Yet we shouldn’t, for that reason, sell Snow’s famous contribution short—even as it is now nearing its 50 year anniversary and prompting renewed chatter. Speaking as a scientifically trained novelist who had seen firsthand the disconnect between different intellectual groups, Snow unforgettably framed the issue that most centrally concerned him—the inadequate influence of science on policy and on society—as a matter of two cultures that couldn’t communicate. (See here for a fuller description of Snow’s argument and what drove him to make it.) It didn’t even matter, as Snow acknowledged from the outset, that there were probably more than just two cultures if you wanted to get technical about it. What counted was the message and, perhaps above all, its timing.

As Snow himself would later note, the “Two Cultures” lecture seemed to feed into a particular Zeigeist—perhaps not only because it captured a deep truth about weird and unnecessary breakdowns between otherwise very smart people, but also because of its articulation at a time when the Soviets had blasted into space with Sputnik I, and the United States set its sights on the moon. And so the “two cultures” concept hit world presses and began to generate such a voluminous international dialogue that even Snow couldn’t keep up with it all. One “contribution,” however, stands out, both because of its own fame and because of its demonstration of just how nasty and unproductive debates over science and culture can become—how dominated by navel-gazing and one-upmanship between people who ought to make common cause.

In 1962, the famous British literary critic and English educator F.R. Leavis decided to take a blast at Snow’s now three-year-old speech in another noted Cambridge peroration, the Richmond lecture. In the process, Leavis generated the mid-century equivalent of a spat between Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly. The sheer brutality of Leavis’s assault got everybody talking: It spent far more time denigrating Snow personally than it did dismantling his argument. And ironically, it probably only increased Snow’s fame and notoriety, which by this time placed him among Britain’s and the world’s top tier of public intellectuals.

Insofar as Leavis had an argument, it was that Snow’s wasn’t really worth addressing at all, except in the sense that his puerile claims—and the great publicity they had received—represented a “portent” of society’s declining intellectual seriousness. Snow had described literary thinkers as “natural Luddies” at a time when what the world really needed was the spreading of scientific innovation to poorer countries; Leavis wholly rejected the characterization. He wasn’t anti-science, he said, but merely concerned with the true condition of human life amid industrialization, and how literature can instruct us as to that condition.

But most memorable were Leavis’s attacks. The man knew how to hurl an insult in a way we really don’t any more; even as you recoil at the incivility, you must admire the wordcraft. Snow, Leavis stated, “doesn’t know what he means, and doesn’t know he doesn’t know.” “The intellectual nullity,” he added, “is what constitutes any difficulty there may be in dealing with Snow’s panoptic pseudo-cogencies, his parade of a thesis: a mind to be argued with—that is not there; what we have is something other.” But what else to expect from a crappy writer like Snow? “As a novelist,” wrote Leavis, “he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is.” A few more scenes from the execution:

Snow’s argument proceeds with so extreme a naiveté of unconsciousness and irresponsibility that to call it a movement of thought is to flatter it.

Snow rides on an advancing swell of cliché: this exhilarating motion is what he takes for inspired and authoritative thought.

It is characteristic of Snow that ‘believe’ for him should be a very simple word.

And so on. As one ringside observer put it, Leavis “threw Sir Charles Snow over his shoulder several times and then jumped on him…the whole thing left one with a sense of comradely sympathy for Sir Charles, as it might be for a man who had been involved in a serious motor accident.” The eminent critic Lionel Trilling added that while he had problems with Snow’s argument, there could be “no two opinions” about Leavis’s breach of decorum: “It is a bad tone, an impermissible tone.”

In lashing out like this, Leavis merely reinforced the point at issue. To read Snow’s 1959 lecture and Leavis’s 1962 reply in succession is to witness precisely the “mutual incomprehension” that Snow had originally described between literary intellectuals and natural scientists—with the only difference being that where Snow sought to engage, Leavis reacted with the defensiveness of a caged animal, and thoroughly undermined any serious point he may have had to make. In a 1956 New Statesman article that preceded the “Two Cultures” speech, Snow had perfectly predicted this sort of response, describing the literary culture of his day as “behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining—standing on its precarious dignity, spending far too much energy on Alexandrian intricacies, occasionally letting fly in fits of aggressive pique quite beyond its means, too much on the defensive to show any generous imagination to the forces which must inevitably reshape it.”

