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January 30th, 2012

BOUBA-KIKI MEETS THE HOBBIT

With the cream of the world’s most powerful and influential on their recent annual pilgrimage to Davos, it is interesting that even the cohorts of image – makers and their talkative doyen , Sir Martin Sorrell, are no longer bothering to pretend that it is also the Forum of the World’s Most Wise.

Indeed ‘wisdom’, which – whatever it may be – implies a thinking horizon at odds with the electoral cycle ( chief energiser on the Davos slopes ? ), seems to be lying at its lowest in the general esteem. Some, outside the ‘leadership’ forums and business schools, think this may be connected with the perceived inadequacy of much current political leadership and vision, when the times clearly demand better; and there certainly seem to be fewer Gandhis or Mandelas around.

So, if the ‘wise’ are not at Davos, where do we look for them since they are most certainly somewhere? This is becoming as difficult a search as that for the Higgs Bosun – an apposite analogy, as it happens, since some eminent scientists have become saddeningly complicit in the bad-mouthing of ‘philosophy’, one of the assumed catalysts of ‘wisdom’ ever since Anaxagoras and Plato discoursed and Archimedes ‘ heureka’ed naked through the streets.

It was sad to see Stephen Hawking paraded as a prime proponent of the ‘philosophy is dead’ campaign though, as is often the case with over-hyped slogans, his actual words may not fully support the book-marketing rhetoric. At face value, however, it will come to be seen – if you will excuse the words – as both ‘unwise’ and ‘unscientific’. And it was no less disappointing to see the ‘You Tube’ footage of Richard Dawkins - on a very off-day with an over-bearing Neil deGrosse Tyson - apparently joining in the premature obsequies.

Happily, these dissonant noises are not to be allowed to prevail against – may I again use the word? - the ‘ wiser ’ among our own science, arts, humanities and education fraternities; and we will be returning soon to this topic which is being hyped into a potentially dangerous battle-ground both within, and between, the contemporary science and arts/humanities communities.

So watch this space.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of friendship and reconciliation, here is an unusual footnote to my ( prophetically titled? ) earlier post, ‘ Science’s Civil Wars: Bring in the Philosophers ‘.

You may remember this : -

‘ One of the more spectacular skirmishes took place this year in the March and June editions of the New York Review of Books; between American philosopher, Colin McGinn and neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, on the occasion of McGinn’s Review of Ramachandran’s latest book, ‘The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human ’ ( Norton USA 2011).

This proves to have been a symbolic pre-Hawking , public skirmish between a leading neuroscientist and a leading philosopher ( though there is no lack of eminent scientists who have also entered the lists against Professor Ramachandran ! ). Still, in any war on philosophers, no one could doubt his considerable credentials….

Ramachandran:

“ To a philosopher who demanded that he define consciousness before studying it scientifically, Francis Crick once responded, ‘My dear chap, there was never a time in the early years of molecular biology when we sat around with a bunch of philosophers saying let us define it first We just went out there and found out what it was: a double helix ”.

McGinn:

“ Ramachandran reveals his lack of understanding of philosophical problems in suggesting that neurology can resolve questions like free-will and qualia – though it may provide relevant data. These questions are not going to be resolved by discovering the neural correlates of such things. Here I suggest an introductory text in philosophy of mind ..”

http://www.creativevaluenetwork.com/arts-science/sciences-civil-wars-send-in-the-philosophers/

In referring to this obvious mis-meeting of minds, I did not at the time mention Ramachandran’s imaginative essay into what the structure of the brain can tell us about language and its origins.

As McGinn paraphrased it, Ramachandran’s bouba-kiki experiment was taken to show that there is a built-in correspondence between the visual shape of an object and the sound that might be its partner. Words began by way of abstract similarities between visually perceived objects and intentionally produced sounds – we call things by sounds that are ‘like’ what they name. Speech, moreover, exploits not only sight-sound similarities but also those between movements of the mouth and other bodily movements, - come-hither gestures etc. He called the process synkinesia .

Well, the jury is not so much out as not yet convened on all this; but , curiously, there is implied support for some elements of Ramachandran’s thesis from another highly creative writer and expert in the science of linguistics ( or philology as it was called in his day ) – J R R Tolkien.

I strongly recommend the ‘The Ring of Words – Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary’
(OUP 2006) co-authored by Gilliver, Marshall and Weiner, starting with his early ‘research assistant’ days on the OED and becoming a fascinating insight into the works and methods of the later great writer/philologist.

Of the two levels on which language exists, the authors acknowledge that the level of ‘meanings’ – the directly communicative quality of language – has come to dominate modern day linguistics. But it is the level of ‘sounds’ on which Tolkien placed particular emphasis.

‘ The sound and shape of words is the most basic foundation of the aesthetic quality of poetry and expressive prose’ is the view ascribed to him by the authors. Philology is concerned with both the sound and shape of words as well as their meaning; and because language is constantly changing, philology ( linguistics) must be concerned with the history and origins of word-forms and word-meanings. Tolkien upheld the importance of the sound of words as an independent value in language, and pursued their origins with great tenacity.

So the man who gave us bogosity, staggerment, bebother, sigaldry, hobbit, -even withywindle- might well have had some instinctive sympathy for the bouba-kiki hypothesis; short, however, of any full conversion to the cause of neuroscientism .

RW January 2012.

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November 29th, 2011

‘ EAVESDROPPING ON SCIENCE’: TURNER ACCUSED.

The ‘Turner and the Elements’ exhibition, opening at the Turner Contemporary in Margate, in January , is a ‘must’ on my 2012 calendar. We are also promised a new book of essays on the exhibition ‘s theme by Turner’s biographer, James Hamilton, who has done much to illuminate and popularise Turner’s life and works.
What a pity, then, that he seems to have induced – with both The Guardian’s Art correspondent, Mark Brown, and BBC News Online ( Entertainment and Arts ) - some tabloid- style ‘revelatory’ captions which both obscure and trivialise the great, two-way creative ferment that Turner and his contemporaries in the arts and sciences were living through.
The BBC version suggests Turner, his ear to the wall separating the rooms of the Royal Academy from those of The Royal Society, is “ eavesdropping for ideas”. This has all the semblance of a failed, embarrassing joke ; until capped by Hamilton’s own reported assurance that “ the thin walls would have allowed the artist to overhear their discoveries “.    Oh dear!
Slightly more restrained, but still off-track, was The Guardian Online’s take on the felony ( much derided in its readers’ posts ) …..

“ Turner used science to paint the sun” as lead in to “ … JMW Turner’s work was also rooted in ground-breaking scientific theories.. “

That, I suppose, is slightly better than hacking into the Royal Society’s intimate chats!   Again, however, a scintilla of reality - the pervasive influence of the great Herschel’s pioneering work in astronomy – risks being torn from the wider, more complex and heady environment of the two-way creative ideas supercharging the 19th century arts/science dialogue.

The point is that we have come a very long way, in the past ten years, in building a plausible, very exciting account of this revolutionary century, crowned by Charles Darwin’s 1859 ‘The Origin of Species’ - the very years within which Turner was born, worked and died ( 1775 – 1851 ). Many, including James Hamilton, of course, have contributed to the building and refining of this picture; and perhaps, especially so :

- Ashton Nicholls ( editor, ‘Romantic Natural Histories’. Houghton Mifflin, 2004) and

- Richard Holmes ( ‘ The Age of Wonder ‘, Harper Press, 2008 ).

( see my 2010 post ‘Upon a Peak in Darien; new vistas from old places’: below )

http://www.creativevaluenetwork.com/arts-science/upon-a-peak-in-darien-new-vistas-from-old-places/

Luckily no one has yet accused Shelley of klepto-poetics for his wanton borrowing from his contemporary Luke Howard’s, ( the meteorological innovator’s ) , scientific classification of clouds -( ‘ On the Modification of Clouds’ 1804 ) ;  both in his ( Shelley’s ) ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and ‘TheCloud ‘ (1820 ). …  ”which demonstrates a remarkably accurate and scientific understanding of cloud formation and the convection cycle “.     ( Richard Holmes op. cit . p.160)

The  Cloud ….

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers
From the seas and the streams;
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid
In their noon-day dreams.
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the sun.
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And then again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder….
__________________

First Stanza “ The Cloud “ Percy Bysshe Shelley (1820 )

The fact is that Turner, and Constable, and Shelley,  and Coleridge, and Wordsworth, like most of their ‘scientific’ peers, including Herschel and his equally brilliant astronomer sister Caroline, meteorologist Howard,   Erasmus Darwin – all were increasingly looking both up to the heavens and, through the growing spectator-sport of ‘ballooning’,    back down at planet earth, seeing both with freshly opened eyes.   Byron went to stare through Herschel’s telescope, Humphry Davy,   like Erasmus Darwin, was moving easily between his science and his poetry. Mary Shelley was writing and exploring technology with ‘Frankenstein.  When not writing or experimenting with chemistry in his Oxford college rooms, Shelley was at the latest balloon ascent in Oxford’s parks …..

And when Coleridge was asked why he spent so much time at lectures on physiology, he replied “ to increase my stock of metaphors”.  While, as Ashton Nicholls shows ( op.cit. p.19)


“ … all scientific thinking also relies on metaphors, analogies, comparison. … In this sense, Copernicus had first to imagine the sun at the centre of the solar system since there was no clear empirical evidence to support such a claim; the sun still appears to circle the earth. Likewise Charles Darwin had to imagine – and he often uses the word ‘imagine’ – that animals might be linked in the way his theory described “.

So,  far from eavesdropping at the wall,  his was the magical time when Turner could have simply knocked on the Royal Society door, and many voices would have said, “ Come in.  Come in!  What are you thinking about and working on ? “

And wouldn’t that have made a better, and essentially truer, story ?

RW. 29/11/2011.

November 8th, 2011

SCIENCES CIVIL WARS: SEND IN THE PHILOSOPHERS

At times of intellectual doubt or change it’s often best to have early recourse to the dictionary, to check again what the words being bandied about are basically meant to mean.

So mea culpa – a confession first! The regular elision into ‘arts/science’ of the key parameters of the inter-disciplinary mission we promote has proved a ‘shorthand’ too many. For ‘arts’ we need to revert to ‘arts and humanities’, the older, wider specification which then fell out of fashion but is re-emerging as the crucial mediator in the current undeclared Wars of the Sciences.

For, as my concise OED reminds me, the ‘ Arts’ are “ the branches of creativity, such as painting, music, drama” … or “ subjects of study mainly concerned with human culture ( as contrasted with scientific or technical subjects) …”; whereas ‘ Science’ is “ the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment …”.

What, then, between these clearer parameters would the words - ‘and Humanities’ -add to the party? Would it adhere more closely to the ‘art’ or ‘science’ component? And why does it matter?

The answer is that, alongside literature, art, and history, ‘humanities’ re- opens the door to ‘philosophy’ which has re-emerged as key mediator in the furious, and escalating, battle now raging between the aggressively garrulous wings of the neurosciences; the more ‘classical’ mainstream scientists; and the endangered custodians of the ideas of free-will, human self-consciousness and choice on which our notions of a moral society have been slowly but precariously built.
(The OED again: - ‘ philosophy’ is “ the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence”; and the study of their theoretical basis …).

These ‘ wars’ may be ‘undeclared’ but they have already spilled out beyond the sciences and humanities into a dispirited public awareness.

A good example is the recent article in the ‘Guardian’ by Rafael Behr, perceptively sub-titled “This pop neuroscience fad is taking all the joy out of being human “.   He comments on the wave of ‘best-sellers’, like David Brooks’ ‘The Social Animal’ which reports on “the ‘revolution in consciousness’ through which, Behr claims, “ science has junked most of what we thought we knew about how people make life choices ” . He comments on the ‘support regiments’ of ‘cognitive psychologists’ and ‘ evolutionary biologists ’ and then …

“ Finally, there are the neuroscientists who watch bits of our brains light up as we perform mundane tasks inside magnetic resonance imaging scanners. They conclude that conscious decision-making is often a retrospective justification for a course of action that the unconscious mind has already embarked upon”.

