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Literature, Science, and Human Nature Ian McEwan Greatness in literature is more intelligible and amenable to most of us than greatness in science. All of us have an idea, our own, or one that has been imposed upon us, of what is meant by a great novelist. Whether it is in a spirit of awe and delight, duty or scepticism, we grasp at firsthand when we read Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary what people mean when they speak of greatness. We have the privilege of unmediated contact. From the first sentence, we come into a presence, and we can see for ourselves the quality of a particular mind; in a matter of minutes we may read the fruits of a long-forgotten afternoon, an afternoon’s work done in isolation, a hundred and fifty years ago. And what was once an unfolding personal secret is now ours. Imaginary people appear before us; their historical and domestic circumstances are very particular, their characters equally so. We witness and judge the skill with which they are conjured. By an unspoken agreement, a kind of contract between writer and reader, it is assumed that however strange these people are, we will understand them readily enough to be able to appreciate their strangeness. To do this, we must bring our own general understanding of what it means to be a person. We have, in the terms of cognitive psychology , a theory of mind, a more-or-less automatic understanding of what it means to be someone else. Without this understanding, as psychopathology shows, we would find it virtually impossible to form and sustain relationships, read expressions or intentions, or perceive how we ourselves are understood. To the particular instances that are presented to us in a novel we bring this deep and broad understanding. When Saul Bellow’s Herzog stands in front of a mirror, as characters in fiction so often and conveniently do, he is wearing only a newly purchased straw hat and underpants. [His mother] wanted him to become a rabbi and he seemed to himself gruesomely unlike a rabbi now in the trunks and straw hat, his face charged with heavy sadness, foolish utter longing of which a religious life might have purged him. That mouth!—heavy with desire and irreconcilable anger, the straight nose sometimes grim, the dark eyes! And his figure!—the 5 long veins winding in the arms and filling in the hanging hands, an ancient system, of greater antiquity than the Jews themselves. . . . Bare legged, he looked like a Hindu. A reader may not understand from the inside every specific of Herzog’s condition —a mid-twentieth-century American, a Jew, a city dweller, a divorcé, an alienated intellectual—nor might a young reader sympathize with the remorse of early middle age, but self-scrutiny that is edging toward a reckoning has a general currency, as does the droll, faux naive perception that one’s biology—the circulatory system—predates and, by implication, is even more of the essence of being human than one’s religion. Literature flourishes along the channels of this unspoken agreement between writers and readers, offering a mental map whose north and south are the specific and the general. At its best, literature is universal, illuminating human nature at precisely the point at which it is most parochial and specific. Greatness in science is harder for most of us to grasp. We can make a list of scientists we’ve been told are great, but few of us have had the kind of intimate contact that would illuminate the particular qualities of the achievement. Partly, it is the work itself: it does not invite us in; it is objectifying, therefore distancing, corrupted by difficult or seemingly irrelevant detail. Mathematics is also a barrier. Furthermore, scientific ideas happily float free of their creators. Scientists might know the classical laws of motion having never read Newton on the matter or grasp relativity from textbooks without reading Einstein’s special or general theories or know the structure of DNA without having—or needing—a firsthand knowledge of Crick and Watson’s 1953 paper. Here’s a good case in point. Their paper, a mere twelve hundred words, published in the journal Nature, ended with the famously modest conclusion: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” “It has not escaped our notice”—the drawing-room...

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