I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again…. Chesterton and Goethe considers Darwin and remembers the Biblical injunction “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.” But, he writes: In the essay, he recalls the writings of G.K. In it, he walks along a beach and comes upon a man throwing stranded starfish back into the ocean, an act Eiseley first sees as futile. The titular essay in Eiseley’s posthumous collection was originally published in The Unexpected Universe. He asks continuously whether is it all right for him, as a distinguished anthropological scientist, to feel. What makes Eiseley’s work unique among this group is his struggle with science. The publication timeframe of those three major books puts Eiseley at the heart of the mid-century environmental discussion, right alongside Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, and the other writers to be profiled in this series. Eiseley organized much of the book himself, drawing from magazine articles unpublished essays and lectures and his previous books, including The Immense Journey (1957), The Firmament of Time (1960), and The Unexpected Universe (1969). The culmination of his career is The Star Thrower, a compendium published a year after his death in 1977. He didn’t just examine the natural world and illuminate it in layperson’s terms, he considered the symbolism in scientific happenstance, and he ruminated on our true human place in the galactic flotsam. Eiseley was one of the earliest practitioners of, shall we say, philosophical science writing. That theme-that science and art are born of the same mind and are therefore inseparable-permeates Eiseley’s writing and reverberates today. It is because these two types of creation-the artistic and the scientific-have sprung from the same being and have their points of contact even in division, that I have the temerity to assert that, in a sense, the “two cultures” are an illusion, that they are a product of unreasoning fear, professionalism, and misunderstanding. In his essay Eiseley, himself an anthropologist, distills his core belief: Snow called this dichotomy “The Two Cultures,” a phrase Loren Eiseley references in “The Illusion of the Two Cultures,” which appeared in The American Scholar in 1964. Such fact-centrism unfortunately sets science at odds with the arts, which are being cut even more deeply.

But from the same mouths come cuts in funding for basic research, or else strings attached. Science is set forth as the savior of the nation: we will innovate our way out of this recession, our ingenuity is our greatest asset.

Political rhetoric for math and science funding abounds, but creationism, in some corners, has equal footing with evolution. Science is in a strange predicament these days.

Loren Eiseley by Loren Eiseley