As a non-scientist he feels  modestly obliged to concede “ This is all good science, “… (though there is some cause to doubt this, as we will see )……

His sensible conclusion ? “… the abundance of jaunty popular tracts weaving all these insights together smells like a fashionable orthodoxy in the making ”.

It’s heartening to know that many scientists are themselves among those doubting that ‘this is all good science’.   Pre-eminent among these has been Professor Denis Noble, Oxford physiologist and systems biologist, whose 2006 ‘The Music of Life – Biology Beyond the Genome’ mounts an elegantly simple but devastating attack:
“ The self is not a neural object …..At the level of neurons and parts of the brain, what we normally mean by the self - that is, you or me - is more like a process than an object . We can certainly ask questions about how you or I would be affected by damage or alteration to our brain … but when we start to talk about the location of the self, we are talking about a person. Such talk belongs to a context in which it makes sense to refer to persons. It leads to semantic confusions to recast these as questions about locations in the brain.”

“The symphony of life that we call a person is not just the playing of individual instruments in the orchestra. And there is no Cartesian opera theatre in the brain. “

It is no surprise that Noble has also played a leading role in bringing the philosophers back into the dialogue. More on that below.

Among ‘their own’ it is probably Raymond Tallis, distinguished former Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Manchester University and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences ( for his research in clinical neuroscience, no less! ) who has, over many moons and through many books, most scathingly exposed the inexorable torrent of claims of neuroscience and evolutionary theory to have explained human consciousness, behaviour, culture and society – down to ( his especial bête noir) the aesthetics of art and literature.

His latest – “ Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Acumen 2011) is a massively detailed and sustained polemic, deeply felt and persuasive – and, just occasionally, deafening!

From a deep experience he is able to question and illuminate some of the more extravagant interpretations of the ubiquitous ‘brain-scan’ methodologies and related technologies; but, for me, he is most compelling on the ‘ continuity of evolution ‘ and the concept of ‘cognitive community’.

“ Our consciousness, and the engines that shape it, cannot be found solely in the stand-alone brain.”

“ … It participates in, and is part of, a community of minds built up by conscious human beings over hundreds of thousands of years. This cognitive community is an expression of the collectivisation of our experiences through a trillion acts of joint and shared attention…. To seek the fabric of contemporary humanity inside the brain is as mistaken as to try to detect the sound of a gust passing through a billion-leaved wood by applying a stethoscope to isolated seeds .”

And there are many others; but note that, as with Noble and Tallis, the final rebuttal – or validation - of an alleged erring science inevitably invokes philosophical scrutiny – ‘the study of the theoretical basis of a branch of knowledge or experience’. Noble and Tallis both know this, and have the appropriate experience within their repertoires. But there is a clear deficiency, in this respect, among many of the more noisy combattants. The philosophers are, however, now increasingly engaged.

One of the most notable of such engagements was the massively impressive “ Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience” (Blackwell Publishing 2003 ). It was no accident or surprise that it should have a short but compelling Foreword by Denis Noble. Its joint authors are PMS Hacker, of St John’s College, Oxford, a distinguished philosopher of mind and language; and MR Bennett, a leading neuroscientist and Professor of Physiology at the University of Sidney.

This book is a totally uncompromising and hard-hitting analysis which doesn’t shirk the need to cope with the pervasive influence of philosopher Daniel Dennett on this field via his much publicised view that “philosophy is allied with, and indeed continuous with, the physical sciences “. The authors, philosopher and neuroscientist alike, disagree; and provide a very detailed appendix ( Dennett’s Methodology and Presuppositions ) to explain why. “ We do not think that any philosophical problem can be solved through scientific enquiry “ prefaces their comments on this fundamental schism.

As clear and accessible are their wider joint conclusions .

“ … there is no such thing ( except figuratively ) as ‘getting inside’ ( a person’s) mind … We can ‘get inside’ another person’s brain, but no amount of investigation of another person’s neural processes … will allow us to inspect his reasoning or what he is thinking . If we want to know what Newton or Kant thought, and wish to examine his reasoning, we read his writings - and there is nothing ‘indirect’ about that .” ( page 94 )

Sir Anthony Kenny, a former President of the British Academy, commented: “ This remarkable book, product of a collaboration between a philosopher and a neuroscientist, shows that the claims made on behalf of cognitive science are ill-founded … The book will certainly arouse opposition, but if it causes controversy, it is controversy that is long overdue “.

This is by no means a little local contretemps. One of the more spectacular skirmishes took place this year in the March and June editions of the New York Review of Books; between American philosopher, Colin McGinn and neuroscientist VS Ramachandran, on the occasion of McGinn’s Review of Ramachandran’s latest book, ‘The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human ( Norton USA 2011). Readers in the UK will recognise much of the book from the author’s BBC Reith Lectures.

McGinn pays handsome tribute to Ramachandran’s irresistible enthusiasms and bravura as the book gallops at great pace through his experimental phenomena on phantom limbs, visual illusion, blindsight, Capgras syndrome, Synesthesia, mirror neurons. As usual, he is soon leaping into breath-taking conjecture on how it throws light on diverse questions of no mean importance - autism, the evolution of culture, origins of language, development of aesthetic sense, and much else. ( We plan to return to some of these more seriously in a forthcoming review of our ongoing language and music interests.)

Behind a fair coverage of content, the inevitable basic questions of a philosopher begin to surface.
“ Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Is ‘thinking’ what the brain does in the way that ‘ walking’ is what the body does?  Ramachandran thinks yes, McGinn no.

“ Ramachandran acknowledges no limit to neural reductionism, but there is a very big issue here that he slides over: the mind-body problem”, McGinn writes. “ His suggestion that by identifying the part of the brain involved in voluntary decision we turn a philosophical problem into a neurological one could only be made by someone who does not know what philosophical problem is in question – to put it briefly - whether or not determinism conceptually rules out freedom of the will. – These are conceptual questions, not questions about the neural machinery that underlies choice…”

The sequel ( the Tell-Tale Brain – An Exchange. June 23, 2011) was no less interesting, but arrived more quickly at where the battle lines are still drawn…..

Ramachandran: “ To a philosopher who demanded that he define consciousness before studying it scientifically, Francis Crick once responded, ‘My dear chap, there was never a time in the early years of molecular biology when we sat around with a bunch of philosophers saying let us define it first We just went out there and found out what it was: a double helix”.

McGinn: “ Crick’s dismissive reponse to the question of defining consciousness shows a total blindness to the possibility that ‘consciousness’ might be a highly ambiguous word, covering very different types of phenomena – sensory experience, cognition, attention, wakefulness, self-consciousness. Obviously any investigation of something called ‘consciousness’ will have to be clear about which of these senses might be in question, distinguishing self-awareness from simple perception. Philosophers have done much to clarify these distinctions “.

“ Ramachandran reveals his lack of understanding of philosophicl problems in suggesting that neurology can resolve questions like free-will and qualia – though it may provide relevant data. These questions are not going to be resolved by discovering the neural correlates of such things. Here I suggest an introductory text in philosophy of mind ..”

————————————-

In the history of human affairs the sounds of gunfire have often drowned out the voices of wisdom and progress. The case for the mutual needs of ‘the sciences’ and the ‘arts and humanities’ for each other has been inching only slowly ( too slowly?) forward; so it’s a beautiful and hopeful paradox that the ‘arts and humanities’ should now perhaps be needed to play the critical role in the synthesis of the diverging sciences.

Paradoxes, however, often come in pairs. A few weeks ago we had the Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University, Sir Leszek Borysjewicz, dourly warning ( Guardian, 20 October) that “ Cash value placed on degrees threatens arts and humanities “.

Why should a distinguished medical scientist and former head of the Medical Research Council be saying such things ? Because fewer high quality graduates would be drawn to research in these ‘purer disciplines’ if their expectations of future earnings were downgraded.

Why should a scientist care?  Because the arts and humanities, in fields like history, language learning, archaeology etc ” provide a distinctive way of engaging with problems” which broad-based universities need. “ The arts and humanities enriched peoples’ lives. Medical Science can make us live to 90. What’s the point of living to 90, if you haven’t got the arts and humanities … ?

More communiques from the trenches soon!.

Ralph Windle

October 6th, 2011

WELCOME SERENDIPITY

No causal connection, of course, but a welcome serendipity  ….

- that less than one week from our post on creativity and its arts/science imperatives ( ‘Google Chairman      Argues CVN’s Case ‘ 30 August 2011 ) the ‘serious’ press was alive with this issue, and the Shadow Culture Secretary, Ivan Lewis,was launching a Review of Policy towards Creativity and a new Creative Industries  network.

And a decade after CVN’s pioneering of the idea , it was interesting to see Lord David Puttnam in the van of a score of leading artists, entrepreneurs and educationalists, putting a cogently argued case to the ‘Observer’ on 4th September. Although its rationale eventually homed in on the economic relevance of the UK’s high-performing ‘ creative industries’ ( so-called, more’s the pity!) it was good to see the thrust of the argument in the right place – this government’s mis-directed educational policies.

‘We are concerned that recent developments, including the 100% cut to teaching grants for arts and        humanities degrees, the exclusion of creative and technical subjects from the English Baccalaureate, the  government’s questioning of whether they have a place in the national curriculum, and severe cuts in    teacher training allocations for these subjects, all send out the wrong message. We urge ministers across    government to come together and adopt coherent and integrated policies which will ensure that creativity  and innovation are at the heart of what our future education system offers. This is in the best interests of  our society, our economy, and the young people who will determine our country’s destiny.’

That’s right in terms of its relative emphasis – and continues:


‘It is for these reasons that we urge the government to recognise that a 21st century education system    should have creativity at its heart as an entitlement for all, through the national curriculum, as well as  through specific courses in further and higher education where the arts, art, design, technology and  computing should be nurtured and developed. We know that for many young people their confidence and  passion for learning are ignited when the education system provides them with the opportunity to express  their creative ability. Arts, humanities and creative and technical learning can offer the opportunity to re-  engage disaffected students but also, as highlighted in the recent US Reinvesting in Arts Education report, there is a clear link between good arts education and standards in literacy and numeracy.’
This is greatly encouraging ( if a few years late! ) and – may I say it? – ‘creative’ in a way that edges towards CVN’s mission; but there are, as we know, unusual ideological and political obstacles at this time to any early hopes of success.

That is why the Ivan Lewis ‘ creative policy and network’ initiative is also so important and welcome. I was invited to the Whitehall launch event on 7th September, and was pleased to see Ed Miliband adding his authority to the process, among an impressively large group of relevant, committed activists. CVN will be helping push things along.

It was Christina Patterson, writing in The Independent on that same day ( 7th
September ) who put it all in some relevant, longer context.

‘ People with the power to create characters and  stories which live on in the minds, and hearts, and films, and songs, and ballets, and paintings, and poems  of other people, tend not to call themselves ‘creative’…but, whether they knew it or not, they did start an industry ….

And so did a young man who left his family to be an actor in London, and knocked off plays to pay their rent. Plays which, 500 years on, are still the most widely performed works of art in the world… Long before the “creative industries” were called the “ creative industries”, they were Britain’s best export “.

This ‘industry’ is already 7% of GDP, employs 800,000 people, and has fewer downsides ( and much lower bonuses ) than financial services. It has great collateral social and educational advantages.

Time to give it a better go.

RW.  6th October 2011.

August 30th, 2011

GOOGLE’S CHAIRMAN ARGUES CVN’s CASE

MARK THIS DATE - 26 AUGUST 2011 !

This was the day when Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, delivered the MacTaggart Lecture in Edinburgh as part of the Media Guardian TV Festival.

In it, he issued a devastating critique of UK educational policy and, through it, delivered a ringing, implicit endorsement of our own ( Creative Value Network’s ) Idea and Mission Statement first published in 2000, which reads : -

“… to stimulate and help build more inclusive and interactive networks of individuals and groups, from across the conventional boundaries of ‘arts’, ‘science’, ‘engineering’ and ‘education’, who are impatient for a more cross-disciplinary approach to creativity and the generation of ideas …”

Wake-Up Call?

