The Art and Evolutionary Science of Wolves

Science and the humanities tend two be on two opposite sides of each other. In an eternal struggle between words an numbers, many of us are caught in the crossfires between quantitative and qualitiative analytics.

Amidst these turbulent times, it's refreshing to see bridges being built to cross the divide. Binghamton University in New York is developing a program called the New Humanities Initiative. A brainchild of David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology, and Leslie Heywood, a professor of Enlgish, the program is be a cross over of evolutionary biology and english.

To illustrate how the New Humanities approach to scholarship might work, Dr. Heywood cited her own recent investigations into the complex symbolism of the wolf...

Dr. Heywood began studying the association between wolves and nature, and how people’s attitudes toward one might affect their regard for the other. 'In the standard humanities approach, you compile and interpret images of wolves from folkloric history, and you analyze previously published texts about wolves,' and that’s pretty much it, Dr. Heywood said. Seeking a more full-bodied understanding, she delved into the scientific literature, studying wolf ecology, biology and evolution. She worked with Dr. Wilson and others to design a survey to gauge people’s responses to three images of a wolf: one of a classic beautiful wolf, another of a hunter holding a dead wolf, the third of a snarling, aggressive wolf.

It’s an implicit association test, designed to gauge subliminal attitudes by measuring latency of response between exposure to an image on a screen and the pressing of a button next to words like beautiful, frightening, good, wrong...

Combining some of her early survey results with the wealth of wolf imagery culled from cultures around the world, Dr. Heywood finds preliminary support for the provocative hypothesis that humans and wolves may have co-evolved.

Read more of Natalie Angier's article in the New York Times.