ABSTRACT
I was interested in science as well as art from an early age. Until my undergraduate years, I felt some tug between these two interests. My undergraduate mentor, Peter Klopfer, was a Zoologist and a Quaker. One of his many accomplishments was founding an independent Quaker or
Friends school in Durham, NC. When visiting his house on one occasion, I mentioned I had always felt some tension between art and science (or specifically Biology), and one of his school-age daughters said that was totally unfounded. She then proceeded to tell me about a course she was taking at the Friends school on “design in nature.” Since that day, I have felt much less regret on choosing a single career path. I appreciate that art and science are each different types of truth seeking which differ mainly in their methods, and across my career I have tried to maintain some familiarity with the methods of both. In recent years, many researchers have made the point that about 95% of our knowledge of children is based on 5% of the world’s children. As a result, our knowledge is based on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industralized, Rich, and Democratic) populations (Arnett, 2008). Science, in my opinion, is at least in part a search for universals, which is why WEIRD samples are not considered to be a fatal flaw. But these international researchers question whether this is correct. So I may have been right in the first place; science and art may have more in common than we typically acknowledge.
