Excerpt

Scientists, a risk-averse group, tend to eschew announcing their larger aims. After all, it is not entirely licit or proper to say, “We are trying to discern the laws of biology, or why social systems might proceed through sequences of increasing complexity,” preferring instead remarks like “We are interested in gene regulation, or how large molecules are synthesized, or why the ancestral Puebloans stored maize.” We feel that the larger objectives come across as grandiose, and so we retreat into prosaic descriptions of the work we do. In other words, we retreat into disciplinarity, a comfortable and familiar zone of tribal and historical cohesiveness, where the consolation of crowds helps to justify our activities. There is nothing wrong in cleaving to operational particulars, and for those interested in detail, these provide valuable information about what we do. The cost of this maneuver is that it restricts the scope of our inquiries and causes us to lose sight of the numerous extradisciplinary ideas and methods that have contributed to (and will be required to further) our progress through the thorny branches of science.

As we have systematically overcome our ignorance of the cosmos, we have pushed at the boundaries of natural phenomena, intermittently reaching critical points where the methods of a field have proven inadequate for further progress. New ideas, techniques, and devices imported from other fields have been required to squeeze through explanatory bottlenecks. Sometimes this fusion of fields has been of sufficient magnitude to warrant the creation of a new discipline (genetics, ecology, etc.), and in time these absorb the insights of others. In this way, scientific disciplines possess something akin to a life cycle, with periods of rapid growth, maturation, sex, and finally senescence and even death. As the pace of life has accelerated, so has the production of disciplines and the rate of their extinction.

BACK TO Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight