National History Museum vs. Science Museum vs. Museum of Art

 

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?