About

Ralph Windle’s Blog on Science & The Arts

is about some big, interconnected issues:-

The long-running Arts / Science / Two cultures Debate. Why the old clichés have to STOP...

How Creative Synthesis - the bringing together of separated (Arts/Science?) modes of thought is now top-priority for Innovation...

About Ralph Windle

At the Arts ⁄ Science Interface

February 24th, 2010

ARTS/SCIENCE ‘ENCOUNTERS’: a Review

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

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….

February 24th, 2010

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the TRIPLE KIND

As promised, I have now posted a shorter version (above) of my Review of Sheffield University’s 2009 Arts/Science ‘ Encounters’ programme. The full Review, with a Foreword by Professor Rachel Falconer, is at :

 http://www.shef.ac.uk/english/arts-science/2009/review

The Review includes ( II The World About Us; and III Responses) a brief but necessary tour d’horizon of the uneasy gestation,since the year 2000, of the UK’s approach to the supposed arts/science divide. Long a topic for  abstract debate, the pressing realities of climate change, threatened economic melt-down, and the challenge of global, real-time communication have whetted appetites for freer flows of ideas, creativity and innovation; not least, between our ‘artistic’ and ‘scientific’ elites. I was asked to put this synopsis on record.

Subsequently ( 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 eloquent practitioners from the arts and sciences; but to have involved, as demanding 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) ‘Encounters’ series; and – given the implications for change already clear from this first  experience ( for potential research, approaches to school and undergraduate teaching,  internal faculty and external community relations among them ) - I conclude that ‘minds should now begin to refocus on some of the bigger, longer-term, strategic implications of this success’,   both locally and nationally.

Ralph  Windle

February 2010

December 10th, 2009

ARTSCIENCE: first look-ahead to 2010

10 December 2009

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.

February 4th, 2009

Our Brother, Darwin

Stimulated by excessive hype, and recently re-cycled into political controversy by the American religious right, the Charles Darwin bicentenary season rolls on.

This quiet, caring genius and man of great principle would be amazed, and embarrassed, at much that is still being imputed to his name, and the specious claims on, or against, his achievement, still being made by contending cabals.

So we think it is time for CVN to throw its own cap into the ring and claim, unequivocally on all the evidence, that Charles Darwin was and remains the quintessential champion of our own cause –  the need for a full-blooded interaction between the arts and sciences, as a prime, necessary stimulus to creative thought, sustained innovation and the progress of knowledge. We honour him as our inspiration and intellectual  forebear.

Darwin was a naturalist first, much stimulated ( he tells us in his autobiography) by a youthful interest in poetry and its exciting contemporary links ( Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats) to the appeal of natural landscape and related sciences.

In much the most perceptive and non-hyperbolic assessment I have read ( by Ashton Nichols: April 2004, as part of the symposium ‘Science, Art and Knowledge: Practising Natural History from the Enlightenment to the 21st Century’) he writes: “ We often assume that Charles Darwin announced a new era in human understanding of the natural world with the publication of On The Origin of Species (1859). In fact, Darwin’s theory was the culmination of decades of scientific speculation about the connections between human beings and non-human nature. Darwin provided a systematic explanation for ideas that had been developing over several centuries. These ideas were reflected not only in the work of natural scientists, philosophers and theologians, but also in the images and ideas of poets, novelists and visual artists.”

This exciting movement of ideas was in both directions. The supposed incorrigible romantic, William Wordsworth, was corresponding with Humphry Davy as the latter made his significant chemical discoveries: electrolysis, magnesium, nitrogen, nitrous oxide (laughing gas, which he tried out on Coleridge). Davy himself was writing and publishing lyric poetry.

Coleridge was an assiduous attender of physiology lectures in London ( ‘ To increase my stock of metaphors’ he said); while Shelley experimented with chemicals and ‘electrical machines’ in his Oxford rooms. Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, combined professional ‘natural history’ with poetry based, like Wordsworth’s, on meticulous ‘scientific’ observation of plants,insects and other natural phenomena.

The extent to which cross-disciplinary ideas, metaphors, similes can drive the basic processes of hypothesis, experimentation and discovery (“ Every brilliant experiment, like every great work of art, starts with an act of imagination” – CVN homepage) was central to Darwin’s approach and achievement. Yet, 150 years on, it remains ignored or poorly understood by many of our arts, science bureaucracies, funding agencies and professional bodies ( see ‘Innovation Without Change’ below); and, apparently, by one of our most visible and enterprising scientific weeklies – NEW SCIENTIST.

How else are we to rationalise its recent ( 24 January 2009) tabloid-style Cover Headline – ‘DARWIN WAS WRONG - cutting down the tree of life’; picked up again at the beginning of a 6-page article ( by Graham Lawton) – ‘UPROOTING DARWIN’S TREE’.

There seems to be nothing in all 6 pages to justify or explain this gratuitous, sensational tone.The article supplies a brief synopsis of some expected supplements to Darwin’s (150 year old)’ Origins’, made possible by more recent developments in DNA and HGT (horizontal gene transfer) etc, all more seriously reviewed elsewhere. Yet clearly the article’s ‘lead in’ –“one of the iconic concepts of evolution has turned out to be a figment of our imagination”- suggests the author’s failure to note and understand what Darwin himself is quoted as saying, more cautiously and accurately, 2 pages later.” The affinities of all beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth”. Most of New Scientist’s interviewees seem to agree and understand better the difference between a ‘simile’ and a ‘figment of our imagination’.

In fact, Ashton Nichols (ibid*) understands Darwin’s science, and his meticulous use of language, in a much more incisive way. “ The manuscript draft of the title page of his master-work, which he sent to Lyell on 28th March 1859, reads “ – An abstract of an Essay on the Origin of Species and Varieties Through Natural Selection …”; but “ in the final version of the published work, Darwin omitted the phrase “ and Varieties” – “ suggesting he was not willing to commit to a precise connection between species and varieties”. This is the distinction still under discussion – as Darwin anticipated 150 years ago.

We are lucky to have an insightful, contemporary view from the current radio series ‘Darwin, My Ancestor’ presented by poet and writer Ruth Padel ( Darwin was her great,great grandfather).It is again his ‘sense of wonder’ and ‘imagination’ in childhood which she sees as the impetus for his scientific achievement; his meticulous interest in small, undistinguished organisms; and his respect for the pigeon-fancier and grower in enhancing his emerging ideas.Ruth’s own ‘Tigers in Red Weather’ (Abacus 2005) suggests that a keen eye, sympathetic imagination, and ability to write remain happy components of Darwin’s legacy.

Ralph Windle

 

*(Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.
September 2005)