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HANNAH CHAPELLE WOJCIEHOWSKI, VITTORIO GALLESE, Introduction

It goes without saying that the nature/culture binary has also
been questioned and dismissed by many evolutionary biologists, an-
thropologists, cognitive scientists and others. We can speak of the con-
cept of the biocultural as constituting a paradigm shift in the Kuhnian
sense of a scientific revolution. A paradigm shift entails that a prevail-
ing conceptual framework be discarded in favor of a new one, the
Copernican Revolution being the standard example of a major para-
digm shift.
Have humanists been receptive to the idea of the biocultural?
Yes, they absolutely have, to the extent that many scholars in all fields
of the humanities are now incorporating biocultural information and
conceptual models from the sciences and social sciences into their re-
search, and thereby reshaping their disciplines. That is, indeed, one
purpose of the present collection of essays — to show some of the myr-
iad creative directions of this new research.
Nevertheless, there is considerable debate about how or
whether scientific — i.e. empirical — information needs to be incor-
porated into the humanities. The Two Cultures theory, famously
4
promulgated by C. P. Snow in the mid-twentieth century, held that
the sciences and humanities were split into two seemingly irreconcil-
able camps. Snow’s provocative yet highly generative statement
about the rivalry between the sciences and humanities during the
Cold War Era fixed that binary opposition into our collective con-
sciousness, even as Snow called for its dismantling. Today many hu-
manists understand the need to rethink their disciplines in light of
the biocultural turn, as some have called it, while recognizing that
others in their fields, rightly recognizing the ways in which the hu-
manities have been and continue to be devalued, do not want their
work to be assimilated into STEM-field research (science, technology,
engineering, math). Moreover, many opponents of biocultural ap-
proaches to the humanities believe that humanistic modes of knowl-
edge-building and evidence-gathering are fundamentally incompat-

4 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, Introduction by Stefan Collini, Canto Classics
(1959, 1964; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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