As you all know, it is now over 10 years since we launched this mission, to great applause from a wide Consultation Network ( see ‘ CVN Archive’ below ) across the arts, science, engineering and educational communities; though, as with so many innovatory ideas in the UK, there proved to be little tangible, mainstream support forthcoming from the ‘policy-makers’ in Government or our fragmented and bureaucratic professional bodies and institutions.

That is why the Google Chairman’s intervention is particularly important – for its clear reaffirmation of the very ideas and imperatives that we have been voicing since the year 2000, together with our robust strategies for necessary action; all of which were enthusiastically endorsed by so many key figures in the arts, science, engineering and educational communitities ( more on that below).

Here, first, are some of Eric Schmidt’s pointed comments:

“ Over the past century, the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together. Britain should look to the ‘glory days’ of the Victorian era for reminders of how the two ( arts/science) disciplines can work together …”

“ It was a time when people wrote poetry and built bridges”, he said. “ Lewis Carroll didn’t just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet”…..

“ If the UK’s creative businesses want to thrive in the digital future, you need people who understand all facets of it, integrated from the very beginning. Take the lead from the Victorians and ignore Lord Sugar ( hear, hear!); bring engineers into your company at all levels, including the top”.

You will find many uncanny resemblances, in his words, to the long continuity of posts and arguments on this website. And the Google Chairman’s intervention comes as a powerful confirmation of the detailed Arts/Science/Engineering interaction proposals, fully documented and publicly proposed by CVN over ten years ago !  See below.

He also provokes a chilling reminder of how educational policy change in the UK, even when widely endorsed, can be shipwrecked on its sclerotic decision processes and political in-fighting among our confusion of ‘professional bodies’, Government agencies and opaque funding mechanisms. Regrettably, this has been very much CVN’s experience  and that of other innovators in this field.
though Schmidt’s words could, hopefully, be the late, but needed, wake up call.

Brief Synopsis of a Very Cautionary Tale.

The acknowledged value and pragmatic realism of CVN’s strategic proposals, under intense scrutiny from the start by highly experienced activists across the arts/science spectrum, quickly engaged an unprecedented level of interest and promised collaboration. Here are some of the early highlights, to give a sense of the energies and initiatives involved.

1. Progressively, from 2000, an extensive network of activists and supporters from theatre, media, performing and visual arts was initiated by CVN co-director Alec Reid, long-term BBC producer and writer/director for theatre, radio, TV and recording technologies. Simultaneously, their science and engineering technology peer groups were being brought together through a variety of individual, professional, corporate, research and university networks, co-ordinated by CEO, Ralph Windle.

2. Three initial cross-disciplinary ‘ginger groups’ were designated, related to:-

- Engineering and the Creative Arts
The ‘Janus Project’ ( endorsed by the Engineering and Technology Board )


- Media, Arts and Digital Technologies


- Creative Industries and the Bio-Sciences

3. As a test-bed for cross-disciplinary programme trials, a ‘Collaboration Agreement’
was negotiated and signed with the Vice Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University
granting research and seminar facilities on the Wheatley Campus; and a top-level
Steering Group established under CVN’s chairmanship comprising Professorial Heads of
Faculties for Engineering, Biological Sciences, English Literature, History and Business.

4. Distinguished engineer and scientist Dr Robert Hawley CBE quickly embraced the
concept and became CVN’s Chairman. His Mountbatten lecture (2002) to the Royal
Institution in London; and (2004) to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, helped widen the
cross-disciplinary dialogue and put CVN at the centre of national pressures for
change.

5. Sir Peter Williams, Fellow of the Royal Society ( ex-Chairman of Oxford Instruments)
whose chairmanship of the newly-formed Engineering and Technology Board (2001)
over-lapped with his Presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of
Science (2002/3), was involved in, and endorsed, plans for CVN’s major ‘Janus Project’
( Engineering and the Creative Arts).

6. In January 2002, Lord David Puttnam, former film producer and then Government
Adviser and first Chairman of the National Endowment for Science and the Arts
(NESTA) became aware of the CVN initiative and a firm supporter. He suggested
its reference to NESTA for potential funding.

He commented ( September 2003 to Dr Hawley ) “ CVN has succeeded in convincing us
that there is, indeed, a massive challenge and equally massive opportunity in this
field”.

7. The Distinguished Professor ( Anna Craft ) commissioned by NESTA to conduct a detailed independent assessment of the CVN Project,  wrote:“ The enormous energy, thought and direction which has already gone into theproject was clear, together with the constituency of supportive and interested parties, at all sorts of levels of operation and many fields of activity”. Her ’strong recommendation of support’ was endorsed by Nesta …

“ The Nesta Executive was unanimous in its recommendation to support CVN “, its CEO reported in November 2003.

(8.  So it would no doubt puzzle Eric Schmidt, and sadly confirm his thesis, that the above accumulating history of positive innovation and high level endorsement should lead to a late- 2003 decision not to help fund the CVN Project nor help it recoup the  investments it had self-financed in response to near-unanimous encouragement from the leaders of somany prestigious institutions.

Basically, the argument seemed to be that, although all were equally committed, it was always
‘the other’ who must move first!  A sclerotic impasse ensued, primarily between NESTA
and our leading Engineering Institutions which ( as if to prove Mr Schmidt’s observations)
remains  unresolved  a decade later. It was a classic example of EM Cornford’s ‘ Principle of UnripeTime’ , already blocking educational innovation in early 20th century Cambridge!

9. To his great credit, Lord Puttnam ( no longer with NESTA ) shared the general
embarrassment and fought hard to try to overcome the massive inertia of the
UK’s engineering bodies.

“ We were astounded that the failure to address the need for greater investment in
creativity and innovation did not appear to be a matter of urgent concern to the
engineering industry …” ( to the then Chairman of the E.T.B. September 2003 ).

Making Things Happen

In the absence of official support, CVN has built its significance on the Arts/Science stage mainly through its self-financed website networks and activities  .It remains the leading independent commentator in the field, monitoring and encouraging a wide diversity of arts/science initiatives. We remain the only point at which a fully national, and increasingly international, strategic overview of this vital and developing cross-disciplinary field is consistently attempted. We are in touch with many creative and innovative thinkers and doers in these fields.

CVN and the Chairman of Google are perhaps not the most natural of allies, but hopefully his  strictures could jog some memories and stimulate action among our decision makers!

Ralph Windle
CEO and Founder
Creative Value Network

May 8th, 2011

WHICH WAY TO HAPPINESS ?

Since it was promised as an inalienable human right, ( in The American Declaration of Independence, 1776 ) the pursuit of ‘ happiness ‘ has ranked high on the human agenda.
In troika with ‘ life ‘ and ‘ liberty ‘, it was taken to share their robust, pragmatic substance,
and only the occasional pesky philosopher bothered to ask what ‘ happiness ‘ actually was.

Kant gave it short shrift – “ happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination” - in line with the longer tradition, back to Herodotus, which asserted that we should call no man happy till he dies .

This has created a great dilemma for politicians for whom the ‘ happy ‘ voter is the best guarantee of re-election; whereas a dead one is of little use at the ballot-box. Clearly, something urgently needed to be done.

What is being done is the launch of an unprecedented, government-led, marketing exercise to establish ‘ happiness’  as the branded product of choice and market-leader. With the British Government in the van, and at a time of massive cuts in wider research, arts and science budgets, the new, national ‘Happiness Agenda ‘ promises an intoxicating bonanza, especially for psychologists and the ubiquitous, sharply-entrepreneurial, neuro-scientists.

For the imaginative inventors of ‘neuro-aesthetics’ and other such diversions from the serious agenda, ‘happiness’ suggests a dream-concept of almost infinite promise. Already the first questionnaires (200,000 of them ) are out from the Office for National Statistics, asking how ‘happy’ and ‘anxious’ we felt yesterday.

This concern with the pursuit of ‘happiness’ is clearly a more attractive and seductive proposition than acting urgently and decisively on what ‘harder’ science has already definitively shown. In its more tangible and less ethereal manifestations, talk of ‘happiness’ is simply a usefully opaque surrogate for the better known, but politically sensitive, elements which clearly and unequivocally condition and determine it.

For one of the more laudable outputs, first of our social and economic science research, and increasingly of physiological and biochemical studies, has been the confirmation of the longer-felt evidence of eye and heart - that it is the wide and widening gap between rich and poor in our societies which mainly determines not only our ‘felt’ measures of well-being, but also the starkly tangible realities of health, life-expectancy, educational expectation and performance, mental health and much else.

It seems a little premature, as New Scientist and others do, to talk of some new ‘Science of Inequality’ or ‘ new sciences’ related to the so-called ‘Happiness Agenda’. As ever, the real credit should go to some relatively modest scientific ‘foot soldiers - like epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett – whose 2009 ‘The Spirit Level’ brought together a massive, existing but largely disregarded data base ( World Bank, United Nations, World Health Organisation, National Census Reports etc ) . It raised, as good science should, some inescapable hypotheses; and enjoyed a rare, initial cross-political honeymoon of recognition and welcome.


Until, that is, its necessary implications for action soon offended the conventional left/right divides, and it was tossed to the Taxpayers Alliance, Policy Exchange ‘Think Tank’ and the dominant conservative press, for ritual dismemberment. The ‘ Happiness Agenda’ was substituted as a much more congenial and inoffensive substitute which, it is hopefully assumed, will spawn the appropriate ‘new sciences’ to foster and sustain it.

I hope not; for the more serious reason for dwelling on this ludicrous episode is that it marks a danger point in the supposed a-political, objective stance of science and the arts. Some near-panic at the unprecedented cuts in educational, research and arts budgets, which to the wise suggests the closing of ranks and concerted action, can also induce the competitive beggaring of neighbours and the perils of sycophancy. At the very least, it’s another reminder of the need for greater clarity of vision, and to alertness to what threatens the integrity and professional objectivity of the arts/science mission.

The ‘Happiness Agenda’ is merely the current, high-profile example of bigger potential irrelevancies to come in a harsh economic and political climate.

“ Despite the fact that we are getting richer …. we still haven’t managed to produce a happier society “ says ‘Happiness’ Czar, Professor Richard Layard; one of many comfortable generalisations from the more complex realities. Even this may come as a surprise to the social majority who have not yet experienced the angst and pain of an above £40,000 annual salary.

And the Professor’s prescription on the recent Action for Happiness Day?


“We are asking people for an individual commitment to aim to produce more happiness and less misery”. And, for our less than happy children, his answer is – school lessons in ‘emotional intelligence’ and wider access to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), presumably to stop them dwelling too much on their job prospects and disappearing educational grants.

He is trying to say, I believe, that money isn’t everything, as our parents may have mentioned; and there are, no doubt, other useful homespun truths floating in the soup.


Yet, among all the pleasant ‘free hugs’ it’s sad that Layard should wish to position this mish-mash of a mission under the aegis of ‘science’. It was reportedly in the late 1990s (Stuart Jeffries, ‘Guardian’ 24 June 2008 ) when ‘Happiness’ became a new science ….Psychological researchers found a close correlation between reported happiness and activity in the cerebral cortex’. “ I have been struck with the sophistication of the science in this area “ was the Professor’s reported comment.


So, at last we’d got it in the bag , could define and measure and, who knows, maybe start creating it!

We haven’t ,of course; but, as Gilbert Ryle showed us in ‘The Concept of Mind’, there’s nothing like giving it a name to turn a notion into an entity. Better still, as Eliot told us in ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’ a choice of three names Is what most helps a cat change identity to suit all seasons.

Happiness? Feel-good? Well-being?

Take your pick — but let’s not call it Science.

RW.   May 2011.

March 3rd, 2011

EYES and EARS OF THE BEHOLDER

Spring approaches with much to delight eye, ear – and brain – on the Arts/Science front.

