54 SCIENTIST 



it appears that more physicists and mathematicians than 

 biologists have spent their later years in pursuing philos- 

 ophy and even theology. 



Biologists, who, as a matter of fact, are often not as 

 bright as physicists in an IQ sense, take more time to make 

 their most significant contributions. Perhaps they also lack 

 the capacity for flashes of genius. Equally, or perhaps more 

 likely, the more gradual onset of productivity is a function 

 of the need to master a lot of detailed data as a preliminary 

 for coming up with a new thought. The variety and the 

 interrelated complexity of Hfe results in masses of data — 

 details of anatomy, details of chemical reactions, details of 

 environmental relationships — all of which tend to swamp 

 the beginning student. If he is good, however, a growing 

 mastery of detail is accompanied by a growing intuitive 

 feeling for the way life works, a kind of biological wisdom 

 which ultimately forms the basis of his creativity and en- 

 ables him to become the leader of a school. Psychologically 

 secure in his accumulated wisdom, taking dehght in his 

 daily sensory contacts with the stuff of life, schooled to 

 tolerate the many obscurities and ambiguities of his subject, 

 he seems to have less need than the physicist for the single 

 overarching generalization hopefully designed to make sense 

 out of everything. 



The foregoing lyrical descriptions are in the nature of 

 what the sociologist calls stereotypes and perhaps reveal 

 more about the author than they do about the present 

 nature of physicists and biologists. Both fields are changing 

 rapidly and in many ways are tending to merge with each 

 other. The peculiarly biological phenomenon of growth 

 finds at least a rough parallel in the growth of physical 

 crystals. Recent work on the differentiation of the chemical 

 elements and the evolution of the universe has begun to 

 entangle the physicist in the kind of intellectual problem 



