Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute’s Brainy Halls - The Daily Beast
Cormac McCarthy on the Santa Fe Institute’s Brainy Halls - The Daily Beast
From a certain perspective, the opposition between humanists and scientists seems superficial. Authors like George Eliot and Charles Dickens read or were influenced by Darwin, and Darwin was a great lover of novels. He wrote in his autobiography that novels “have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists.” As Gell-Mann remarked at lunch one day, “Novels are part of civilization, and thus interesting.” Our era of hyper-specialized subfields and mutually unintelligible vocabularies makes it easy to forget that borders between disciplines were once crossed more frequently.
