• New Curriculum Designed to Unite Art and Science

  "Yet a few scholars of thick dermis and pep-rally vigor believe that the cultural chasm can be bridged and the sciences and the humanities united into a powerful new discipline that would apply the strengths of both mindsets, the quantitative and qualitative, to a wide array of problems. Among the most ambitious of these exercises in fusion thinking is a program under development at Binghamton University in New York called the New Humanities Initiative.
  
  Jointly conceived by David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a professor of English, the program is intended to build on some of the themes explored in Dr. Wilson?s evolutionary studies program, which has proved enormously popular with science and nonscience majors alike, and which he describes in the recently published ?Evolution for Everybody.? In Dr. Wilson?s view, evolutionary biology is a discipline that, to be done right, demands a crossover approach, the capacity to think in narrative and abstract terms simultaneously, so why not use it as a template for emulsifying the two cultures generally? " (NYTimes.com)

  tags: humanities, science, biology, grue

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