Science
The creative element
Bernard Dixon
There is no "profound difference between the arts and sciences in regard to the uniqueness of their creations," writes a distinguished biologist, Gunther Stent, in Scientific American. It is a fallacy to suppose (he argues) that whereas the work of a Shakespeare or a Picasso is unique, the discoveries of an Einstein or a Darwin would, in time, have been made by other scientists. Stent has been staggered to find that many of his friends and colleagues hold such "obviously false" views about a supposed distinction between art and science, and has written a spirited paper in an attempt to put everyone right.
The starting point of, and main target for, Stent's critique was a review by another biologist, Erwin Chargaff, of The Double Helix, the book in which James Watson described how he and Francis Crick discovered the helical structure of DNA, the hereditary material in living cells. In the course of his review Chargaff argued that " Timon of Athens could not have been written, ' Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon ' not have been painted, had Shakespeare and Picasso not existed." With very few exceptions, he said, "it is not the men that make science it is the science that makes men. What A does today, B or C or D could surely do tomorrow." In other words,
while the artist uses imaginative gifts to present his own unique vision of the world, the scientist (however talented) is merely an explorer of external reality, describing matter, forces and natural laws as they actually exist. Whereas great art is unique to its creator, material things and phenomena — such as the DNA helix — are simply waiting to be discovered. If Nobel prizewinners Watson and Crick hadn't described the helix, someone else would have done so.
Stent's onslaught on this viewpoint is a mixture of the telling and the trivial. He is, for example, on strong ground when he emphasises that art, like science, often rests on tradition. In Timon, Shakespeare reworked the story he had read in William Painter's collection of classic tales, The Palace of Pleasure, published forty years earlier, and Painter in turn had used as his sources Plutarch and Lucian. By stressing this organic element in both art and science, Stent provides a useful corrective for those who believe in a totally rigid distinction between the two activities. On the other hand, it is scarcely useful to observe that the precise word sequence of Crick and Watson's now classic paper on DNA is as unique to them as that of Timon is unique to Shakespeare. What emerges, in fact, is Stent's insistence that just as other dramatists might have brought us the same human insights as did Shakespeare in Timon, but would not have done so "in quite the same exquisite way," so other scientists would not have discovered the DNA helix in precisely the same manner as Crick and Watson.
There is persuasive eloquence in Stent's thesis but not, alas, total conviction. Above all, his case falters in not distinguishing sufficiently the content of scientific discovery from the manner of its making. Undoubtedly there is a personal, creative element in great science akin to that of the artist, with both imagination and the intellect playing vital roles. But the end result, however mysterious or elegant — and however incomplete or premature — is a description of part of the natural world as it really is. That's why, while we still turn to the literature of centuries back for its human insights and continued relevance, no one today reads even such master-works as Newton's Principia to learn about celestial mechanics, or Darwin's Origin of Species to learn about evolution.
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