NYT
May 27, 2008
Basics

Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science

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.”

Harold Bloom in the Western Canon suggests that the key humanities
texts have "aesthetic value", which you either experience or you do
not in your individual interaction with the text.

He suggests that writers like Shakespeare are beyond analysis by
Marxists, evolutionists, etc.,

In summary, aesthetic value is beyond scientific analysis.

Therefore, "The two cultures" are still well separated, and it's
difficult to see how you can bridge the gap between them.

Personally, I read canonical novels and physics textbooks and find
value in both, but the values I find are as different as chalk and
cheese.

I happily admit there are two cultures and let both exist within me.

Why attempt to weld them together? It would make writing on the
blackboard difficult, and chalk doesn't taste nice in a cheese
sandwich.

Paul Grieg wrote:
> Harold Bloom in the Western Canon suggests that the key humanities
> texts have "aesthetic value", which you either experience or you do
> not in your individual interaction with the text.
>
> He suggests that writers like Shakespeare are beyond analysis by
> Marxists, evolutionists, etc.,
>
> In summary, aesthetic value is beyond scientific analysis.
>
> Therefore, "The two cultures" are still well separated, and it's
> difficult to see how you can bridge the gap between them.
>
> Personally, I read canonical novels and physics textbooks and find
> value in both, but the values I find are as different as chalk and
> cheese.
>
> I happily admit there are two cultures and let both exist within me.
>
> Why attempt to weld them together? It would make writing on the
> blackboard difficult, and chalk doesn't taste nice in a cheese
> sandwich.

Paul Grieg wrote:

> Harold Bloom in the Western Canon suggests that the key humanities
> texts have "aesthetic value", which you either experience or you do
> not in your individual interaction with the text.
>
> He suggests that writers like Shakespeare are beyond analysis by
> Marxists, evolutionists, etc.,
>
> In summary, aesthetic value is beyond scientific analysis.
>
> Therefore, "The two cultures" are still well separated, and it's
> difficult to see how you can bridge the gap between them.
>
> Personally, I read canonical novels and physics textbooks and find
> value in both, but the values I find are as different as chalk and
> cheese.
>
> I happily admit there are two cultures and let both exist within me.
>
> Why attempt to weld them together? It would make writing on the
> blackboard difficult, and chalk doesn't taste nice in a cheese
> sandwich.

I agree or may be in the neighborhood of that. The average person need
only be convinced that applied science works --not that any theories
it stems from involves a noumenal or "realer world" that should
replace the phenomenal one presented in personal experience. A
scientist (especially a particle physicist) who literally tried to
live her everyday life in the formal or abstract models of her
particular field would probably be dead (via suicide, etc) or residing
in a mental institution.

Although the practice of science involves 3rd-person descriptions, a
philosophical stance like scientific realism should include
acknowledgement that there wouldn't even be a 3rd-person perspective
like that outside of the human or biotic cognitive system (much less a
God's Eye View). Such an ontological world would be as scaleless as it
colorless, odorless, aesthetically valueless, devoid of judgemental
classifications (taxonomy), etc. We can't completely disparage or
dispense with the qualitative and conceptual "illusions" that
evolution has wired our brains to represent and conceive reality as,
from the information input of the senses.

And yes, I've probably diverged at the start from the article's
"constructivist" sounding tone (of knowledge being a matter of
cultures rather than cognitive systems like minds or brains), but I've
never been very good at stating opinions of this sort in that type of
framework.