WELLCOME IMAGE AWARDS

The winners of this year’s awards can already be viewed at www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12538048 with an excellent commentary by Catherine Draycott, Head of Wellcome Images

These images are certainly, as claimed, highly colourful and visually stunning, though the further claim – that they are important to our understanding of scientific advances – invites further questioning. There’s no doubt, however, that Spike Walker’s brilliant photomicrograph of a caterpillar proleg comes close to a positive answer with explicative and aesthetic aspects of the artefact in dazzling accord.

The judges have certainly done an impressive job in selecting 21 winning entries which “ do not simply convey scientific information, but also have aesthetic beauty”.

Winning entries are on display at the Wellcome Collection in Central London until July 2011.


Go see them if you can.

GENOMICS FORUM POETRY WINNERS

The Genomics Policy and Research Forum, housed in Edinburgh since 2004 as part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Genomic Network (EGN), exists primarily to build links between social scientists and scientists working in the fields of genomic science and technology.

So some sceptic eyebrows were initially raised at the announcement of a Genomics Forum Poetry Competition!; until, that is, we were reminded that the Forum – in an unusual but highly welcome way - is equally mandated to engage with citizens , policy makers, business and other groups in the wider civil society around it.

The Genomics Forum is going about this aspect of its mission with great gusto, and its poetry competition is one more evidence of a refreshing and uninhibited willingness to open windows on its wider worlds.

Wide enough, it seems, to have attracted over 200 entries from around the world. The three winners and some (very) honourable mentions can be seen and read at www.genomicsnetwork.ac.uk/forum.

Thankfully, the judges were not averse to the controversy inherent in the topic, or to the unstoppable penetration of the poet’s eye. “ What marked a good poem”, the Judges’ Report states, “ was a sense of the ambivalence about the apparent possibilities of genetics, and an ability to consider and illustrate all sides of the argument. Many poems did not make it to the short list because they were too insistent that scientists play god …”.

The winner, Sophie Cooke’s ‘Forward Deck’, skilfully exploits this licence, to the further extent of its ‘double helix’ layout on the printed page.

It is growing harder to tell you apart,
genetically wondrous crew
in your superfine cruising clothes.
Your perfections are various, yet
shrink away from death ….

… You lay your head against the sunrise,
fresh as the only day that comes,
a day that is
yesterday, tomorrow and today ….

… You have undone the wheel
and laid its arc out flat ……

See the full text on the Forum website.

Flanked by Nina Boyd’s ‘Digital’ and Russell Jones’ ‘Chromosome Medley’, ‘Forward Deck’ spearheads an impressive group of new voices on the poetry of science stage. The sometimes chilling tug between the defining imperfections of our humanity and the apparently inexorable drive of genetics is precisely the territory where science, poetry and art most need each other.

PARALLEL UNIVERSE

A poetry competition ‘bringing Science to Poetry and Poetry to Science’.

Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science, which houses an unrivalled collection of early scientific instruments in one of the world’s oldest surviving purpose-built museums, is thick with the atmosphere of earlier science; but no less committed to public engagement through family-friendly exhibitions and a mind-boggling richness of lectures, exhibitions and workshops.

Where else might you go, free, to hear astronomer, Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discoverer of pulsars, talk on astronomy and poetry; or take the family to a Saturday afternoon workshop on how to work the astrolabe?

Parallel Universe, a science poetry competition organised by the Radcliffe Science Library and Kellogg College Creative Writing Centre, announced and exhibited its 10 winners at the Museum on 1st February ( www.mhs.ox.ac.uk ); and a podcast of the poets reading their work is at www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/universe. The poets are Oxford University staff, students and alumni.

As you might expect, focus and tone are different from those of the Genome Forum’s more articulated brief; but these poets are no less incisive or occasioinally moving than their genomic peers. The two groups should read, possibly meet (?) and enjoy the stimulus of each other’s work.

Here, as taster, is a little of Patrick Toland’s elegant ‘The Naming of Stars’

Once it was easy; launch a hero
out of history, freeze him there as sure
as any gaze of Medusa.
Scoop a goddess from her shell, place
the pearl in a glade
of dark irradiance.

Then came emperors, demi-cousins,
the haulage of a bear, a hunter’s
broken shoulder.
And that’s the fix; those other victors damp
ambition, the reach of our innumerables.

So, we name a star by the shimmer of
a school-girl and her outlawed
sequined bag,
a galaxy becomes the coal that slips a fire
and chars the paisley
cometing the rug. ……

IMAGES, POETRY …. And MUSIC yet to come!

watch this space. RW.

January 23rd, 2011

CELEBRITIES of SCIENCE

Looking at ‘science’ , as I first did, through the prism of the ‘arts’, one great surprise was how it, too, pursued a pronounced ‘cult of personality’ which not only persists but seems to expand through time. The essential loneliness of the long-distance writer or artist, at his/her solitary desk or easel, contrasted, I had thought, with the more anonymous ‘groupiness’ and objective collectivity of the laboratory. A multiplicity of names on a scientific paper was, and remains, nearer the norm than any conceivable joint work by Shakespeare with Bacon or Amis with Nabokov.

It was an illusion, of course, not unlike the bigger confusion between ‘citizen’ and ‘customer’ which is deluding our Government into closing libraries and turning hospitals into shops – what Philip Pullman rightly castigates as ‘market fundamentalism’. But ‘illusion’ too, because the creativity which marks out the best of ‘arts’ and ‘science’ flies free of any stereotypes of location; and its clinching synthesis may come as readily on the top deck of the No.11 bus as among the test tubes of the Clarendon laboratory. And so it is with that cross-disciplinary ‘creative synthesis ’ between ‘science’ and ‘art’,so well described by the enigmatic Arthur Koestler in his ‘The Act of Creation’  (Hutchinson 1964).

“The creative act is not an act of creation in the sense of the Old Testament. It does not create something out of nothing; it uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesises already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole”.

He quotes the mathematician, Hadamard: “ It is obvious that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas …the Latin verb cogito ( I think) etymologically means ‘shake together’.

Triggering this synthesis comes about by one of two contrasting paths –“ more or less conscious, logical reasoning or, at the other end, sudden insights which seem to emerge spontaneously from the depths of the unconscious.”

And – central to our ‘arts/science’ theme …” the same polarity of logic and intuition prevails in the methods and techniques of artistic creation”. Hence the contrasting ‘ninety per cent perspiration, ten per cent inspiration’  (Bernard Shaw)   and ‘ je ne cherche pas, je trouve’ –I do not seek, I find’  ( Picasso).
Could this ‘polarity’ also influence in some way our assessments of their relative value and esteem?

Oddly, it was the normally commonsense Guardian which seemed ready quite recently to extend the cult of scientific personality to the borders of Olympus, with its glossy “The Gods of Science” ( Guardian Weekend 11.09.10).  I suspect that the title was as much an embarrassment to their chosen pantheon as to the reader; but revealing and ‘of its time’ in that three of their chosen four very impressive men of science ( no women are apparently yet up for deification?)  are more widely recogniseable as outstanding TV personalities and ‘popularisers of science’ than cutting edge practitioners. Important, no doubt, but for very different reasons.

Still, I’m sure Richard Dawkins will have relished the special irony of being mistaken for a delusory god!

In matters divine, of course, as with the sanctification processes of the Catholic church, it helps to be dead. The 2009 year-long celebrations of Darwin’s bi-centenary showed the more credible face of this very human phenomenon; elevating him to a more plausible - if metaphorical – pantheon alongside Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein and other indisputable, past Greats of science.

The Past, however, still retains plenty of scope for revisionism and retrospective reappraisal of relative merit amongst science’s long dead.

A major recent example of this is Fritjof Capra’s 2010 polemic on ‘Learning from Leonardo’, based on his lectures at the Center for Ecoliteracy’s seminar on ‘Sustainability Education: Connecting Art, Science and Design’.
( http://www. ecoliteracy .org/essays/learning-leonardo)

Capra opens with the claim that “ when it comes to connecting art, science and design, there can be no better inspiration than Leonardo da Vinci.” That he is the true Zeus to the scientific Olympus has so far been denied “ because we have mis-viewed his scientific work through Newtonian mechanistic lenses”.

This has prevented a proper understanding of the essential nature of Leonardo’s approach, which is that “ of a science of organic forms, of qualities, that is radically different from the mechanistic science of Galileo, Descartes and Newton. And this is why Leonardo’s science is so relevant today, especially for education, as we are trying to see the world as an integrated whole, making a perceptual shift from the parts to the whole, objects to relationships, quantities to qualities.”

He clearly nominates Leonardo rather than Galileo as the more appropriate ‘father to modern science’ and wonders how Western scientific thought might have better developed towards where we are, had Leonardo’s notebooks been retrieved and studied more quickly at his death.

He has a point: Leonardo’s attitude of appreciation and respect for nature was based “ on a philosophical stance that does not view humans as standing aside from the rest of the living world … but embedded in , and dependent on, the entire community of life in the biosphere”.

This is a cogent and highly relevant advocacy, but does not require more specious reallocation of celebrity seats in the pseudo- pantheon. Leonardo remains in the thick of it, alongside many another past and present, great and not- so- great, battler for organic knowledge and better things.He would, no doubt,now have a well-thumbed copy of Denis Noble’s ‘The Music of Life’ in his back pocket.

I don’t think he would care a damn for who’s won the Science/Arts Celebrity Knockout.

Ralph Windle.

September 27th, 2010

LANGUAGE, TRUTH and LOGIC

Language is the unique, differentiating characteristic of the human species. Yet its origins and workings remain oddly resistant to scientific enquiry, even in this golden age of science. Magnetic Resonance Imaging allows us to examine synaptic formations in the living brain and plot neuronal pathways. Our ubiquitous neuroscientists are probing the innermost workings of our thinking and emotional processes, generating myriads of hypotheses on ‘ minds’ and ‘brains’; and yet the origins and workings of human language remain remarkably obscure.

The great American Linguistics Scientist, Stephen Pinker (‘The Language Instinct’ 1994)
at least explained what made us different from other animals in this respect. He described the three main kinds of non-human communication system:-

-  the‘finite repertoire of calls’ (warning of predators, making a territorial claim etc);

- the continuous ‘analog signal of magnitude of some situation’ ( the livelier the dance of the bee, the richer the food source it is telling its hive-mates about)

- and ‘random variations on a theme’ ( birdsong, repeated but occasionally with a ‘new twist’)

Our human language has a totally different design. Its unique ‘combinatorial system’( called ‘grammar’) makes human language ‘infinite’( ie there’s no limit to the number of complex words or sentences). It is effectively ‘digital’ ( can infinitely re-arrange its elements in particular orders and combinations; and each combination can convey a different but- through its provenance - comprehensible meaning).

So, by both nature and nurture , we have access to this unique faculty; which, like all ‘potentials’, can atrophy or wither by abuse, under-use or misuse. Which is why, starting with the fundamentals of education for our children, the alert and lively application of our language faculties is central to the full life and our professional livelihoods. We all know this, but there are many regrettable signs of our societies and political leaders falling short or misreading the threats to this priceless asset.

Some - scientists among them - are even questioning the impact of rapidly developing technologies on this birthright. Susan Greenfield, a leading UK scientist, has controversially suggested that society needs to be much more aware of the potentially harmful effects of the internet, networking sites and computer games on the brain. ‘ Using search engines to find our facts could impair our ability to learn’. At the recent Festival of Science in Birmingham she felt the need to suggest ‘without scaremongering’ that ‘ we should acknowledge that these new technologies are bringing unprecedented change in our lives and we have to work out whether it is for good or bad’.

Words, of course, and how we perceive and manipulate them, are central to this language capability and its life enrichment. The book, newspaper, magazine have been its more recent ‘packaging’ yet all seem to be in some degree of decline in our societies. It’s in this context that we should see the relevance of initiatives, (like the ‘Halo and the Noose’ project of our South African communicants, Graham Williams and Dorian Harrhoff), to reconnect with longer traditions of story- telling and the live exchange of words and meaning. They are achieving some remarkable re- engagements in dialogue and action.

