Art and Science

?Art and Science?

I?m worried about science. Ever since I wrote my screed the other day (on this blog) on the grand ?virus? pseudo-explanation for thebee die-out, my normal worry-level about what is happening to science has reached a kind of fever pitch. I?m anEnglish-teacher now, but I grew up as a science and math geek. (Yes, like every science kid, I have a ?blowup the place? story?my pals Freddy, Warren,and I took out a wall of their garage with a particularly elegant chemistryexperiment one afternoon). If you comeinto my house on any random day, you are likely to find me reading an articlein Science or watching some geekyscience-show on tv. So when I say I?mworried about science, I mean that from the pov of a science-lover. I?m worried that theRush-to-Scientific-Explanation turns science into alchemy. Bogus. Hyperbolic. Ultimately false or,at least, misleading. Next step, comes discrediting, disbelief. For every scientist making someunsubstantiated godlike pronouncement about the ?evolutionary cause of this orthat,? there?s another school district banning evolution from its textbooks asungodly. I'm not suggesting causality (that bad science leads to fundamentalism) only two sides of a cultural coin.

Dan Levitin, in myfav book of the moment (This Is YourBrain On Music), writes ?What artists and scientists have in common is theability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretationof the products of our work.? Dreamon! So much science now is funded in away that makes it necessary to move from experiment and interpretation topronouncement. So you?re not studyingone genetic mutation in mice; you are curing prostate cancer. (A few missing steps, well, no matter . ..) Partly, this is a matter of therapidity of scientific change in the last three decades. Because of vast computational capacities andspeeds, we?ve sequenced the genome and know more about neural networks and manyother things than we ever have before. But that then puts pressure on all science to be speedy. Snap! Snap! Snap! You?re not doing anexperiment?interpretation and reinterpretation, like art?you are solving,curing, creating, explaining everything. Less art than religion. That?sinteresting, because it is the humanities that used to be the explanatorycure-all. Now, humanists have become far more specific, localized, cautious, careful. Not so many Grand Theories. We take into account regional, ethnic,racial, gender, religious, national, and other differences when we maketheories. Micro histories. Circumspection. And we are cautious about ourgeneralizations, put them out there for dialogue and critique, interpretationand reinterpretation. Rarely dohumanistic theories make NY Times headlines. There?s not a category ?Humanities? in the NY Times, and the weekly BookReview gets slimmer every week. Hmmm,considering what?s happening to science, now that it has the status of MediaDarling, maybe that?s a good thing. TheHumanities may be the indy-film, alt-rock, small press, Slow Food alternative to thisgeneration?s version of multimedia, multimedia, corporate BIG SCIENCE. The science-gal part of me weeps. (Excuse me while I go drown my sorrows by playing with my chemistry set. . .)