that abstract knowledge is assimilated much more easily if it is presented in the form
of a story—e.g. by relating anecdotes or biographical episodes about the theory’s
creators, or by recounting the historical sequence of steps through which a great
scientific mystery was solved.
This power of story telling not only supports mythical thinking, religion and
education; it is also the basis of literature, cinema, and many forms of entertainment.
A multibillion-dollar industry has arisen in Hollywood and other places just to cater
for the public’s need to be entertained with compelling stories. Narrative is also the
foundation on which the culture of the humanities is built. Half a century ago, the
novelist-scientist C. P. Snow [1961] famously lamented the growing divide between
the “two cultures”, the scientific and the literary one. In spite of several attempts to
bridge this gap [e.g. Prigogine & Stengers, 1984; Brockman, 1995], the separation
remains as strong as ever.
This fundamental difference in outlook may explain the recent lack of
popularity of scientific studies in the US and other Western countries: students
brought up in a culture of movies, comic strips and novels that is essentially narrative
seem to find the formal, scientific way of thinking increasingly alien, choosing social,
communicative or artistic disciplines instead. Many commentators have warned about
the dangers of this development: fewer people graduating in scientific fields means
fewer researchers, engineers and technologists—the professions that seem to
contribute most directly to economic and social progress. Moreover, the lack of
scientific education makes the population at large more vulnerable to irrational belief
systems, such as various cults, creationism, New Age superstitions, and political and
religious extremism.
The present paper proposes a new paradigm to bridge the gap between the two
cultures. Thus, it may help us to unify the worldviews of science and those found in
literature, myth and religion. This paradigm can be motivated by evolutionary
psychology: if our brain has been shaped by natural selection to process events in the
form of a story, then perhaps this is because human life is indeed more story-like than
law-like. Using the recent theories of evolutionary cybernetics [Turchin, 1977] and of
complex adaptive systems [Holland, 1992; Miller, Page & LeBaron, 2007; Axelrod &
Cohen, 1999] I will argue that real-world events have the same characteristics of time
sequence, context-dependence, agent-centeredness and intrinsic uncertainty as stories.
This ‘narrative’ dynamics can be summarized by the slogan “life is an adventure!” I
will further show that while this new outlook by necessity limits the absolutist
ambitions of traditional science, it by no means invalidates its results. On the contrary,
the underlying paradigm of agents and their courses of action can be seen as an
extension and strengthening of the scientific worldview, albeit one that is now truly
compatible with narrative culture. To get there, I will first show where classical,
Newtonian science has gone too far in its ambitions of reducing life to deterministic
laws, and then how the new theories of complexity and evolution have opened up a
fundamental new perspective.