Sublime

Fuller cautions: Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery.

Kinsey’s methods as a sex-researcher were forged with his entomological research. Studying wasps, he learned that the key to biological discovery is in large sample sizes—in collecting as much information as possible, and then charting individual variation. Even Kinsey recognized his scientific practice as a form of collecting:

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The world of science was open before us to a degree that has become inconceivable now, when pages and pages of application papers must justify the plan of investigating, “in depth,” the thirty-fifth foot of the centipede; and one is judged by a jury of one’s peers who are all centipedists or molecular podiatrists. I would say that most of the great... See more

The economist, philosopher, and writer Henry Hazlitt sums up the dilemma: In the modern world knowledge has been growing so fast and so enormously, in almost every field, that the probabilities are immensely against anybody, no matter how innately clever, being able to make a contribution in any one field unless he devotes all his time to it for ye... See more

Fuller points to the usefulness of useless knowledge as a critical element in this collective abundance and the salvation of our species: Specialization’s preoccupation with parts deliberately forfeits the opportunity to apprehend and comprehend what is provided exclusively by synergy.

What the student needed above all was the chance to learn to think for himself. So he ought to pursue the line of investigation that interested him most, just as, conversely, a professor ought to be perfectly free to devote his own efforts however he chose. One term, a course of twenty-one lectures was offered on sharks alone, a favorite topic of t

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