Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science

David Sloan Wil­son on design­ing the Human­i­ties Ini­tia­tive, a course con­ceived to cross the cul­tural chasm between the sci­ences and the human­i­ties, bring­ing together the strengths of both mind­sets to issues in evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy, and to avoid roman­ti­ciz­ing sci­ence or pre­sent­ing it as the ulti­mate arbiter of meaning:

You can study music, dance, nar­ra­tive sto­ry­telling and art­mak­ing sci­en­tif­i­cally, and you can con­clude that yes, they’re deeply bio­log­i­cally dri­ven, they’re essen­tial to our species, but there would still be some­thing miss­ing, and that thing is an appre­ci­a­tion for the work itself, a true under­stand­ing of its mean­ing in its cul­ture and context.