National History Museum vs. Science Museum vs.
Museum of Art
Serendipity plays a big part in the writing of these blogs.
Today is a good example of that. My husband does computer repair for a lovely
woman named Shirley C. Strum. Dr.Strum is an expert in olive baboons and
spends part of every year in Africa studying them. She is Professor of
Anthropology and Professor of the Graduate Division, School of Social Sciences
at UCSD and Executive Director of the Uaso Ngiro Baboon Project in Kenya. Last year her second popular book came out, Echoes
of Our Origins: Baboons, Human, and Nature. She gave us a copy of the latest
book and I found it fascinating. I am not going to go into any details about it
except to say that Dr.Strum is a creative, out of the box thinker, rigorous in
her research and quite brilliant. I highly recommend the book.
The question this book made me ask in its latter chapters:
what is the difference between Natural History and Science? I am buried deep in
the visual arts and it had simply never occurred to me to think about this. Although
I have visited the San Diego Natural History Museum and the San Diego Science
Museum and written numerous stories about both in the past, I never really
thought about why Natural History was just not part of Science and vice versa. Why
were there two buildings to house these subjects?
This was an easy Google fix: “Natural history is
the observational study of organisms, environments, and natural objects in
their natural environment, often focusing on description, classification, and
"what" is happening. Natural science is the systematic,
experimental study of the physical world, aimed at discovering general,
reproducible laws through testing and analysis. This includes biology, earth
science, atmospheric sciences, .oceanography, planetary science, chemistry, physics
and astronomy.” In other words, one is observing, the other is experimenting. Of
course, you need both, but I did not know the relationship has been rather a
rocky one because of human egos.
As an artist married to a physicist, you would have thought
this topic had come up. I know that the arts are not just storytellers,
recorders of events, emotions, trends and topics. The arts are harbingers and
thus are making hypotheses about
the future. One is not better than the other. They live in harmony, just as he
and I do.
In 2014, the SDVAN project The
DNA of Creativity gave four grants for art and science
projects. The most relevant to this
article are probably Urban
Succession (preserving wildlife in urban
settings through artist constructed habitats)and Sea Changes: Act (a
project featuring climate change, plastic pollution, acid seas,
and dwindling fish populations and offering emotional motivation to create
changes in these areas affecting our oceans ). But all four projects were
tasking the artist involved not to just be story tellers of scientific experiments,
but encouraged artists to be creatively involved in the same way that scientist
were innovative. The other two projects were as equally guided to this end. SD View Art Now (a
smart phone app to locate local arts events near you) and PAMM - PolyAesthetic
Mapping: The Muses (ways to think
about assessment criteria and the collaborations that artists and scientist might
experience).
I write about all of this as Dr. Strum’s book left a
lasting impression that there are things we can and should be doing to
determine our evolution. And when I say “our” I mean the entire world. How
do we co-exist, not dominate. How is there a place for experimental behavior
which might carry us forward, but also an imperative for order, compassion and
trust that stabilizes our civilization?