We are certainly seeing this in our own work in the Arts/Science Interaction fields. The main purpose here is to stimulate creativity by bringing together supposedly different ‘mindsets’ -the ‘artistic’and the ‘scientific’- into what Arthur Koestler called ‘Creative Synthesis’; the interlocking of previously unconnected ‘ skills or matrices of thought’.

Yet ‘matrices of thought’ are primarily displayed across these different disciplines through words and language. So it is no surprise to learn that a major part of the ‘cross-disciplinary’ dialogue is centred on finding the appropriate language and- in this context – ‘bridging’ metaphors. ‘Metaphor has, we know, long been connected with the fields of literature and poetry ‘ the essential appeal of which is to the emotions, as opposed to logic or reasoning’ ( JGJennings. ‘Metaphor in Poetry’). Yet ‘logic and reasoning’ are surely what ‘science’ is pre-eminently about! Hence philosopher John Locke’s scorn for the flowery imprecisions of rhetoric and poetry.

So it was that the supposed divergent languages of ‘emotion’ and ‘truth’ helped build and sustain an alleged ‘arts/science’ divide on which the enduring ‘Two Cultures’ hypothesis was built. It was wrong, and we are learning better – but too slowly.

The Greek from which our word ‘metaphor’ derives means a ‘cross-over’ term, which attempts to understand one thing in terms of something else, even if this may not make ‘literal’ sense. As my friend and past collaborator, Rachel Falconer ( now Professor of English Literature at Lausanne University ) has explained, a metaphor can be seen as a kind of ‘creative’ lie, or at least a diversion from literal truth. So, when Romeo asks, ‘what light through yonder window breaks?’ he doesn’t  then say ‘It’s the sun’, which would make sense. He says,’ It is the East, and Juliet is thesun!’ –which she patently isn’t! ‘By using the metaphor, Romeo is able to convey both that the sunlight is coming through his window, and that Juliet is the centre of his universe ’.(Arts/Science Encounters, Sheffield University, 2009)

Neither Romeo nor Shakespeare were scientists, of course, so you might ask what this has to do with Science. Everything, it now transpires, since science is itself being progressively seen, by society and many of its leading practitioners , as a predominantly ‘human’ activity rather than some austere repository of ‘facts’ and ‘universal truths’; so that the creative shaping of our conceptions, and the imaginative play of metaphor is coming to be seen as a required characteristic of creativity in science as well as in poetry and literature.

The evidence for this is now overwhelming ( and, I believe, is paralleled by some opening up of minds in economics and business, too, through the creative re-entry of poetry and story into these once barren fields!)

One - some would say the most - influential ‘science’ book of the past decade – ‘The Music of Life’ by leading Oxford physiologist and geneticist, Professor Denis Noble, subtitled ‘Biology Beyond the Genome’ , is structured around striking metaphors from music ( of which he is himself an accomplished performer). Here the ‘metaphoric’ content does more than simply bridge between ‘arts’ and ‘science’; it also underpins his further serious scientific purpose of boosting ‘systems biology’ as the necessary way forward beyond the brilliant mapping of the genome itself. ’Only Connect’ is no longer to be a purely literary abstraction!

The special relationship of music to these important and exciting developments is emerging as a dominant theme of this fresh synthesis, and so will be playing a major role in our own Arts/ Science agenda as this new season unfolds. It has already triggered an unprecedented series of interchanges with Professor Noble, his scientist/musician brother Ray Noble, and the leading Swiss classical guitarist Christophe Denoth. We expect important outcomes in due course.

At the 2009 Venice Biennale, Professor Falconer (above) also gave a detailed account of a much earlier, internationally known, book which built bridges between ‘art’ and ‘science’ through metaphor. It was in 1975 that Primo Levi, established writer and committed professional chemist, brought out ‘The Periodic Table’ (which, she points out , once beat Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’ to gain the title of ‘best science book ever written!’) It is, in fact, Levi’s autobiography, in which he uses sustained metaphors from Mendeelev’s Table of Chemical Elements to structure the narrative of his own life and relationships. Levi was a Nobel Laureate – not for Science, but for Literature!

Story, and story-telling, with their origins long before the written-word, are part of our oldest, and most prolific, sources of metaphor. Yet growing insights into our language idiosyncracies leaves still unsolved the greater mystery of how the ‘spoken’ word itself evolved. By way of birdsong, perhaps?

At the turn of the year we reported on the unique work of composer/ornithologist Peter Cowdrey and his highly innovative ‘Conference of Birds’ group of performer/ researchers.The significance of their (Arts Council supported) study Mission to Brazil earlier this year –focussed on Amazonian birdsong, and exchanges with key musicians and researchers working in the Amazonian rain-forest - continues to grow. A fascinating account of the mission, covering both ‘music’ and ‘science’ aspects of the dialogue, has been put together by  Nadia Kerecuk , an advisor at the Brazilian Embassy in London. I am hoping that she, and Peter, will be sharing some of the highlights with us on the website soon.

These are exciting times …. Not least because I can also now announce that Eva Koleva Timothy’s brilliant photo-monograph ‘ Lost in Learning’, on the processes of discovery and exploration, has just been published in the USA. Expect a full review and details here soon.

Ralph Windle
September 2010.

June 17th, 2010

ENGINEERS’ CORNER

                                  “ We make more fuss of ballads than of blue-prints –
                             That’s why so many poets end up rich,
                             While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.
                             Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch? ”

                                            Wendy Cope (from ‘Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis’)

CVN and this website have always been much blessed by our many, witty and creative engineer friends.( One of them, the distinguished Dr Robert Hawley, honoured us by becoming CVN’s first Chairman.) They were always conspicuously ready to laugh-along with Wendy Cope’s caricature ( above); but, even more, at their own ( ‘Engineering Council’s) absurd press advertisement which had provoked it:-

         “ Why isn’t there an Engineers’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? In Britain we’ve always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint .. How many school-children dream of becoming great engineers ? “


                   ( Advertisement placed in The Times by the Engineering Council)

Sadly, the accumulating evidence ( over at least the past ten years ) suggests that the absence of that necessary dream owes more to the unimaginative confusions of engineering’s own collective bureaucracies, and its over-numerous ‘professional bodies’, than to the unfair competition of pampered poets.

For here we go again ( The Engineering and Technology Board’s UK Engineering Report 2009) : -
   “ the UK needs an extra 587,000 engineers between now and 2017, all with advanced   skills, so that the country can compete with other developed economies … there is concern at the 30% decline in the number of lecturers teaching engineering … and at the 17% drop in the number of HE students going into production and manufacturing degrees in 2009”.

Where are all these missing, brighter talents and  supposedly reluctant women?

Paul Jackson, the ETB’S Chief Executive (three CEOs, four Chairmen and a name change in its mini-history so far )  offered (to ‘Personnel Today’)  the shattering revelation that  …      “ engineering has an image problem and needs to tackle the gender divide .”

Now these were some of the very issues already on The Engineering and Technology Board’s first (2002) agenda when Dr Hawley ( whose ‘Making the Best of Valuable Talent’ had reached Lord Sainsbury in 2000); myself for CVN, (after wide consultations with Ove Arup and other industry leaders); and a trail-blazing team of cross-disciplinary collaborators including  the Deans of the arts/science/engineering faculties of Oxford Brookes University ( led by their brilliantly committed Professor of Engineering, Dr Denise Morrey) presented to ETB ’s first Chairman, Sir Peter Williams, the detailed proposals for the ‘Janus Arts/ Engineering’ project, initiated by CVN and aimed specifically at upgrading the creative content and appeal of UK engineering programmes.

Sir Peter much welcomed the plan, (which went public in Dr Hawley’s Mountbatten Lecture in November 2002); and in March 2003, the ETB chairman hosted the ‘Engineering and Creative Arts’ dinner symposium at the Howard Hotel, London, involving Sir Peter, Dr Hawley, Geoffrey Crossick, then Chairman of the AHRB; Lindsay Sharp ( then Director, Museum of Science and Technology); myself and six other CVN activists, including Professor Denise Morrey and Professor John Perkins from Oxford Brookes, BBC Producer Alec Reid, Bristol Theatre Director, Andrew Hilton, and painter, Peter Welton.

By now, Lord David Puttnam , first Chairman of the National Endowment for Science ,Technology and the Arts, was also personally involved and very supportive. He sent his personal assistant to the ‘Janus’ planning symposium. And, with Sir Peter also doubling as President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it would have been difficult to envisage a more prestigious endorsement for this necessary and overdue innovation. (See the website archive for a fuller list of CVN’s Consultative Network.) Note that ETB’s current Chairman, Sir Anthony Cleaver, was also involved (twice) in the briefings by myself and Dr Hawley -during his earlier incarnation as Chairman of the ( later aborted) UK e Universities Worldwide Limited .

Perhaps it is an attribute of such institutional and top- people gyrations that a clear and honest collective ‘memory’ seems rarely to develop and survive, whether by choice or neglect; but it explains much of the too-slow learning and endless iterations which seem to  characterise them. In this case, the sad politics of unwieldy ‘Councils’, and confused and warring personalities clicked in to delay, and then de-rail, this essential project. And, were it not for the angry articulations of Lord David Puttnam towards this professional  engineering disarray, no one but he and CVN would ever have known. So here, just for the record, are some of the truths he felt obliged to express to Sir Peter and others of this important profession:-

“ CVN has succeeded in convincing us that there is indeed a massive challenge and equally massive opportunity in this ( Engineering and the Creative Arts) field .I will be writing shortly ( to the ETB ) about my concerns in respect of the gap that CVN has identified ..”
                                                       ( to Dr Hawley, September 2003).

“ One great benefit of the CVN proposal is that it has alerted us to the urgent need for action and serious progress in this field. Indeed, it seems to us that the future of the UK Engineering Industry clearly depends on such progress.”


                                                       ( to Sir Peter Williams, September 2003)

“ We were astounded that the failure to address the need for greater investment in creativity and innovation did not appear to be a matter of urgent concern to the Engineering industry”.
                                                           ( to Sir Peter Williams, ibid 2003)

There is much more …..

                                           ________________________________________

                                     “ No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
                                And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
                               There’s far too much encouragement for poets –
                               That’s why this country’s going down the drain.”

                                                                                         (Wendy Cope: ibid)

Oh for a refreshing whiff of Wendy’s wit ….!

Plus ca change !…A longer, more detailed, account of  these events remains in the CVN archive, always in the hope of better things to come for our engineering friends. It was, and remains, a tragedy that their ‘leaders’ lacked the vision and energy to act.

 ( RW June 2010. )

March 25th, 2010

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the TRIPLE KIND.

SYNOPSIS

Through the medium of a collaboration with Sheffield University I was able, in January 2010, to publish a Review of the University’s ambitious ‘Arts/Science Encounters’ Programme 2009. I post here the Synopsis of the Review which  appears in full below (’Arts/Science Encounters: A Review’).

Given my own, and the wider national interest in the Arts/Science scene since 2000, I also included within the Review a short tour d’horizon of the UK’s more widespread progress towards its often stated ambition of more effective cross-disciplinary interchange between our ‘arts’ and ‘science’ communities.

This Review therefore includes ( II The World About Us; and III Responses) a brief but necessary account of the uneasy gestation, since the year 2000, of the UK’s wider approach to this supposed arts/science divide. Long a topic for abstract debate and policy confusion, the pressing realities of climate change, threatened economic melt-down, and challenge of global, real-time communication have revived appetites for action to match much past rhetoric; and for freer flows of ideas, creativity and innovation between our ‘artistic’ and ‘scientific’ elites.

Subsequently ( in IV. The Sheffield Initiative; V. Oh! The Wonder Of It; and
VI . Engaging Reality ) I go in some detail through the 16 events, with the help of key participants, and attempt some analysis of what seemed to be happening in them which made them special. The real essence of their success and future promise was not simply to have staged fascinating dialogues between impressive practitioners from the arts and sciences; but to have involved, as co-equals, a lively and energised public. Overall, I conclude that the Sheffield ‘Encounters’ were an impressive new entry on this national scene.

