Artwork,

Some pieces commissioned for research projects, some of my own.

I sometimes do my own art. I’ve been drawing since I was a child, I drew comics in high school, and when I was a grad student, I took a course from an art school. I’ve also been privileged to work with extraordinary artists like Andrey Atuchin, Raul Martin, and Julius Cstonyi. They’re far more skilled than me, but I’d like to think years doing art and illustration taught me a few things about the craft and so, like a movie director knows how to get the most out of his actors, I know how to get the most out of them. I’m biased, but the pieces I’ve commissioned are among my very favorite works of scientific art.

For the longest time, I saw an artistic side as incompatible with serious science. Science, I thought, was all about rigid and formal writing. It was huge volumes of data and rigorous mathematical analysis. It was complex graphs, computer code, and so on. Being a scientist required doing science to the exclusion of other things. Scientists were, well, all science. I don’t know where I picked this idea up. I think it has to do with the fact that there’s lots of posturing in academia — you’re constantly auditioning for grad school, a postdoc, a job, a promotion. So people try to present themselves as serious academics and serious people, it becomes performative. Instead of just being scientists, it’s like they’re cosplaying the stereotypical scientist… and in their mind, scientists just do science.

Yet, it’s likely that doing art helps with being a scientist. Historically, great scientists often had creative pursuits. Einstein had his violin, Oppenheimer wrote poetry, Feynman had his drawings and his bongos but perhaps more importantly his writing, Darwin was as much a writer as he was a scientist; Galileo was arguably the first popular science writer. That may be because science is a creative pursuit, one that requires imagining solutions to problems no one else has thought of, and that exercising your creative faculties through music, writing, acting, poetry lets you see and imagine different possibilities, it develops imagination. So arguably, if you’re truly serious about science, you need to be doing something creative. These days I tell my students to keep their creative pursuits— keep drawing, acting, dancing, writing. It makes your science, and your life, richer. Studying ancient rock art in Africa, a thought struck me — Homo sapiens was far and away the most talented artist of all the human species, and that may help explain why we survived, and the others went extinct.