WHERE SCIENCE MEETS ART

A lecture by Peter Forbes, winner of the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing

Where is the natural meeting ground between science and art? Poet and journalist Peter Forbes, winner of the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing for his book Dazzled and Deceived, argues the case for biology in the latest talk in Warwick's Distinguished Lecture Series.

“The mystery of form is one of nature’s deepest secrets,” says Peter Forbes at the opening of his talk. “It’s only in the last 30 years that we’ve come closer to deciphering it.”

As a person who has a foot in both the art and science camps - being both a science writer and a poetry critic - Peter Forbes explained why he thinks biology is on a par with art. “Although physics is an awesome achievement, it led to the bomb, and after Hiroshima many physicists actually left the discipline for biology. It’s biology that’s the cornupcopia of science that could rival Shakespeare, if we must set the two against each other.”

For Forbes, morphology - the art and science of form and pattern - is the most obvious meeting ground between science and art. “Why is it we don’t know more about this meeting ground where the lion of science lies down with the lion of art?” he asks. The reason is relative neglect. The triumphs of Western science since the 17th century, such as Newton’s Law of Gravitation, the atomic theory and particle mechanics, have been triumphs of reductionism, he believes. Form doesn’t really come into these discoveries.

On the contrary, form is a synthetic activity, “building rather than reducing to fundamental particles”. The exception is Darwin, who talked of "endless forms most beautiful". However, he knew nothing of the processes that created form. His natural selection is a sieve, not a generator of possible forms. Science in the three and a half centuries since its inception has pursued the material cause with the neglect of form.

In 1953 two scientists rushed into a pub one morning and shouted that they’d discovered the secret of life. What they had actually discovered - DNA structure - was one of the material causes of life, not the formal or efficient cause, which still awaited discovery. DNA structure and genetic code didn’t tell us what we need to know about the creation of biological form. If every cell contains the entire complement of DNA why do some cells only become eye cells or liver cells for example? For two and a half billion years, life consisted only of single-cell creatures. We don’t know why they then came together to form organisms.

Albrecht Dürer noticed that forms could morph into other forms. Alan Turing, the English mathematician and computer scientist, wrote in 1952 what is now an influential paper on form [The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis]. At that time, a year before the DNA structure was discovered, almost nothing was known about form-making. Turing, however, had noticed that certain patterns in living things could be explained by physical processes and modelled by mathematics. Turing “shows how chemicals diffusing through biological tissue could become unstable and, mathematically, he showed that this instability could actually generate the patterns you see on snail shells, leopards, jaguars, giraffes and even Fresian cattle," says Forbes.

During formation in the womb the lower part of a foetus’s face consists of arches that are the remains of fish gills.

He adds: “the secret of body plans in nature is so special. We are tetrapods, evolved 365 million years ago when the first fish learned to paddle about land”. Our fishy past may come as a shock to some people, but a scientist discovered that “the body plan of a lobster is like a vertebrate flipped, back to belly … our backbone contains our nervous system whereas in a lobster it’s the other way round”. Nowadays we understand the Hox genes involved in pattern formation. “We share our Hox genes with all of creation and what’s happened since to the lobster is that the Hox genes have been copied four times. Without that flip of the curve we (humans) wouldn’t be here.”

We still bear the signs of our evolutionary past. During formation in the womb the lower part of a foetus’s face consists of arches that are the remains of fish gills. “To create the face requires this strange morphing process. The process is so time-sensitive, the two halves of the face have to come together. This often fails and that’s what produces cleft lip and palate.”

Forbes asserts that while some forms are demonstrably beautiful, beyond that we come to personal taste. What is the biological point behind beautiful forms? Beauty may mean little when it comes to the point of view of survival, but it is in fact valued in the process of sexual selection. A beautiful creature is seen as a guarantor of its fitness. “Much of what we take to be quintessentially human is the result of sexual selection - traits selected by our ancestors. There’s a sense in which we have evolved our own human form.”

Disruptive colouration in nature has influenced camouflage. Nature has the capacity to mimic and camouflage: “something magical seems to happen when colour overflows form marked out by lines. It happens in nature and it happens in military camouflage. It can, however, puzzle the biologist. Take, for example, the zebra, whose coat is a product of disruptive colouration. Scientists are unsure whether this is effective in the animal’s natural habitat and have debated the question for a long time."

So form, says Forbes, is where the disciplines of science and art meet: “patterns in nature are there by necessity but we can create purely gratuitous patterns that nature would never conceive of," he concludes.

Peter Forbes is a writer who has consistently worked at the interface between art and science. He read chemistry, wrote his first articles for New Scientist magazine, edited Poetry Review for 16 years and has edited three poetry anthologies, including Scanning the Century (Penguin, 2000).

He reviews frequently for the Guardian and Independent newspapers and contributes occasional articles to The Times Eureka monthly science supplement. His first popular science book, The Gecko’s Foot (Harper Perennial, 2006), on the new science of bio-inspiration, was longlisted for the Aventis/Royal Society Prize. Dazzled and Deceived (Yale University Press, 2009) traces the links between nature, art and warfare through the lens of mimicry and camouflage, taking in figures such as Darwin, Theodore Roosevelt, Sir Peter Scott, the Surrealists, and Picasso, and comes up to date with the new science of form in nature: evo devo. The book won the 2011 Warwick Prize for Writing.

By Penelope Jenkins