Finally ( VII . Postcript ) I welcome the continuity into a second (2010) Sheffield ‘Encounters’ series; and , given the implications for change already clear from this experience, I list :-
                         i.     making a reality of cross-disciplinary research,
                   ii.     curriculum change for school and undergraduate teaching,
                   iii.    rethinking of internal faculty relations and
                   iv.    more commitment to sustained community involvement

as the obvious areas about which ‘minds should now begin to refocus on some of the bigger, longer-term, strategic implications of this success’.

Not just locally, but nationally.

Ralph  Windle                                              

March 15th, 2010

OUT of AFRICA … THE STORY of YOU…

A little while ago I looked forward to the publication in South Africa of ‘The Halo and The Noose – The Power of Story Telling and Story Listening’ (www.haloandnoose.com ) by Dorian Haarhoff and Graham Williams. The good news is that the book is now out and available in both ‘print’ and ‘e-book’ versions by way of the dedicated website (below*).


This is a South African project, co-authored by Dorian Haarhoff - poet, mentor and cross-disciplinarian with an unusually deep and wide knowledge of live ‘story’ in many cultures; and Graham Williams - a training specialist from a psychology/economic background ( who contributed an early piece to this website on the arts/science gap.)
Over the year or so of its development, the authors were kind enough to show me the growing manuscript and eventually to ask me to write the ‘Afterword’ which I was honoured to do; for, although angled mainly towards their ‘business’ world, I quickly recognised the book’s wider relevancies to the Arts/Science interaction theme. It chimed closely with the philosopher AC Grayling’s words, then much echoing in my mind ….

‘throughout human history story-telling has been a central means of informing people about possibilities beyond their personal sphere, and inviting them to understand those possibilities better’. ( ‘The Heart of Things.’ Orion Books.2005)

For ‘story’, of course, is a prime source and conveyor of ‘metaphor’ which has emerged, from so much of our growing experience, as a prime catalyst of creative synthesis between art and science. I quote, in my ‘Arts/Science Encounters Review’ (below) Rachel Falconer’s words on Richard Holmes’ brilliant presentation of his ‘The Age of Wonder’ :
“Holmes proved, to me, the crucial point that in order to engage the layperson’s sense of the wonder of science, all one needs is a good story, engagingly told. The wonder is latent in the material, but it is the story that awakens our interest and interweaves this knowledge into the fabric of our lives and imaginations.”


‘The Halo and the Noose’ therefore supplies an important new link in the potential cross-disciplinary chain and promises a welcome fresh ally to our own preoccupations , with a very lively dialogue to come.
Meanwhile, this book proves its point on every page through the rich compulsion and diversity of the stories it relates; and its reminder that they are – in the end - inescapably about ourselves….
‘mutato nomine de te fabula narratur’, as we are reminded the Roman poet, Horace, said.    ‘Just change the name, and this story is about YOU!’

“Storytelling in Business”: http://www.haloandnoose.com.

February 24th, 2010

ARTS/SCIENCE ‘ENCOUNTERS’: a Review

SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY; 2009 ARTS/SCIENCE ENCOUNTERS : Ralph Windle’s Review

FOREWORD

 

‘Ralph Windle is a poet, writer, arts/science commentator, and creator of the fictional character Bertie Ramsbottom. Oxford-based, he has his roots in Sheffield, and we were delighted and honoured to have him as a guest at the 2009 Sheffield Encounters. His review of the Encounters captures something of the essence of the events, as well as his own individual style…..

We would do well to hearken especially closely to what they meant to Ralph because, as is clear from his contextual discussion in Part I of this review, he has thought long and campaigned hard, as a writer and founder of the Creative Value Network , over the divisions which undoubtedly still exist between the communities of arts and science researchers . I would like to thank him for his wise reflections, his quirky and erudite insights, and most of all, for the sheer pleasure of his conversation.’   

   Rachel Falconer.  Pofessor of Modern English Literature, Sheffield University. ‘Encounters’ Co-ordinator

I    PREAMBLE

`Begin at the beginning,´ the King said, gravely, `and go on till you come to the end:
then stop.’                           Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll.

During the three months mid-March to mid-June 2009 Sheffield University hosted a series of sixteen events, which they called Arts-Science Encounters. These talks and performances involved over 30 of its senior professors and researchers, from all 5 of its Faculties; and ranging over more than 20 disciplines from neuroscience, physics and nanotechnology to literature, music, architecture and psychology. There were also distinguished guest presenters, including Ruth Padel, poet and Darwin descendant, Bernard Gregor-Smith, eminent cellist, and prize-winning writers Richard Holmes (The Age of Wonder) and Denis Noble (Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome).
The early-evening events were open to the general public, free, and designed for the non-specialist.

The programme offered an intriguing smorgasbord of irresistible delights, such as…
Music, Bird Song and Brain Science - What do nightingales, Messiaen and brain science have in common…?

Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth - An exploration of the works of Buckminster Fuller through Bharathanatyam Dance…

Cern and The Large Hadron Collider - What goes on there? Why is its work so vital?

A Chemist´s Adventures in Wonderland - What happens when art, fashion and chemistry collide…?

The aim was simply stated. It was `to stimulate conversation and debate about the ways we choose to pursue knowledge in our different (arts or science) fields´.

Clearly, the wider celebrations of the bi-Centenary of Darwin’s birth, the 150th anniversary of the publication of his The Origin of Species, and the 50th Anniversary of C P Snow’s `Two Cultures´ Rede Lecture, all these made 2009 a particularly auspicious year for the Arts/Science theme. Darwinimania ruled, and the great and the good were out in full plumage on the metropolitan conference and media platforms.

Some worthy, generally more modest and appropriate things were, of course, also happening; and, as witness to many, I concluded – and wrote at the time – that, in the happy circumstance of Darwin’s return for his anniversary celebrations, I felt sure he would have preferred to join me on the train to these Sheffield Encounters than endure the more flamboyant Establishment panegyrics.
In this review of the semester-long series of events, I hope to give good reasons why….

December 10th, 2009

ARTSCIENCE: ON THE 2010 AGENDA


Following on an exhilarating Darwin bi-centenary year, there is already much to look forward to in 2010 and some big issues looming.
Among others, we will be trying to bring the Arts/Science dialogue a bit closer to the ‘real world’ dramas of economic melt-down and global warming etc from which it has often seemed strangely detached…..
And asking, 10 years later, whatever happened to ‘Imagination and Understanding’: the major ‘Report on the Arts and Humanities in relation to Science and Technology’ which was to usher in the brave new ArtScience world; and engaged so many Very Important People in soirees at the Royal Society, Royal Institution and other august locations?
First, however, we need to give an update on a number of projects with which we already have contacts and on which we will be commenting more fully early in 2010. They include:

Sheffield University Arts/Science Encounters


The 2009 Series was a great success and introduced some important new elements to the dialogue. I was asked by their initiator, Professor Rachel Falconer, and other key people involved, to write a special report on the experience. This I hope to publish on this site in due course. Meanwhile, the good news is that there is to be a 2010 follow-up ‘Encounters’ series.


Music and the Conference of Birds


Music and birdsong are proving to be prolific catalysts of arts/ science interdisciplinary projects.
One of the most creatively vigorous is the Conference of Birds, formed by composer/ pianist Peter Cowdrey with a talented group of performers and very knowledgable bird-science enthusiasts. They are currently on a research and performance mission to the Brazilian rain forest and I will be interviewing and reporting on their work on their return. Dance, film and video are also involved.
http://www.theconferenceofbirds.com
The Comedy of Change: (ballet by dancer/scientist Nicky Clayton).


Nicky Clayton is professor of comparative cognition at the University of Cambridge where she studies the cognitive capacity of corvids - rooks, jays and crows. She is also scientific advisor to the Rambert Dance Company with whom she has produced a new ballet, inspired by evolution and natural selection. It is now on tour. (New Scientist 7 November: Dancing with Darwin).
The hope is that she may be talking about the project during the 2010 season of arts/science ‘Encounters’ and we will be reporting.

The Fragmented Orchestra

We have been trying, so far without much success, to learn more about this fascinating project described as ‘a huge distributed musical structure modelled on the firing of the human brain’s neurons’ orchestrated, over a wide geography of 24 sites ,from Liverpool. It is the brainchild of Jane Grant, John Matthias and Nick Ryan.


The website http://thefragmentedorchestra.com has been a little volatile of late. If you have information, please tell  ralph@ralphwindle.com

LOST IN LEARNING

This is an unusual ‘learning and creativity’ project and travelling exhibition being built around a very impressive photographic monograph shortly to be published in the USA by Boston based photographer/writer Eva Timothy. The highly evocative images all derive from historic artefacts associated with key figures in the fields of exploration, science and the arts. CVN has been invited to supply a ‘foreword’, and we will be following and reporting on the book and the project in 2010.

Eva Timothy’s brilliant existing portfolio, which includes earlier sequences in Oxford and Venice during a recent European year, and her stunning images of childhood curiosity, can be seen at www.illumea.com

The Halo and the Noose -  The Power of Storytelling and Story listening … Graham Williams and Dorian Haarhoff (Graysonian Press, Johannesburg, 2009)

This is a South African project, soon also to be available as an e-book with accompanying web-site. Dorian Haarhoff is a poet, mentor and cross-disciplinarian with an unusually deep and wide knowledge of live ‘story’ in many cultures. His co-writer and project collaborator, Graham Williams, is a training specialist from a psychology/economic background ( who contributed an early piece to this website on the arts/science gap.)
The CVN interest, which led the authors to request a special ‘afterword’ to their work, is that – although mainly written into a business context – the ‘story ’medium is becoming an area of great interest and practical involvement in several approaches to the arts/science interactive learning field.
We’ll be returning to this during 2010.

The Identity Project ( The Wellcome Trust)

CVN has no current direct involvement with this project – a nine-month season of exhibitions, live events, films etc being presented in London and various other venues across the UK –though we will be visiting and commenting on some activities. See

www.wellcomecollection.org

We are mainly interested in, and plan to follow up, one related event - the well-publicised ( ‘Inside the mind of an Actor’ Guardian 24 Nov.) brain scan of actress Fiona Shaw reciting Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’ for an audience of cognitive neuroscientists in the basement of London University’s psychology department.

We are hoping - as no doubt Professor Tallis - that no self-styled ‘neuro-aesheticians’ were allowed in.

More to come.           RW.

August 3rd, 2009

Upon a Peak in Darien… New Vistas from Old Places

Gradually we are sorting through the many and welcome initiatives on the Arts/Science interaction front which the 2009 coincidence of the Darwin and Two Cultures anniversaries has stimulated.

What, if anything, has happened which will endure into 2010 and beyond, when the media have turned elsewhere and the VIPs who have graced the scene move on to other conferences and sound-bites? What remain the key issues and how far, after this welcome spotlight of attention, are they now likely to be addressed?  CVN has been be preparing a status report on the more important initiatives and on the agenda of priorities for the next phase of the Arts/Science Interaction debate.

One thing is for sure, however, and it’s a great joy to comment on it today. Without doubt, one of the most astonishing, unintended and welcome outcomes of a heady year’s debates has been the now-irreversible re-positioning of what we have so-long labelled ‘The Romantic Poets’ in the historical, intellectual and literary accounts of the run-up to Darwin and the break-through of Science.

For, science apart, this should have a profound impact on the way we, and generations of teachers, have introduced our children to the main corpus of our ‘great poets’ work –Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and others – bringing them in from the inaccessibly ‘sublime’ to the inspirationally immediate and relevant. Think what this could do to re-animate some of the bored and not-of-this-world attitudes to poetry in our societies! We can see, so much more clearly, what kind of images jostled in Keats’ mind as he wrote the words we’ve parroted, with little conviction, since early school …

                          Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
                        When a new planet swims into his ken;
                     Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
                        He star’d at the Pacific –and all his men
                     Looked at each other with a wild surmise –
                        Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

They are the more pertinent, memorable, but no less beautiful .

