Art and Science
New Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/science/27angi.html
Basics
By NATALIE ANGIER
Senator Barack Obama likes to joke that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination
has been going on so long, babies have been born, and they're already walking and talking.
That's nothing. The battle between the sciences and the humanities has been going on for so
long, its early participants have stopped walking and talking, because they're already dead.
It's been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C.P.
Snow delivered his famous "Two Cultures" lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he
decried the "gulf of mutual incomprehension," the "hostility and dislike" that divided the
world's "natural scientists," its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its "literary
intellectuals," a group that, by Snow's reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn't a
scientist. His critique set off a frenzy of hand-wringing that continues to this day, particularly
in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers bemoan the
Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic
academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.
Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be
bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that
would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of
problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under
development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.
Jointly conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a
professor of English, the program is intended to build on some of the themes explored in Dr.
Wilson's evolutionary studies program, which has proved enormously popular with science
and nonscience majors alike, and which he describes in the recently published "Evolution for
Everybody." In Dr. Wilson's view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right,
demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms
simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally?
"There are more similarities than differences between the humanities and the sciences, and
some of the stereotypes have to be altered,"
Dr. Wilson said. "Darwin, for example, established his entire evolutionary theory on the basis
of his observations of natural history, and most of that information was qualitative, not
quantitative."
As he and Dr. Heywood envision the program, courses under the New Humanities rubric
would be offered campuswide, in any number of departments, including history, literature,
philosophy, sociology, law and business. The students would be introduced to basic scientific
tools like statistics and experimental design and to liberal arts staples like the importance of
analyzing specific texts or documents closely, identifying their animating ideas and
comparing them with the texts of other times or other immortal minds.
One goal of the initiative is to demystify science by applying its traditional routines and
parlance in nontraditional settings -- graphing Jane Austen, as the title of an upcoming book
felicitously puts it. "If you do statistics in the context of something you're interested in and
are good at, then it becomes an incremental as opposed to a saltational jump," Dr. Wilson said.
"You see that the mechanics are not so hard after all, and once you understand why you're
doing the statistics in the first place, it ends up being simple nuts and bolts stuff, nothing
more."
To illustrate how the New Humanities approach to scholarship might work, Dr. Heywood cited
her own recent investigations into the complex symbolism of the wolf, a topic inspired by a pet
of hers that was seven-eighths wolf. "He was completely different from a dog," she said. "He was
terrified of things in the human environment that dogs are perfectly at ease with, like the
swishing sound of a jogging suit, or somebody wearing a hat, and he kept his reserve with
people, even me."
Dr. Heywood began studying the association between wolves and nature, and how people's
attitudes toward one might affect their regard for the other. "In the standard humanities
approach, you compile and interpret images of wolves from folkloric history, and you analyze
previously published texts about wolves," and that's pretty much it, Dr. Heywood said. Seeking
a more full-bodied understanding, she delved into the scientific literature, studying wolf
ecology, biology and evolution. She worked with Dr. Wilson and others to design a survey to
gauge people's responses to three images of a wolf: one of a classic beautiful wolf, another of a
hunter holding a dead wolf, the third of a snarling, aggressive wolf.
It's an implicit association test, designed to gauge subliminal attitudes by measuring latency
of response between exposure to an image on a screen and the pressing of a button next to
words like beautiful, frightening, good, wrong.
"These firsthand responses give me more to work with in understanding how people read
wolves, as opposed to seeing things through other filters and published texts," Dr. Heywood
said.
Combining some of her early survey results with the wealth of wolf imagery culled from
cultures around the world, Dr. Heywood finds preliminary support for the provocative
hypothesis that humans and wolves may have co-evolved.
"They were competing predators that occupied the same ecological niche as we did," she said,
"but it's possible that we learned some of our social and hunting behaviors from them as well."
Hence, our deeply conflicted feelings toward wolves -- as the nurturing mother to Romulus
and Remus, as the vicious trickster disguised as Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother.
In designing the New Humanities initiative, Dr. Wilson is determined to avoid romanticizing
science or presenting it as the ultimate arbiter of meaning, as other would-be integrationists
and ardent Darwinists have done.
"You can study music, dance, narrative storytelling and artmaking scientifically, and you can
conclude that yes, they're deeply biologically driven, they're essential to our species, but there
would still be something missing," he said, "and that thing is an appreciation for the work
itself, a true understanding of its meaning in its culture and context."
Other researchers who have reviewed the program prospectus have expressed their
enthusiasm, among them George Levine, an emeritus professor of English at Rutgers
University, a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University and author of "Darwin
Loves You." Dr. Levine has criticized many recent attempts at so-called Literary Darwinism,
the application of evolutionary psychology ideas to the analysis of great novels and plays.
What it usually amounts to is reimagining Emma Bovary or Emma Woodhouse as a young,
fecund female hunter-gatherer circa 200,000 B.C.
"When you maximize the importance of biological forces and minimize culture, you get
something that doesn't tell you a whole lot about the particularities of literature," Dr. Levine
said. "What you end up with, as far as I'm concerned, is banality." Reading the New
Humanities proposal, by contrast, "I was struck by how it absolutely refused the simple
dichotomy," he said.
"There is a kind of basic illiteracy on both sides," he added, "and I find it a thrilling idea that
people might be made to take pleasure in crossing the border."
New Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/science/27angi.html
Basics
By NATALIE ANGIER
Senator Barack Obama likes to joke that the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination
has been going on so long, babies have been born, and they're already walking and talking.