For while Leavis may have possessed a sharper wit than Snow, and greater intellectual sophistication over all, he stood on the wrong side of history. Even as the Snow-Leavis battle sparked a renewed wave of chatter about the “two cultures,” trends in education clearly favored one combatant over the other.

In the postwar period, notes University of Virginia historian Guy Ortolano, British universities greatly expanded, and virtually all of that growth lay in the sciences, which began to receive copious government funding. It was a ratcheting up that Snow heavily supported: He had served as a scientific adviser to the influential 1946 Barlow Commission, which had called for precisely this course for British higher education, so as to create a much larger scientific workforce. By contrast, Leavis had devoutly hoped that Cambridge—his university and also Snow’s—would come to center on the English education program Leavis headed. Instead, the unhappy critic found himself fighting to prevent the ascension of a scientist to the position of Master of his Cambridge college (Downing) and lamented, “When I am retired, all that I have worked for at Cambridge peters out.” No wonder Snow epitomized everything Leavis despised.

And yet if we are to understand the plight of science today, especially in the United States, it helps to borrow a bit of Leavis’s animating philosophy and merge it with Snow’s. As Ortolano has put it, Leavis was centrally concerned with the “assault of mass civilization upon intellectual standards.” He bemoaned the growth of the mass media and the democratization and expansion of higher education, both of which (he felt) watered down excellence and weakened our ability to determine what really mattered, what to truly value. Leavis wished to defend the highest of high literature from these corroding, dumbing-down forces; but today, when we observe popular media culture, we can see that science, too, has not managed to compete. Not against mass coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death, or Britney Spears’ sad tribulations, or Paris Hilton’s arrest record.

In this sense, Snow and Leavis—both Cambridge men—might have been allies, if only they had known then what we know now. And if only they had been able to talk about it with civility.

We would be remiss, then, if we learned nothing more from the Snow-Leavis affair than that intellectuals sometimes behave badly. Stripped of all the nastiness, we can see in hindsight that both pugilists were saying something very important: Snow, that intellectual culture had grown fragmented and disconnected; Leavis, that mass media culture was squeezing out intellectual culture anyway. When you merge these two points together, you find, perhaps, a powerful articulation of the problem of the intellectual life in our times. Serious people, and serious arguments, are all too rarely taken seriously in the media (except, amazingly enough, on Comedy Central!) Meanwhile, continuing polarization, internecine battles, and ivory tower syndrome among intellectuals distract them from what ought to be their greatest concern—their tragic decline in influence.

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Indeed, historians have shown a wide range of contemporary responses to Darwin’s work, and many religious thinkers had no problem adapting to it.

It’s difficult to extricate our view of Darwin from the U.S.’s century-long history of evolution battles, or from the fact that nearly half of our citizens reject outright the deep history of the Earth and its living things revealed by Darwin and some of his contemporaries. Gallup polls taken over several decades consistently show that roughly 45 percent of Americans agree with the stunning statement, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” Meanwhile, some leading evolutionary thinkers—chief among them Oxford’s Richard Dawkins—move more or less directly from their understanding of Darwin’s work to cheerleading for atheism. Science-religion battles seem resurgent today, and it’s tempting to see in Darwin the modern originator of this enduring conflict.

Yet historical research on the relationship between science and religion, including work on the Victorian period and the Darwinian revolution, reveals a very different story. Not only did fundamentally theological ideas—the notion of the “perfect adaptation” of living organisms to their circumstances, for instance—actually help shape Darwin’s theory, but religious beliefs strongly influenced its reception in surprising ways. Who would have thought that several fervent early twentieth century neo-Darwinists right in Richard Dawkins’s beloved Oxford were actually exuberantly pious Anglo-Catholics, who saw in Darwin’s ideas a stick with which to beat back deistic Protestantism?