There is little doubt that we owe much of this exhilarating reappraisal to Ashton Nichols ( whose 2004 ‘Romantic Natural Histories’ I have commented on before*); and to Richard Holmes’( ‘The Age of Wonder’ 2008) who made a brilliant appearance at one of Sheffield University’s impressive ‘Arts/Science Encounters’ earlier this year.

Tucked away in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society is the text of Nichols’ masterly 2004 summation of the argument, entitled -with his characteristic wit and flair – “Roaring Alligators and Burning Tygers: Poetry and Science from William Bartram to Charles Darwin ”!  *

He reminds us that ‘ …Darwin’s theory was the culmination of decades of scientific speculation about connections between human beings and nonhuman nature…These ideas were reflected not only in the work of natural scientists, philosophers and theologians, but also in the images of poets, novelists and visual artists’ …

‘Wordsworth corresponded with Humphrey Davy, while Davy was making a number of his most significant chemical discoveries: electrolysis, magnesium, nitrogen, and nitrous oxide (laughing gas) which Davy tried out on Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others … the poet Coleridge was attending almost every lecture on physiology being offered at the time in London. When asked why he went to so many scientific meetings, he replied “To increase my stock of metaphors ”. Percy Shelley experimented with chemicals in his rooms at Oxford …’ and so on. *

So poetry, which many of these early natural scientists themselves wrote ( Davy, Priestley, Erasmus Darwin and others) was in the very thick of it, not on the Elysian heights or at the Olympian extremities. We need some important ‘re-writes’ of the standard ‘Companions to English Literature’ under ‘Romanticism’ to correct their emphasis on ‘the sense of the infinite and the transcendental’ ( OUP 1987 et al) and the pseudo-deification of their muse.

So there is much gain as we move on. And note the tongue-in-cheek Coleridge reply above. The stock of metaphors – moving both ways between science and the arts – is one of the key elements in the ‘creative synthesis’ which Koestler and others lobbied for. It’s very important; but it’s another story to which we’ll come.

* read 22 April 2004 at symposium ‘Science,Art and Knowledge.Practicing Natural History from the Enlightenment to the 21st Century’.

                              _____________________

*Postscript:  click on ’The PEST Anthology’ for the latest additions to the Poetry of Engineering, Science and Technology anthology.

May 3rd, 2009

CP Snow: Only Connect

                                                                                          3 May 2009
Among the enduring controversies about CP Snow’s 1959 ‘Rede’ Lecture (50 years old on 7th May) the one general point of agreement is that it was this lecture which put the phrase ‘The Two Cultures’ into the vernacular, and provoked the still unfinished debate about the science/humanities divide and its consequences.
Or did it? In fact, Snow had already launched the phrase more than two years earlier, as title for a short article in the New Statesman ( 6 October 1956). There are major differences (though much common phraseology) between this article and the subsequent Rede lecture; and yet he still felt the need to re-vamp and further amplify his argument a full four years after it (‘The Two Cultures: A Second Look‘ (1963).
So, as Snow readily conceded, his own ideas and attempts at expressing them were continually gestating over the six or seven years from the New Statesman trailer to the ’Second Look’ epilogue, with the formal ‘lecture’ sandwiched uneasily between. And , although most people agreed that he had homed in on one of the greatest of the post-Darwinian social fissures – the Science/Humanities divide - he had also, critics said , helped to create the red-herrings and ambiguities on which the phoney wars between the cultures have thrived ever since.
So does ‘The Two Cultures’ lecture have any significant locus within the mainstream of the post-Darwin ‘Scientific Revolution’ ? And what were Snow’s real intentions for it?
For the latter, the answer requires some understanding oft he conventions and limitations of the Oxbridge ceremonial lecture style; with its flavour of Senior Common Room and elite insider peer groups. Where else would expressions like ‘literary intellectual’ hold much meaning? And where, outside that environment, would such insider- archaisms possibly be understood ( as ‘scientist’ would)? Snow knew these limitations and, as a professional writer, rather than academic dialectician, felt constrained by them;; there were those in the ‘Rede’ lecture hall who would recognise, only too well, that it was they he had in mind.
Which is why the serious essence of his argument, and the extent of its development over the years to 1963, is better measured between his more direct ‘ conventional’ media statements – New Statesman 1956 and A Second Look 1963 –than by the ‘formal’ lecture alone.
In this context, the function of the short New Statesman preliminary becomes clear. It was an uninhibited but necessary exercise in ‘ground-clearing’ before the architecture of his desired new social order could begin to be approached. His long accumulation of frustration and anger with the ‘ establishment’ elites demanded some cathartic release before any more positive agenda could be engaged. So, uncomplicated by the educational, political and rich/poor themes of the subsequent lecture, his NS article is a single-minded, frontal assault on the ’traditional’ culture, mainly (but not exclusively?) literary. His hostility is focused, not so much on any innate inferiority of the ‘pen’ to the ‘pipette’, (Snow’s own forte was his writing); but rather on the long-standing, conventional elites, still dominating the Oxbridge( and Ivy League) Senates and Councils, and with privileged access to the ear of Government. Between the Senior Common Room at Christ’s and the comparative rough-and-tumble of his Civil Service Commission and ’real world’ scientist recruitment realities, he had had the quintessential ‘gamekeeper/poacher’ conversion experience.
Reminders of the traditionalists’ grindingly slow adjustment to the earlier Industrial Revolution had been all around him at Cambridge. One of their greatest turn-of-the-century, in-house, critics, FM Cornford, had only recently died (1943). His great satire on Cambridge governance (Microcosmographia Academica 1908), enunciating the universal Principle of Unripe Time, had exposed the labyrinthine processes- of ‘caucuses’ and ‘squaring’ – by which the traditionalists defeated or held back, change.
‘ There is only one argument for doing something’ Cornford wrote; ‘ the rest are arguments for doing nothing. The argument for doing something is that it is the right thing to do …but it is at this point that the many arguments for doing nothing are brought in… Together, these arguments suggest that any action which departs from our conventional wisdom must be either wrong; or, if it is right, is a Dangerous Precedent. It follows that NOTHING SHOULD EVER BE DONE FOR THE FIRST TIME.’ And so – devastatingly- on.
Cornford’s book was a dramatic reminder of other, within-memory, fights - for degrees for women, the ‘rationalist’ movement, abandonment of compulsory chapel, etc against the very traditionalists Snow was to target .

 By a nice, mainly forgotten irony, Cornford had married Frances Darwin, daughter of Charles Darwin’s son and biographer Sir Francis Darwin, himself a distinguished Cambridge botanist.
Frances, an award-winning poet and author- contemporary of Snow’s, made a physical and intellectual link back to the great scientist. Allied to the radical, and innovative Cambridge Classics don, this would have been the embodiment of Snow’s ideal – the ‘marriage’ of the best in both the humanities and science : and allied to the championship of social change and progress in education. In stark contrast to the Oxbridge elites of Snow’s perception.
So the New Statesman article goes for the guttural of this ‘traditional’ culture. Unlike the lecture, the attack here is a deeply moral one. This ‘culture’ is decadent, barren of its own ideas yet resistant to the fresh promise of the new; its members tainted by its flirtations with fascism, anti-Semitism, defence of slavery. Snow names names – Pound, Faulkner, Eliot …… Contrast this with the fresher, outward and forward-looking attitudes of the scientists, their confidence, social and humanitarian concerns …..It is their moral, not their mere intellectual, uplift that “ is the greatest enrichment the scientific culture could give us”. These sentiments, so directly expressed, would have risked uproar in the hallowed Rede lecture hall.
And, its psychological purpose served, Snow’s later treatment of the ‘two cultures’ theme becomes progressively less strident and more positive on the benefits of fusion to both.
The ‘Two Cultures’ element of the Rede Lecture itself is relatively even-handed in tone between the ‘cultures’, more befitting the discursive and anecdotal medium, even though the balance of sympathies remains clear.
”The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict art and thought to the existential moment ……. On each side there is some of it which is not entirely baseless. It is all destructive. Much depends on misinterpretations which are dangerous.’
It is only at this point of ‘equilibrium’ between the two that Snow can make his bigger point, lost in many commentaries.” The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures – of two galaxies as far as that goes –ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the break-throughs came.”
Like, for instance, Darwin’s own – since we now know, through the work of Ashton Nichols, Richard Holmes and others, the extent to which 18th and 19th century literature and science fed from each other. This – the ‘creative synergy’ which Koestler talked about and CVN pursues – is what Snow so much wanted, but feared for. “ The chances are there now …. But in a vacuum, as it were, because the ‘cultures’ can’t talk to each other”.
Nor is this just about more poets using the language of ‘refraction’ and ‘polarised light’! “Of course, that isn’t the way science could be any good to art. It has got to be assimilated along with, and as part and parcel of, the whole of our mental experience, and used as naturally as the rest….There is only one way out of this: that is, of course, by rethinking our education”. The evidence seems to suggest that this has not yet been done.
To look for equivalent clarification on the remainder of Snow’s intentions, it seems best to go beyond the rest of the formal Lecture to his own chosen emendations in ‘A Second Look’(1963). The most astonishing of these is the extent to which Snow pursues the moral, social and political reaches of his argument; while so many eyes have been on the more banal arithmetic of ‘How Many Cultures’ ? ( and he does concede he had overlooked at least one possible Third – the Social Sciences, no less!).
The key priority, however, is ‘ applied science’ which is making it possible to remove unnecessary suffering from a billion human lives…The Scientific Revolution is the only method by which most people can gain the primal things – years of life, freedom from hunger, survival for their children… there was no pre-industrial ‘Eden’….” Here, in fact, is what I intended to be the centre of the whole argument. Before I wrote the lecture, I thought of calling it ‘The Rich and the Poor’ and I rather wish I hadn’t changed my mind”.
Paradoxically, this wise and sensitive man was an offspring of both – science and literary- cultures; as, we now know, was Darwin. I think they would have got on well together.

May 3rd, 2009

Whose Rise and Fall …?

Whose Rise and Fall ….?                3 May 2009

In the weeks since we first signalled the forthcoming 50th Anniversary of the ‘Rede’ Lecture (‘CP Snow and the Darwin Legacy’ - 7April 2009)  the juggernaut of licensed condescension seems to have been slowly grinding into gear.

Now, with the occasion almost upon us, the same New Scientist  which brought us’ Why Einstein was Wrong about Relativity’(1 November 2008); and ‘Darwin Was Wrong: Uprooting Darwin’s Tree’(24 January 2009); now brings us ‘The Rise and Fall of a Cultural Legend’ ( 2 May 2009) complete with dominant Humpty Dumpty caricature of a CP Snow egg-head, and a small selection of short vignettes by some current cognoscenti.

Luckily, the wisest of these (Mary Midgely and AC Grayling) seem uneasy with the journal’s neo-tabloid editorial style, and opt for the need to ‘continue Snow’s chasm-bridging’(Midgely) and ‘his point has only become more acute’(Grayling). Mary Midgely closely echoes the themes of the ‘Our Brother Darwin’( 4 February 2009) theme, commenting as we had done, that ‘this kind of narrowness had surely only recently crept into the tradition..’ Bravo!

The more ceremonial marking of the ‘Rede Lecture’ 50th birthday takes place (2 days early) on Tuesday 5th May at the Royal Society for the Arts ( why London?)with Melvyn Bragg officiating. We wish them well and hope that, with all its faults, the real significance of Snow’s message is recognised – which requires more than a cursory re-reading of the ‘lecture’ itself; it makes its real points only in the fuller context of the six/seven years of gestation of his theme between  ‘Two Cultures’ (New Statesman October 1956), and  ‘A Second Look’ (1963).

Which is why, as a number of you have suggested, I am also posting some of my more detailed notes on the events and ideas which seem to have contributed to the gestation of Snow’s concerns; and which place the ‘Two Cultures’ firmly within the ‘Darwin Legacy’.

On the day of the London ‘Rede’ retrospective I will be in Sheffield to hear Ruth Padel read from her ‘Darwin: A Life in Poems’ as part of the university’s ‘Arts/Science Encounters’. As my ‘post’ (‘CP Snow: Only Connect’) suggests, there are some special reasons why Snow might have preferred to be in Sheffield , rather than London, too!

