There is an explanatory vacuum. Some scholars think that it will be filled by something resembling the theory of organic evolution. I think they’re right. But it will also draw elements from epidemiology, cognitive psychology and behavioral economics. Whatever it looks like, we can be sure of one thing: It will be expressed not in words, but equations.

If the rudiments of a new cultural science are visible, so are its limits. There is one great difference between human and natural things: The former have meaning; the latter do not. That is why the humanities are filled with critics and the natural sciences are not: Critics tell us what artifacts mean.

When Edmund Wilson tells us that Sophocles’s “Philoctetes” is a parable on the association between deformity and genius; or when Arthur Danto says that Mark Rothko’s “Untitled (1960)” is simply about beauty, then we are, it seems, in a realm of understanding where numbers, and the algorithms that produce them, have no dominion.

I say “seems” because deep-learning algorithms are becoming very good at extracting meaning from data; and, as art becomes data, it is always possible that new meanings may be revealed by algorithmic microscopes yet unbuilt. That said, it would take a very clever algorithm to flag up irony in Jane Austen. More fundamentally, the truth of art criticism is not the same kind as scientific truth.

Will there be a new kulturkampf — a great battle between quantification and interpretation? Or will the humanities, weakened by their own interminable, internecine Theory Wars, gratefully accept the peace imposed by science? Some will fight. Hard words such as “imperialism,” “scientism,” and “vaulting ambition” will be flung about — the vocabulary of anti-science is rich, well-honed, and all the more pungent for a little Shakespeare.

But most scholars, I believe, will simply accept quantitative tools for the power that they offer. Some will use them to survey vast bodies of literature; others to unravel the tiniest philological knots. Under the Pax Scientia criticism will continue, but be tamed. The epistemological feuds of the 20th century will yield to the technical quarrels typical of science. The scene will be less tumultuous, some will say less exciting, but it will be a renaissance.

Whether the new humanists will accept, or even understand, the rise of a mathematical theory of culture is another matter. It’s being built by biologists, economists and physicists and being published in the unforgiving terms and journals that such scientists read. I hope they do. After all, it seeks to explain the world of human-made things that they know and love. And it holds the promise — long sought, often heralded, never fulfilled — that the Republic of Learning, so divided for so long, will become one.

Armand Marie Leroi is a professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College, London, and the author, most recently, of “The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science.”