Which is not to say that science and religion have always held hands. It is surely the case that truculent up-and-comers like Darwin’s so-called “Bulldog,” Thomas Henry Huxley, delighted in using Darwinism to tweak the noses of the Anglican clergy who ran the universities (and much else besides) at the end of the nineteenth century. The point is, surprise!, it was complicated: as the science historian John Hedley Brooke has written, “There is no such thing as the relationship between science and religion. It is what different individuals and communities have made of it in a plethora of different contexts.”

Just look at the science-religion “conflict thesis” itself, born of a pair of American late-nineteenth century books: John Draper’s 1874 History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion, and Andrew Dickson White’s The History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom of 1896. Context? Draper was a professor of physics in New York who had looked on with horror in 1870 when the Pope made his notorious declaration of papal infallibility. The idea of a pointy-hatted Italian sending unbreakable commands to Irish immigrants gave Draper the creeps. And White? He was the president of Cornell, the first non-sectarian American university, and thus keen to insist that reason itself had to be protected from all spiritual influences.

Indeed, historians have shown a wide range of contemporary responses to Darwin’s work, and many religious thinkers had no problem adapting to it. We often hear about Thomas Henry Huxley’s famously theatrical 1860 Oxford debate against the Anglican bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who rejected Darwin’s idea. Yet we forget figures like the Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley or the future Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederic Temple, both of whom saw in evolution a new revelation about the Creator’s wisdom and plan.

As for Darwin himself, he was no Huxley. While he famously concluded about religion that “I for one must be content to remain an agnostic,” he was never combative about the relationship between his science and others’ faith. One reason for his sensitivity was his wife Emma’s enduring Christianity. The other was simply his temperament: He was not a fighter. The so-called “New Atheists” today, like Dawkins, who use evolution as their cudgel are certainly not following the example Darwin set in his own life. In a late-life letter to an inquiring philosopher, Darwin sifted from his own master-theory a doctrine of modest caution in the face of the infinite: “you have expressed my inward conviction” he wrote, “that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy.”  Undue certainly was not to be encouraged–in any direction.

When we survey the range of responses to the teaching of evolution in the United States today, we’re not actually so far off from the Victorian period in many ways. We have our atheists who embrace evolution and strongly reject religion (the Huxleys, the Dawkins), our religionists who reject evolution and embrace biblical literalism, and then our vast middle of compromisers and reconciliationists—those who understand the gist of evolution by natural selection, but do not experience that knowledge as a solvent of their religious beliefs. This latter group has no motive to fight the culture war, and we seldom hear from them. But Darwin Day is for them, too–in fact it may be theirs most of all.

D. Graham Burnett is associate professor of history at Princeton University and author of Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature. Chris Mooney is a visiting associate at Princeton’s Center for Collaborative History, author of The Republican War on Science, and the contributing editor to Science Progress.

Science as progressive boasts philosophical and political skeins stretching much further back into the American historical experience.

In another sense, though, the title of this new publication, Science Progress, is purposely argumentative. It suggests that science, both as a way of thinking and as a source of novel ideas and products, is in the main a liberating practice that enables human flourishing. This understanding of science as progressive does not deny that the power of science may be misused. Nor does it exclude the need for guidance and even regulation in the service of equality and solidarity. But it does assert that the core values of science are democratic and anti-authoritarian.

The very words “science” and “progress” came to have their modern meanings in the 19th century, and they did so right around the same time. This simultaneous semantic evolution was, of course, no accident. Microscopes and telescopes were drilling both down and up into nature, and stethoscopes revealed the body’s inner space. Systematic investigations that manipulated variables proved more revealing than mere observation. The possibilities that could emerge from human insight began to seem endless.

Science as progressive, however, boasts philosophical and political skeins stretching much further back into the American historical experience. Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is often credited as the first to express the modern idea of progress in terms of advancing science and technology. And this vision was to have a profound effect on later 17th century thinkers, including those who provided the intellectual justification for the American Revolution. For all the founders’ disagreements, there was no doubt that the new nation’s promise was necessarily bound up with its innovative genius. Even those bitter rivals Jefferson and Hamilton made their own contributions: Jefferson through the patent statute that rewards inventiveness; Hamilton by laying the foundations for history’s most successful capitalist economy.

