Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
- Theseus, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act 5, Scene 1
I’ve been asked by Nature’s online editors to offer a few words about what this blog is, and will be, all about. While pondering this I was drawn to something I read about ten years ago when I was first forming my scientific worldview. In The Pleasure of Finding Things Out_, the American physicist and polymath Richard Feynman offered his reflections on the nature of beauty. He explained how an artist friend of his acquaintance had insisted that, as a scientist, Feynman was incapable of appreciating the intrinsic beauty of the natural world. Holding up a flower, his friend explainedresult&ct=result&resnum=2 that, “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, [you] take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” This sort of dichotomy between the cold, hard logic of science and the romantic sensibilities of the arts has always been an area of keen interest for me, because the idea is so blatantly untrue.
This dichotomy finds a fitting metaphor in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s playful commentary about “civilized” man pitted against romantic nature. In the view proffered by Feynman’s friend, scientists would be akin to that tyrant of pragmatism, the Duke Theseus, concerned only with law and order and disdainful of the joy experienced through natural harmony. When beautiful Helena insists on marrying her true love against her father’s wishes, Theseus threatens to kill that which refuses to be controlled and later chases down the young lovers through the enchanted woods. Such an image is reminiscent of that mythical ogre Science, personified in the much maligned Francis Bacon, as a creature intent on “hounding nature in her wanderings” in order to “bind her to your service and make her your slave”. As such, scientists are apparently incapable of experiencing the enthusiastic joy of living nature, but desire merely to pursue and control that which eludes us.
This distorted interpretation has gained traction during this generation as the “two cultures” debate has become resurgent on multiple fronts. In the academy this was based on fears (some legitimate, some not) that the scientific paradigm represented a “reductionism” and a “determinism” that threatened to erode the importance of human agency and difference. As a result, many academic departments drew firm lines between the humanities and the sciences (as if science were somehow inhuman). Even my department at Duke University divided into separate schools, and moved to completely separate areas of campus a mile apart, to emphasize that some anthropologists studied human culture while others studied human evolution.
We have also seen a level of antagonism against science from religious zealotry unprecedented since the 1920s. Once again they are seeking to erode scientific standards, most recently at a school board in Texas. As my friend Sheril Kirshenbaum has emphasized (perhaps more kindly than I), at her blog The Intersection and in her new book Unscientific America, our once upstart colonies who boldly challenged orthodoxy have now reverted to an insipid conservative dogma based on the uncritical acceptance of a desert mythology from 2,000 years ago. As a nation, our level of scientific literacy is dwarfed by every country in the Western world and ranks only ahead of Turkey. Given our extreme privilege and educational opportunities (not to mention our power and influence around the globe) this represents a scandalous, as well as a dangerous, trend. As Thucydides fearedWKy8b-qBSJ5s&hl=en&ei=q6zeSfD8E-DqlQeH7f3UCA&sa=X&oi=bookresult&ct=result&resnum=2#PPA416,M1 for Athens, so we should for reason: Oikos basileōs, en tōi hemeterōi oikōi (“As goes the royal house, so goes the empire”).
Which brings me to what I, and this blog, are all about. I was educated as a scientist and am now a historian. I was raised as a Christian and am now an atheist. I grew up in the United States and am now an aspiring resident of Canada. Like Kurt Vonnegut, I am a man without a country, but on multiple levels. As I reflect on my location in space and time, this blog will be my way to skip stones from across the pond. Most will be too bulbous and with the incorrect spin to travel very far, but hopefully a few will make it to the distant shore.
My primary training is in evolutionary anthropology, where I have a masters degree emphasizing primate behavioral ecology. My thesis work focused on bonobo (Pan paniscus) social behavior and their unique form of female dominance and group cooperation. I have also had experience in the lab working on issues of phylogenetics and neuroscience. My intended PhD work at Duke was going to focus on the endocrinology of affiliation in female bonobos. But that was before I discovered a passion for the history of science that resulted in a ricochet to that “other” culture and another country. Now at the University of British Columbia, my doctoral work will focus on the history of evolutionary biology, emphasizing the period just after the publication of On the Origin of Species.
The topics explored on this blog will reflect my dual identities and, occasionally, the conflict between them. At the original home of The Primate Diaries, I emphasized new studies in evolutionary biology on issues ranging from cooperation and group selection to mating strategies and sexual selection to ultimate questions on primate behavior and evolution. Frequently, I leveled my critques on agents of unreason or the misuse of science for political purposes. I have a strong commitment to animal rights and environmental sustainability. I sometimes enjoy moments of levity.
