The durability of C. P. Snow's notion of ‘the two cultures’ is a testament, no doubt, to the evocativeness and apparent continued aptness of the phrase, but also, one suspects, to the sense of scandal that has always attended it: its acknowledgement, that is, of extensive ignorance and provincialism among the educated classes and its image of the academy as divided into two mutually suspicious or indeed warring tribes. The intellectual map has shifted in important ways since Snow's essay was first published, and his account of the differences between natural scientists and the group he called ‘literary intellectuals’ appears increasingly dated and, indeed, itself quite provincial. One notes, for example, the academic and intellectual significance of the social sciences, which Snow famously overlooked; the emergence of such fields, disciplines and interdisciplines as women's studies, environmental studies, media studies or cognitive science; the increasing intellectual and social importance of the biological vis-à-vis the physical sciences; and the increasingly close collaboration between academic research institutions and industrial and governmental units. Transformations of these kinds over the past fifty years, along with other institutional and intellectual developments discussed elsewhere in this book, have significantly complicated the individual situations of and mutual relations between the natural sciences and the humanities – neither of which was ever simple, stable or uniform – and also their respective characterisations, both as assumed and articulated by practitioners and as formally theorised in such fields as epistemology, education theory and philosophy of science. Nevertheless, elements of a two-culture divide – certainly the ideology of such a divide – remain with us.