In his now famous 1959 lecture, The Two Cultures, CP Snow said that the gulf between the sciences and humanities had created a significant barrier to solving the world’s problems. This prompted a debate that still rages today. On the one hand, the sciences and the humanities seem as segregated as they have ever been – especially within schools. But recent years have also seen a growing number of projects in which artists and scientists have worked together successfully.

While some see this as a positive development in overcoming the barrier identified by CP Snow, others, such as Lewis Wolpert, maintain that the humanities have little to offer the practice of science. Author of Malignant Sadness: The Anatomy of Depression, broadcaster and scientist Wolpert is Vice President of the British Humanist Association and Emeritus Professor of Biology at UCL.

Here, he talks to the IAI about Richard Dawkins, scientific ethics, and why art-science collaboration is doomed to failure.