About two weeks ago I went to Politics and Prose for a great talk by the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, who was in DC promoting his new book, Angels and Ages, a book of essays about Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. The words and actions of these two influential men - some would call them secular saints - still reverberate today. And coincidentally, they were also born just hours apart, on the same day: February 12, 1809.
Gopnik explicitly said that he did not intend to suss out any mystical or astrological significance to the shared birthday: it's a coincidence, and nothing more. But as he explains in his book,
The shared date of their birth is, obviously, "merely" a coincidence, what historians like to call an "intriguing coincidence." But coincidence is the vernacular of history, the slang of memory - the first strong pattern where we begin to search for more subtle ones. Like the simultaneous deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, 1826, the accidental patterns of birth and death point to other patterns of coincidence in bigger things.
When a member of the audience asked if Gopnik would have written the book, had the two great men not shared a birthday, Gopnik laughed and said he would - but it would obviously not have been the same book. The "mere" coincidence of birth is the hook on which Gopnik hangs the entwined lives of his heroes, the starting point for his thoughtful and insightful foray into modernity. That's what a wonderful writer like Gopnik can weave through the warp of coincidence.
Over at SEED's newly redesigned website, I've written a little piece about art, science, and common patterns. Basically, I think that good art prompts the viewer to find meaningful connections between things that seem unrelated, to draw parallels that previously went unnoticed. Art can be a springboard to insight. Science, which can so easily become insular and near-sighted, needs that springboard, even if - like a shared birthday - it's just a hook to get the story started.
It's worth noting that Darwin was a great scientist precisely because he could make meticulous, minute observations of a single species - he wrote a whole book about earthworm digestion, for heaven's sake! - while also seeing the grand, universal, far-reaching forces that shape finch beaks, beetle shells, poodles and pigeons. It's not easy to make those linkages, in history or in science; sometimes art, literature, or music can give the roving mind a nudge in the right direction. As Gopnik notes in his book, "there is no struggle between science and art": both are ways of understanding the world, and their strengths are complementary. That's what this blog is about - when it's not about cephalopods, zombies and Pi Day.
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I enjoy Gopnik's writings; lucky you to get to hear him speak! Thanks for the review.
Congrats! Can't wait to read your piece! Took a quick look and it looks lovely.
That's why your blog kicks fucking ass!
... "there is no struggle between science and art" ...
Run them both through the same funding agency, then see how they relate...
First off, art and science aren't generally funded by the same agency, because different metrics are appropriate for selecting the best projects to fund. Second, while at a macro level there is only so much funding to go around, that practical challenge is hardly an indication that the *fields* of science and art are fundamentally in conflict.
There's definitely a connection between art and science. Archeologists even go around looking for 'arty-facts' :D
Great post. But I'm still going to quibble with you a bit (hey -- it would be boring otherwise, right? :-) ) I'm with you on the point that art serves an important purpose as a springboard to insight (great phrase) and that's a much-needed function for scientists, who can be pretty myopic.
But I'm not convinced it's valid to make the connection between art -- which has intention and authorship behind it -- and random chance events, like the Darwin-Lincoln birthday overlap. A piece of art that sparks an otherwise unforeseen connection in the mind of the viewer (be s/he a scientist or not) is the product of an intentional act on the part of the artist who created the work. Not that the artist deserves credit for the inspiration/insight, but there is, at the heart of it, non-arbitrary human intent.
That's not what's going on with the Lincoln-Darwin birthday coincidence. That's a truly random event, that has nothing human driving it. So to put it in the same category as connection-inspiring artwork isn't really fair. In fact, it could make somebody start asking why we need artwork to inspire connections in the minds of viewers -- aren't there enough random coincidences in the world to supply all the inspiration we need?
(And I won't even get started on the differences between truly random events -- i.e., birthday overlaps -- and seemingly random coincidences that are in fact due to deep scientific connections.)
Incisive little posts like these are why Bioephemera is so damned high on my reading list. You continue to make this generalist very happy. Thanks.
Colin - very good points. First off, I didn't mean to imply that coincidences like a shared birthday are equivalent to those commonalities in nature which are based on natural laws, like fractal patterns or convergent evolution or whatnot (although your point about the counterintuitive statistics of shared birthdays is precisely why I think "coincidence" always bears closer examining - it depends on your perspective, doesn't it?) If I did imply that the two were equivalent, I apologize. It's a bit more complex than that - what I'm talking about here are initial observations and what you then do with them.
In his book, Gopnik uses the birthday coincidence as the hook for a work of literature which in turn highlights certain larger themes. I'm arguing in this post that art (in this case a book, or literary art) can use the raw material of coincidence to foster insight in the reader, and that this is an intriguing parallel to how Christopher's painting in the SEED piece used similar natural patterns to foster insight in the viewer. In both cases authorial intent is interposed between the observation and the viewer, to transform observations or events which might otherwise seem unrelated into a meaningful and intriguing line of thought.
In the case of Christopher's piece, the similarity between neurons and antlers turns out to not be "merely coincidental," but has to do with the rules governing growth in biological systems. But that isn't immediately apparent, is it? When you begin making observations, you don't know if any commonalities you observe are caused by random chance, or not.
Anyway, I thought it was a neat connection given that I had written the SEED piece just prior to Gopnik's reading. And while I'd like to call that timing another evocative coincidence, it's much more likely that I just had convergent patterns and connections on the brain. :) Hope this clarifies.