Over the last century, two separate intellectual cultures have developed, one made up of the scientists and the other of the literary intellectuals. But it was the literary culture that pre-empted the idea that they were the intellectuals, and to a great extent, they were often ignorant of what was happening in the scientific community. The scientists are partly to blame for this situation developing because they were not communicating the value and implication of their ideas and discoveries to an intelligent public. The self-proclaimed literary intellectuals are responsible for not communicating with the scientific community, grasping what they were doing, and including discussions of it in their work. The literary intellectuals still aren’t, but changes are taking place.

It had been hoped that a third culture would develop, a meeting of the minds of the writers and scientists culminating in a cooperative effort at communicating the concepts and implications of scientific discovery. That third culture has yet to appear, but according to Edge founder John Brockman, a different third culture is developing. "Scientists are communicating directly with the general public. Traditional intellectual media played a vertical game: journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, third-culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavor to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.

The scientists have come out of their labs and lecture halls and are bringing their ideas directly to the public.

Sites like Edge, television shows like Charlie Rose, radio programming like Terri Gross’ Fresh Air and NPR’s Science Fridays, are giving scientists a voice and intelligent listeners, readers and watchers access to important scientific information presented in an understandable way. Among the leading scientific intellectuals who have written books that have become bestsellers among the general populace are Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Daniel Dennett and Murray Gell-Mann and a few dozen others.

An example of how this has worked was when three of the Republican presidential candidates said they didn’t believe in evolution, and then one of them, Senator Sam Brownback, wrote an op-ed piece defending his views in the May 31, 2007 New York Times titled "What I Think About Evolution." (www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/opinion/31brownback.html).

It seems Senator Brownback doesn’t think about evolution very much, as he displayed a good deal of ignorance about the concept, including asserting that there was more than one theory of evolution, that evolution is a chance and random process, that science and faith have to be complementary and must support each other because they are expressing truths about the spiritual and materials orders created by one God, and that evolution produces only minor changes in a species but can’t produce larger changes, such as one species evolving into another.

What was great is that evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne, of the University of Chicago, was able to quickly write and publish a detailed, highly readable scientific response to Senator Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo’s thoughts questioning evolution, and more particularly to Brownback’s op-ed piece here: www.edge.org/3rd_culture/coyne07/coyne07_index.html.

That is the Third Culture in action.

Coyne questioned how the NYTimes editorial staff could allow Brownback to "play fast and loose"with the facts of science on its op-ed page, and how it went along with publishing "misleading statements about evolution" and "gross errors"regarding scientific facts.

Of the candidates themselves, Coyne wrote: "Senator Brownback, along with his two dissenting colleagues, really should be forced to answer a rather more embarrassing question: who is responsible for their being so misinformed? Where did they learn the so-called ‘problems’ with evolution: at their mothers' knees, or in Sunday school? Or perhaps from reading books; and, if so, what books, and who recommended them? Doesn't a public servant have a responsibility to stay informed across a wide spectrum of topics and issues?"

Coyne made clear the dangers involved when our leaders deal with the world based on their particular religious certainties instead of scientific fact and reason. Religious certainties vary from culture to culture, from religion to religion and even within the same faith, as can be seen by the various and often violently enforced interpretations of Islam and Christianity, but scientific facts are the same everywhere.

More and more scientists and thinkers need to be doing the same thing as Coyne did, calling our leaders to task when they speak out in support of scientific ignorance, superstition or for policy based on religious preferences.

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