Humans, Nature, and Birds: Science Art from Cave Walls to Computer Screens 9780300151732

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Humans, Nature, and Birds

Portrait of Robert Cheseman, 1533, by Hans Holbein the Younger. For a Science Art caption see p. 201.

Humans, Nature, and Birds Science Art from Cave Walls to Computer Screens

Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy Foreword by Paul R. Ehrlich

Yale University Press New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s Public Understanding of Science and Technology Program. Copyright © 2008 by Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Scala types by BW&A Books, Inc. Printed in the United States of America by R. R. Donnelley, Roanoke, Virginia. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wheye, Darryl. Humans, nature, and birds : science art from cave walls to computer screens / Darryl Wheye and Donald Kennedy ; foreward by Paul R. Ehrlich. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-300-12388-3 (alk. paper) 1. Ornithology. 2. Ornithological illustration. 3. Birds in art. 4. Nature (Aesthetics). 5. Nature—Effect of human beings on. 6. Art and science. I. Kennedy, Donald, 1931– II. Title. QL673.W48 2008 704.9'4328—dc22 2007050149 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Foreword: Art, Science, and Birds, by Paul R. Ehrlich Preface: What Is Science Art?

xiii

Introduction: A Gallery of Science Art Gallery Guide

vii

xv

xxi

lower gallery. Bird Art over the Millennia

1

room 1. Birds as Icons 5 room 2. Birds as Resources for Human Use 16 room 3. Birds as Teaching Tools

29

room 4. Birds as a Means of Understanding Biology

40

room 5. Birds as a Means of Promoting Conservation

mezzanine. Thinking about Aesthetics, the Oldest Bird Paintings, and Painting Nature upper gallery. How Science and Art Overlap room 6. Science Art as Its Own Category room 7. Content, Style, and Medium

52

64

69

72

95

room 8. The Importance of Captions 118 room 9. From Real Public Venues to Virtual Ones

125

room 10. Science Art, Birds, and Perceptions of Nature 131

appendix 1. Timeline Linking Art, Technology, and the Study of Birds

143

appendix 2. A Science Art Checklist for Practitioners

Notes

171

Selected Bibliography

185

Acknowledgments

189

Illustration Credits

191

Index

193

167

Foreword: Art, Science, and Birds PAUL R. EHRLICH

T

o some, birds, science, and art may seem like a weird mixture. But they have long been at the center of my intellectual life. Along with friends, wine, and food, they have also been my major focus of enjoyment. So it is with great plea-

sure that I compose a foreword to a wonderful book on Science Art written by two old, close friends about the relationship between three of four of my favorite loves. The fourth love is my wife, Anne. Anne and I met at the University of Kansas, where she was an art major. I was working on the structural features of butterflies and their evolution, and soon she was working with me, dissecting specimens and drawing features of their minute exterior skeletons, their even tinier hundreds of muscles, their immensely tangled reproductive glands, and the like. Even unartistic scientists often turn to drawing to illustrate points, as I had to when focused on the anatomy of butterflies. That was in the 1950s, but the situation is unchanged today—in many cases, art (or at least illustration, depending on your definitions; I would make no distinction) can better represent science than most photography can. Indeed, we need only compare Ed Wilson’s drawings of ants in his scientific work with photographs of ants to see the advantages. (To compare points made with drawings and those made with photographs, see B. Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson, The Ants [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990]. To appreciate Wilson’s care in illustrating ants see his Pheidole in the New World: A Dominant, Hyperdiverse Genus [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993].) The scientist knows what should be visible or obvious, but the camera does not, although a scientist like Tom Eisner who is an artist with a camera can often get equally impressive results. (See T. Eisner, For Love of Insects [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003].) like anatomical drawings of butterflies and ants, mostly away from

vii

In a sense, the place where Science Art has thrived the longest but,

public view, is in medical illustration. Here again the prevalent idea that somehow photography is unbiased and art is biased is clearly false. The camera cannot deal with such matters as three dimensions, shadowing, and color distortion the way an illustrator can, especially if the illustrator is trained as a scientist or is working collaboratively with one. I would much rather my brain surgeon were guided by a painting supervised by another brain surgeon than guided by a photograph. It is just as impossible to flawlessly “map” reality onto a canvas (or the page of a book) as it is to map it into a human brain, but in a good artist’s rendering the critical parts are in clear view and decipherable. All of our perceptions of the world “outside” are filtered from trillions of possible perceptions. All we need to know in order to understand this is that our species, for a couple of hundred thousand years, did not realize that it was bombarded with various kinds of electromagnetic radiation. The radiation was out there, but with the exception of visible light and infrared radiation (heat) we could not detect the radiation until we invented devices that extended our ability to perceive it—radios and Geiger counters, for example. Since then, neurobiologists have abundantly documented how much our sensing of the world, particularly our visual sensing, is a complex interaction involving our environment, our sensory organs, and the brain that interprets the inputs from those organs. It is not so surprising that often Science Art achieves an approximation of what we think is out there better than a photograph does. But Science Art (including photographic Science Art) can do much more than that. It can teach, excite, and aid us, as this wonderful book shows. The frequent superiority of carefully observed drawings over routine photographs is not just the case with anatomy and small insects. Many, if not most, bird watchers prefer guides with drawings or paintings rather than photographs. Artists’ renderings allow birds to be shown in similar poses for the sake of comparison and allows important field marks to be prominently indicated. Field guides of birds provide some of the best examples of Science Art; indeed, Roger Tory Peterson started the whole field-guide business based on Science Art when he used illustrations and indicator lines to show people how to discriminate between similar bird species. Although Peterson’s early field guides were quite diagrammatic, later ones were more representational. But I wonder whether some of the most influential ecological science studies, such as Robert MacArthur’s brilliant study of niche partitioning in warblers, would have occurred if Peterson had

not developed his field guide; MacArthur lay on his back in the woods and documented di=erences in the behavior of similar warblers that he could identify with ease and accuracy on account of Peterson’s work. (See Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds [Boston: Houghton Mi