However, the most important focus of The Primate Diaries has been and will be the beauty and wonder of the natural world. Science is a humanity. The two cultures may use different tools depending on the questions we seek to ask, but our goals are fundamentally the same: the pursuit of knowledge about ourselves and the world we live in. Furthermore, while religious claims to objective knowledge are necessarily subject to the same standards as any other claim about the natural world, it doesn’t change the intrinsic beauty and symbolic meaning that religious traditions represent for people throughout the globe. Science will not replace religion (and has never had any intention to), but scientific findings will require religious believers to abandon demonstrably false claims about reality and, to use a concept biologists are enormously fond of, to evolve with a changing environment. As Keats reminds us, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
I remain just as perplexed today by the accusation that science and beauty are incompatible as Richard Feynman was nearly thirty years ago. Feynman’s response to this straw man of scientific humbug reflects that of fair Helena when she attempts to assuage her would-be rival in the midst of an absurd conflict, not unlike what we face today:
So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted;
But yet a union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem:
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart.
Our two cultures may have their own unique histories and institutional foibles, but the seeming division between us is just as illusory as one of Robin Goodfellow’s charms. In his reply to the artist, Feynman stated that, “I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can see the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. . . [A] science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
It only adds; I don’t understand how it subtracts. And that, in rough form, is what I plan to write about.
Wow. You’ve set the bar high for the quality of your posts.
Don’t bother with levity. We’re all deadly serious around here. We’re scientists, so we don’t need humour.
Science is a humanity. The two cultures may use different tools depending on the questions we seek to ask, but our goals are fundamentally the same: the pursuit of knowledge about ourselves and the world we live in.
That’s an interesting thought, I also like this one:
science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower.
I’d actually never heard of the “two cultures” concept, it almost seems like a fitting description though, unfortunately.
Ironically, I think I’ve met more iconoclastic atheists in the classical/early christian studies dept than in the biology dept(it’s full of agnostics).
awesome post and um, yay female bonobos!
Please excuse Bob’s humour!
Really looking forward to reading your posts. As a science journalist, I’m an outsider looking into the world of science and so I’ve thought a lot about the two cultures. Though you actually have the background to look at this in a more rigorous way! Welcome!
Welcome, Eric! I’m an aspiring Canadian citizen in Vancouver too (originally from England), and my postdoc was in primate genome evolution, so I’m very much looking forward to reading your posts.
I think it’s disingenuous of Feynman, and Eric, to say that he doesn’t understand the perspective of the artist. In my opinion there is more gained than lost when we understand the flower better, but there is not nothing lost. Part of beauty in many things is its mystery. Part of the beauty of a flower is not knowing everything about that flower, because then you’re in a position of awe. You’re smaller than the flower, and you don’t own it. When you understand the intricate workings of the flower, it becomes just another thing, a mechanism that you understand. Now, in my mind, connecting to that intricate mechanism connects you to greater mechanisms, and allows you a broader view of life everywhere, how it’s connected, and your part in that. The artist just sees the flower and is drawn to its mystery, and that’s the end. The beauty that comes from greater understanding leads to greater beauty. But to pretend that nothing is lost in the transition, is not entirely accurate.
That was a great post Eric. Welcome to the party!
Eric, nice to see you made your move here with a Bang! Sorry that Triangle lost you and your awesome blogging, but being on NN will be good for everyone – you will get more readers, and more people will get to read your good stuff.
Thank you everyone for that warm welcome! I’m looking forward to interacting with all of you and I’ll see you soon on your comments page.
Welcome Eric! I enjoyed reading your post and was very impressed by the quality of your writing.
It makes me wonder, now that you say you are part of the the “other culture”, if most scientists could not make such a jump. Does writing style reflect how much a person is part of the “two cultures?”
I look at most scientific writing, including my own, and it is dry, unemotional and filled with run-on sentences and/or terse statements of facts.
This is of course, by design and for ease, but most of us don’t even seem to want to throw in a little creativity and excitement (except, sometimes, when it comes to the titles of papers…)
I also am looking forward to the rest. I hadn’t been able to look earlier, but welcome!
John’s comment was interesting. I was getting set to argue, but now upon re-reading it I would agree (except I’m not sure that I’d have chosen ‘disingenuous’). There is a certain loss of innocence when you learn more about anything, and original perspective can not be recovered. I wouldn’t want it to be, either! One’s sense of awe simply changes scale, since it is not possible to fathom all levels of what knowing a flower better could imply, simultaneously. But time and experience are one way streets, and ignorance is bliss to some.
Yes, there is definitely a loss of innocence. People will sometimes hear birds singing and say something like, “Isn’t it wonderful? The birds are so full of joy they can’t help singing.” They are not real happy to learn that much of the song consists of, “I’m a healthy male of your species; mate with me” or “This is my territory; keep out.”
“I was raised as a Christian and am now an atheist. … I have a strong commitment to animal rights and environmental sustainability.”
You may have lost the theistic part but it sounds like you’re pretty strongly religious :)