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.