April 7th, 2009

How Many Cultures? CP Snow and the Darwin Legacy

2009 – The Year of Magical Anniversaries

In this heady year of Darwinian anniversaries – bicentenary of his birth, 150th birthday of The Origin of Species – we may need a quiet reminder that soon, on Thursday 7th May , we also mark the 50th anniversary of CP Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture in Cambridge.


If nothing else, this was the occasion which put the phrase ‘The Two Cultures’ firmly on the agenda and provoked an –unfinished and unresolved – debate about the ‘Arts/Science’ divide and its consequences.

 

 
There is no suggestion that this event ranks with the momentous significance of Darwin’s life and achievement. It was simply Snow’s ( for the time) unusual career mix of ex -research scientist, successful novelist and high-ranking Civil Servant which gave him the prestigious Rede Lecture platform for his ideas; but even these credentials were questioned as ‘bogus’ by his severest critics (like his famous literary- critic adversary, FR Leavis)  in the controversy which followed.
So what was the ‘Two Cultures’ connection with the mainstream of Darwin’s legacy? And why, given the nature of CVN’s own inter-disciplinary mission, do we propose to raise a glass in Snow’s honour on May 7th?

 

 
Snow himself had felt obliged to re-visit some key points of his lecture four years later (‘The Two Cultures: a Second Look’ 1963). Since his ‘update’ includes the shattering possibility that the ‘Two’ cultures might well have been ‘Three’ or more, we can perhaps best capture some firm ground for his views by a brief synopsis of his own 1963 retrospective ‘critique’ of what he had said in 1959:

Oddly, in spite of the universality of the ‘Two Cultures’ phrase, it remains better not to assume that everyone entering this debate has read what Snow actually said; this seems to be particularly true of many of the post-modern tweedle-dums and tweedle-dees who, according to Eliane Glaser (New Humanist, March/April 2009), were still fighting the ‘Science/Humanities Wars ‘ in the 1990s;  and, for all I know  ’fought till six and then had dinner’. Snow said that:-

1    In advanced Western society ( including the USA) we have lost even the          pretence of a ‘common culture’. The people we educate ‘with the greatest intensity’ can no longer communicate with each other ‘ on the plain of their major intellectual concern’.

2    This is serious for our ‘creative’,’intellectual’ and, above all, our ‘normal’ lives.

3    I gave my most pointed example in the shape of the two groups representing what I have christened ‘ The Two Cultures’

     One of these ‘contained the Scientists, whose weight, achievement and influence did not need stressing’. The other contained the Literary Intellectuals: ‘they do not take decisions… but they represent ,vocalise, and to some extent shape and predict the mood of the non-scientific culture’.

4    The chief means (of change) open to us is education – mainly in primary and secondary schools, but also in colleges and universities.

5    There were questions about my word ‘Culture’; ‘ I want to repeat what was intended to be my main message – that neither the ’scientific’ system of mental development, nor the ‘traditional’, is alone adequate for our potentialities … or for the world we ought to begin to live in …’.

6    There were questions about the number ‘two’. Suggestions ranged from three to infinity, and there are certainly many ‘sub-cultures’. But ‘two’ brought out the key dichotomies.
     However …’ I had been slow to observe what, according to our formulae, is becoming something like a Third Culture- Intellectual persons from a variety of fields – social history, sociology, demography, political science, economics and psychology etc – all concerned with how human beings are living or have lived. Such an emerging ‘culture’, in order to do its job, has to be on speaking terms with the Scientific one…. and some social historians already face towards the Literary Intellectual one. This may help towards solving the problem, but we’re not there yet …..

7    But it is at this point in his ‘Second Look’ that Snow gets to the heart of the matter of his intentions and his wider social motives. It puts all the pedantic arithmetic of ‘How Many Cultures’ in its proper perspective. He argues:-
        It is applied science which is making it possible to remove unnecessary suffering from a billion human lives.
       Here, in fact, is what I intended to be the centre of the whole argument. Before I wrote the lecture, I thought of calling it ‘The Rich and the Poor’ and I rather wish I hadn’t changed my mind.
     The Scientific Revolution is the only method by which most people can gain the primal things ( years of life, freedom from hunger, survival for their children …)
     There was no pre- Industrial ‘Eden’ ….

     Escaping the first dangers of applied science (eg nuclear war) is one thing. Doing the simple and manifest good which applied science has put in our power is another, more difficult, more demanding of human qualities, and in the doing , more enriching to us all -from whatever ‘culture’.

    That is why we must learn to understand and communicate with each other across these cultures; and affect the way men think of themselves more profoundly ‘than any scientific advance since Darwin’s…’
    The need runs both ways between and within the ‘cultures’. In the face of the industrial revolution not all ‘literary intellectuals’ were Luddites; and ‘pure scientists and engineers also often totally misunderstand each other’ ……..and so on.


This is why, a hundred years after ‘The Origin of Species’  CP Snow  -like Darwin a child of both cultures -(read Ashton Nichols ‘Romantic Natural Histories’ again),  chose to wrestle with the real Luddites – of whatever culture- still obstructing the educational and social paths to fulfilment of Darwin’s ‘All Cultures’ legacy.  And key to that was, in Snow’s time, to open up the predominantly OxBridge and Ivy-League traditional elites, still with great influence on Government and any futures of educational policy.


    At which point, let me reveal yet another of this year’s Magical Anniversaries, less-known but of happy consequence for all we are discussing.
It falls mid-way (1909) between ‘The Origin of Species and ‘The Two Cultures’ .


It is the happy occasion of the marriage of a young (classics) lecturer at Cambridge, to an aspiring poetess.( more ‘literary intellectuals’, do I hear? )….Except that the young don became a fearless fighter for educational change, campaigned vigorously for degrees for women, co-founded the rationalist ‘Heretics’; and wrote a devastating satire on the way innovation is quietly subverted in organisations; so apposite, that I once transcribed it for the young corporate executive. Snow undoubtedly knew it, and appreciated first hand what the Establishment difficulties might be for an eventual ‘Two Cultures’ cure.
    The young don was Francis Cornford.  His book ‘Microcosmographia Academica’ ( or, less formidably,’ The Principle of Unripe Time ’(CUP 2009). And his bride?  None other than Frances Crofts Darwin , daughter of Darwin’s son and biographer, Sir Francis Darwin, himself a considerable botanist.

What would I not give to have overheard their family chats on the ‘two cultures phenomenon!
 Frances became a very successful poet, and won the Queen’s Medal for Poetry in 1959. We have already commented on Ruth Padel, our contemporary poet and writer, who is a great, great grand-daughter of Darwin and author of the brilliantly moving ‘Darwin: a Life In Poems’.


     I have no doubts about where Charles Darwin’s sympathies would have been in this debate. He would have been with Snow all the way on the obvious need to maintain healthy and open dialogue between scientists and all in the so-called ‘humanities’. He would have barely understood what idiocy could separate them and require him to classify himself as the one or the other.

 

And both, Snow and Darwin, would have applauded the invigorating ‘Encounters’ between the two currently taking place at Sheffield University.
 Which is why I hope to be in Sheffield, on May 5th, to hear Ruth Padel read from her work; and the historian, Mark Greengrass talk about pre-modern attitudes to the arts and sciences before the fences were built.
 And I’ll raise a grateful glass to Darwin, Snow and the Cornfords to mark this special Year of Magical Anniversaries!
Ralph Windle

March 16th, 2009

Creative Break-Through at Sheffield University


Just Started!  A series of sixteen ‘ARTS-SCIENCE ENCOUNTERS’ which will be putting Sheffield University  firmly on the cross-disciplinary map by mid –year.

Having had the privilege of discussing it with its co-ordinator Rachel Falconer, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University, I strongly recommend that you go to http://www.shef.ac.uk/english/arts-science ; and since all events are open to the public, that you try to navigate your diaries through to mid-June so as to take in one or more of some very exciting planned events.

For the programme promises precisely the explosive mix of cross-disciplinary ideas for which CVN pleads: speakers from more than twenty disciplines – including Physics, Literature, Design, Chemistry, Music, Law, the Neurosciences; presented by both internal and external specialists, researchers and performers of the quality of Ruth Padel ( poet, novelist and author of ‘Darwin – A Life in Poems); science-writer /biographer Richard Holmes ( ‘ The Age of Wonder’); systems-biologist Denis Noble( ‘ The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome’). And many others.

I certainly plan to be at several of these ‘Encounters’ and will have much more to say about them -and what might follow – in due course. It will not surprise you to learn that the sessions on ‘Music, Bird-Song and Brain-Science’ and ‘Darwin, Creativity and Truth’ are among my personal choices!

This series of events is dedicated, as a celebration of an exceptional life, to the late Jeremy Knowles who, after Oxford, became the long-term Amory Houghton Professor of chemistry and bio-chemistry at Harvard, and a distinguished researcher. Since he was also an accomplished pianist, organist and devotee of Bach, it comes as no surprise to CVN that his niece and god-daughter (Rachel Falconer) should have devised these ‘Encounters’, with her colleagues across the faculties, as an appropriate way to honour him. In so doing they also boost the Arts/Science agenda.

For the moment I will simply say how welcome this initiative is, and wish it deserved success.

February 27th, 2009

Darwin - Right or Wrong?

Although two weeks later, it was good to see Richard Dawkins and other eminent scientists picking up the theme of our ‘Our brother, Darwin’ post (below, February 4 ) in an angry letter to ‘New Scientist’.

 

“ What on earth were you thinking when you produced a garish cover proclaiming that “Darwin was wrong” (24 January)?
First, it’s false, and second, it’s inflammatory. And, as you surely know, many readers will interpret the cover not as being about Darwin, the historical figure, but about evolution.
Nothing in the article showed that the concept of the tree of life is unsound; only that it is more complicated than was realised before the advent of molecular genetics. It is still true that all of life arose from “a few forms or… one”, as Darwin concluded in The Origin of Species. It is still true that it diversified by descent with modification via natural selection and other factors.
Of course there’s a tree; it’s just more of a banyan than an oak at its single-celled-organism base. The problem of horizontal gene-transfer in most non-bacterial species is not serious enough to obscure the branches we find by sequencing their DNA.

 
(Daniel Dennett, Medford, Massachusetts, US , Jerry Coyne, Chicago, Illinois, US , Richard Dawkins, Oxford, UK and Paul Myers, Morris, Minnesota, US Letters . New Scientist.18 Feb )

All these points were made in our blog; but then the writers understandably move to the political (creationist/evolutionist) implications of New Scientist’s gaffe.

“The accompanying editorial makes it clear that you knew perfectly well that your cover was handing the creationists a golden opportunity to mislead school boards, students and the general public about the status of evolutionary biology. Indeed, within hours of publication members of the Texas State Board of Education were citing the article as evidence that teachers needed to teach creationist-inspired “weaknesses of evolution”, claiming: “Darwin’s tree of life is wrong”.


You have made a lot of extra, unpleasant work for the scientists whose work you should be explaining to the general public. We all now have to try to correct all the misapprehensions your cover has engendered.”

 

Their intervention is very welcome; but as I point out in a letter of my own to the Editor, they omit one crucial element of the CVN criticism, notably “ The extent to which cross-disciplinary ideas, metaphors, similes can drive the basic processes of hypothesis, experimentation and discovery; and it is these which were central to Darwin’s own approach and achievement…..Uproot Darwin’s Tree – his acknowledged ‘ simile ‘- and you destroy not only the critical element of his method, but also the wider processes behind significant learning and discovery; what Koestler, in ‘The Act of Creation’ called ‘creative synthesis’.
I was delighted to have in a positive reaction to ‘Our brother, Darwin’ from Ashley Nichols, of Dickinson College in the USA  whom I mentioned there. I want to revert again to Ashley’s work on another occasion. In the meantime, if it isn’t already on your reading list, note his New Riverside Edition‘Romantic Natural  Histories( Houghton Mifflin 2004) which brings alive the exciting literary and natural science context in which Darwin lived and thrived.