That's nothing. The battle between the sciences and the humanities has been going on for so
long, its early participants have stopped walking and talking, because they're already dead.
It's been some 50 years since the physicist-turned-novelist C.P.
Snow delivered his famous "Two Cultures" lecture at the University of Cambridge, in which he
decried the "gulf of mutual incomprehension," the "hostility and dislike" that divided the
world's "natural scientists," its chemists, engineers, physicists and biologists, from its "literary
intellectuals," a group that, by Snow's reckoning, included pretty much everyone who wasn't a
scientist. His critique set off a frenzy of hand-wringing that continues to this day, particularly
in the United States, as educators, policymakers and other observers bemoan the
Balkanization of knowledge, the scientific illiteracy of the general public and the chronic
academic turf wars that are all too easily lampooned.
Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be
bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that
would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of
problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under
development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.
Jointly conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a
professor of English, the program is intended to build on some of the themes explored in Dr.
Wilson's evolutionary studies program, which has proved enormously popular with science
and nonscience majors alike, and which he describes in the recently published "Evolution for
Everybody." In Dr. Wilson's view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right,
demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms
simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally?
"There are more similarities than differences between the humanities and the sciences, and
some of the stereotypes have to be altered,"
Dr. Wilson said. "Darwin, for example, established his entire evolutionary theory on the basis
of his observations of natural history, and most of that information was qualitative, not
quantitative."
As he and Dr. Heywood envision the program, courses under the New Humanities rubric
would be offered campuswide, in any number of departments, including history, literature,
philosophy, sociology, law and business. The students would be introduced to basic scientific
tools like statistics and experimental design and to liberal arts staples like the importance of
analyzing specific texts or documents closely, identifying their animating ideas and
comparing them with the texts of other times or other immortal minds.
One goal of the initiative is to demystify science by applying its traditional routines and
parlance in nontraditional settings -- graphing Jane Austen, as the title of an upcoming book
felicitously puts it. "If you do statistics in the context of something you're interested in and
are good at, then it becomes an incremental as opposed to a saltational jump," Dr. Wilson said.
"You see that the mechanics are not so hard after all, and once you understand why you're
doing the statistics in the first place, it ends up being simple nuts and bolts stuff, nothing
more."
To illustrate how the New Humanities approach to scholarship might work, Dr. Heywood cited
her own recent investigations into the complex symbolism of the wolf, a topic inspired by a pet
of hers that was seven-eighths wolf. "He was completely different from a dog," she said. "He was
terrified of things in the human environment that dogs are perfectly at ease with, like the
swishing sound of a jogging suit, or somebody wearing a hat, and he kept his reserve with
people, even me."
Dr. Heywood began studying the association between wolves and nature, and how people's
attitudes toward one might affect their regard for the other. "In the standard humanities
approach, you compile and interpret images of wolves from folkloric history, and you analyze
previously published texts about wolves," and that's pretty much it, Dr. Heywood said. Seeking
a more full-bodied understanding, she delved into the scientific literature, studying wolf
ecology, biology and evolution. She worked with Dr. Wilson and others to design a survey to
gauge people's responses to three images of a wolf: one of a classic beautiful wolf, another of a
hunter holding a dead wolf, the third of a snarling, aggressive wolf.
It's an implicit association test, designed to gauge subliminal attitudes by measuring latency
of response between exposure to an image on a screen and the pressing of a button next to
words like beautiful, frightening, good, wrong.
"These firsthand responses give me more to work with in understanding how people read
wolves, as opposed to seeing things through other filters and published texts," Dr. Heywood
said.
Combining some of her early survey results with the wealth of wolf imagery culled from
cultures around the world, Dr. Heywood finds preliminary support for the provocative
hypothesis that humans and wolves may have co-evolved.
"They were competing predators that occupied the same ecological niche as we did," she said,
"but it's possible that we learned some of our social and hunting behaviors from them as well."
Hence, our deeply conflicted feelings toward wolves -- as the nurturing mother to Romulus
and Remus, as the vicious trickster disguised as Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother.
In designing the New Humanities initiative, Dr. Wilson is determined to avoid romanticizing
science or presenting it as the ultimate arbiter of meaning, as other would-be integrationists
and ardent Darwinists have done.
"You can study music, dance, narrative storytelling and artmaking scientifically, and you can
conclude that yes, they're deeply biologically driven, they're essential to our species, but there
would still be something missing," he said, "and that thing is an appreciation for the work
itself, a true understanding of its meaning in its culture and context."
Other researchers who have reviewed the program prospectus have expressed their
enthusiasm, among them George Levine, an emeritus professor of English at Rutgers
University, a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University and author of "Darwin
Loves You." Dr. Levine has criticized many recent attempts at so-called Literary Darwinism,
the application of evolutionary psychology ideas to the analysis of great novels and plays.
What it usually amounts to is reimagining Emma Bovary or Emma Woodhouse as a young,
fecund female hunter-gatherer circa 200,000 B.C.
"When you maximize the importance of biological forces and minimize culture, you get
something that doesn't tell you a whole lot about the particularities of literature," Dr. Levine
said. "What you end up with, as far as I'm concerned, is banality." Reading the New
Humanities proposal, by contrast, "I was struck by how it absolutely refused the simple
dichotomy," he said.
"There is a kind of basic illiteracy on both sides," he added, "and I find it a thrilling idea that
people might be made to take pleasure in crossing the border."
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