This volume represents a significant effort tosolve one of the most pressing problems of intellectual life today. The explosion of knowledge, sometimes called the data revolution, has tended to force the individual into narrower and narrowed fields of specialization. This tendency is not merely the influence of the Internet or other electronic means of storing and distributing knowledge; it goes back a century and more. Electronic technology provides some relief in the form of easier access to what is known, but the problem is far from solved. Its most obvious manifestation over the past half century is the explosion of libraries trying to keep up with the flow of information.

At the same time, people are no more intelligent or able than they ever were. The dominant solution is to specialize, and increasingly, scholars in all fields are forced to limit the span of their knowledge in order to master some part of the vast assemblage available.

Much the same narrowing has occurred in the way fields of knowledge are defined within academic institutions. Two centuries ago, it was possible to be a “naturalist,” taking an interest in almost anything that falls today under the category of biology and more. Today, such a span would be labeled dilettantism, and it is both rare and little respected. Clinical medicine became a separate professional category even earlier, and it has continued to separate into ever more numerous fields of subspecialization. Over the past century, nonclinical biological sciences have also subdivided, the widest gap being that between cellular and whole-animal biology, with ecology occupying another kind of niche in its effort to study the interaction of several species in one environment.