This volume emerged out of a workshop called “Integrating Science and the Humanities,”
held at the University of British Columbia in September 2008.
1
The relationship between
the sciences and the humanities has long been a fraught one—a tension famously captured by C.P. Snow in the phrase “The Two Cultures” ( Snow 1959 /1993). The belief that
humanists study “texts”—in the broad sense that this term has acquired in recent
decades—whereas scientists study “things” is still commonplace in modern universities.
The two groups typically perform their work in different parts of the campus, are served
by separate funding agencies, and are governed in their work by radically different methodologies and theoretical assumptions. Attempts to bridge the two cultures have often
taken the form of hostile takeovers: humanists trying to forcibly bring the work of scientists under the umbrella of arbitrary, interpretable “inscriptions” 2
or scientists arguing
for the explanatory irrelevance of human phenomena not amenable to quantifi cation. 3
The purpose of the workshop was to bring together scholars from across the sciences and
humanities to explore the potential of an alternative approach—an approach that is
referred to as “vertical integration” ( Tooby and Cosmides 1992 ; Slingerland 2008a ) or,
increasingly commonly, “consilience” ( Wilson 1998 )