The art of science, and the science of art!

“If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week.”
> – Charles Darwin (as quoted by my biological anthropology professor and UF Anthropology department head Dr. Krigbaum).

One thing that has always irked me about artists, especially those in the performing arts, is the tendency to put down science, or worse, to aproach it as the opposite or art. Scientists I’ve met are sparked by a deep curiosity about the world around them and how it works. They search for truths, for deeper understanding. They share a thirst for originality, new discoveries, and for problem solving. They’re adventurous and creative. Their progressive thinking is often deemed crazy by mainstream society, only to later be praised as relevant, genius, and ahead of it’s time. Scientists are story tellers, constantly creating new, elaborate ideas based on thoughtful observation. Since beginning college, I’ve found my science professors to be no more or less boring, rigid, or close-minded than my music, literature, theatre, of film professors. Somewhat my surprise, one thing I have found is that my science professors generally demonstrate a profound respect for art and for artists during lectures, often blurring preconceived boundaries between what is art and what is science. A good number of my Arts teachers, on the other hand, focus their energy into putting down science and emphasizing the limitations of scientific research as if it were not a creative endeavor, while everything around them from podium, to projector screen, to periodic table, to solar powered pencil sharpener, are testaments to the creativity of people who are sooner be lumped into the category of scientist than artist.
When I see artists, real artists (not those whose sole drive is ego or a dream of making it big), I see a drive that is SO similar to that of a scientist! Natural philosopher, physiologist, inventor and poet Erasmus Darwin greatly influenced his son Charles’ thinking. Yet, unlike his grandson, Erasmus did not explore the far reaches of the globe in search of inspiration and evidence for his evolutionary theory, but rather sat at home, eloquently summing up his own ideas of evolution, biology, the origin of the cosmos, and the connections between scientific and social progress in a series of poems, that’s right, POEMS. I’m not advocating that today’s scientific research should all have structured rhythm and rhyme (although that would be a fun challenge). I just think that many of the same elements that make up a great artist also make a great scientist, and vice versa, and that by making science (or the elements of science such as objective or deductive reasoning) out to be some sort of enemy or antithesis of art is a narrow-minded and outdated view for any so-called artist to hold.

Now, can you believe that today, in 2009, we still have people fighting to keep science teachers from teaching evolution…. and this Erasmus guy had the right idea back in 1802 AND summed it all up in 8 little beautifully simple lines of poetry:

“Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.”

Erasmus Darwin. The Temple of Nature. 1802.

If only my senior thesis could be this short or smart……