It is also no coincidence that other concepts that have been important to the way that America has come to understand itself, ideas such as the frontier and the West, demand an experimental attitude in grappling with novel challenges. Who, besides the westward settlers themselves, has come more to represent the pioneer spirit than America’s “inventors,” people like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Jonas Salk, and Bill Gates?

Even as America’s western frontier has vanished, the pioneer spirit and the virtues and values associated with it continue to have a powerful hold over the American mind. Few government initiatives have been so wildly successful in capturing the public imagination as the space program of the 1960s, which resonated with the Kennedy administration’s “new frontier.” The ideas of science and progress are deeply held in America’s self-identity, pervasive in our notions of who we are, what we do and why we do it. The optimistic “can do” spirit, the approval of bigness, boldness, and adventure, the lure of “the road,” are all associated with this sensibility. At our best we hold these truths to be, if not self-evident, at least within our grasp.

And of course generations came to characterize America itself as an “experiment,” a romantic and visionary theme that comported well with the orientation of both pragmatist philosophers and early progressives. The only sure path to social and scientific advancement was seen as an iterative process of hypothesis, systematic experimentation, and data-gathering, and then reform in light of experience. That the human condition can and should be improved by any means necessary—whether through government or private enterprise or some combination of the two, but with government as the ultimate guarantor of the public interest—has come to be the essence of progressivism, but so has the need to ground such alleged improvements in the best possible evidence.

Few government initiatives have been so wildly successful in capturing the public imagination as the space program of the 1960s, which resonated with the Kennedy administration’s “new frontier.”

The progressive theme of history is not, however, self-evident in Western culture. The Greeks tended to think of their own time either as inferior to the mythical Golden Age or as part of a cycle of advance and decline. Imperial Romans saw themselves as in stasis since the establishment of the empire. Medieval Roman Catholic thinkers largely gave up on worldly progress in favor of spiritual improvement while awaiting Armageddon.

Neither has the conjunction of science and progress always been welcomed as an unalloyed good. Just as the words’ modern meanings were coming into consciousness there were also the first signs of alarm, in a tradition that began famously with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, continues to exert a powerful hold on popular culture, and has lately manifested itself in a conservative critique of science. Taken to an extreme, far from being a guarantor of progress (which even progressives could not reasonably assert), the potentially inhumane drift of science threatens the idea of progress itself.

One common criticism of progressive science policy is that it uncritically adopts an instrumental view of science without reflection on the goals of innovation. Although we reject the notion that a philosophy of innovation must be dumb to moral values, we appreciate that progressives have too often appeared to worship at the altar of change. Science Progress will therefore seek to compass consideration of ends as well as means.

Similarly, at the risk of invoking a hackneyed reference to spirituality, we also believe that science occupies an exalted dimension, that the growth of reliable knowledge is in effect an expansion of consciousness. Science may not be the only path to a greater grasp of reality, but it makes a unique contribution to enhanced understanding of the cosmos and our place within it. To distort the process of inquiry amounts therefore to a narrowing of vision, a corruption of imagination, and a threat to our freedom as beings endowed with intellect.

It would be disingenuous to deny that the trigger for Science Progress is the sense among many that in recent years the respect for evidence and the spirit of open inquiry has been threatened for the sake of short-term political advantage. But the larger issue is the long-term national interest, which depends on the best evidence that only science can provide for commercial innovation, economic growth, military defense and the best possible array of intelligence options.

In the 21st century, more than ever, it is no exaggeration to assert that only free and rigorous inquiry and not authoritarian dogma can provide the reliable information required for our physical survival. Perhaps most important, progress in science is essential for a continued sense of our national purpose as participants in an historic experiment in freedom and self-governance, as one people joined by a common future rather than a common past, a future we cherish for the sake of the generations of Americans to come.

The goal of Science Progress is to help identify and realize the elements of that boundless American future. We hope this goal is manifest in our statement of mission:

Science Progress proceeds from the propositions that scientific inquiry is among the finest expressions of human excellence, that it is a crucial source of human flourishing, a critical engine of economic growth, and must be dedicated to the common good. Scientific inquiry entails global responsibilities. It should lead to a more equitable, safer, and healthier future for all of humankind.

—Jonathan Moreno, Editor in Chief, Science Progress, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor and Professor of Medical Ethics and the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania