There will be no San Diego Darwin Birthday concerts in February 2010 for the first time in 11 years, but it’s for a good reason. Steve will be speaking in Santa Fe, NM at the American Institute of Medical Education seminar: Creativity Madness – Psychological Studies of Art and Artists. This lecture, entitled “Scientific Creativity: Charles Darwin, Genesis, Data, Evolution” and semi-concert will be a first at that conference in that Steve will be speaking about scientific creativity, with a focus on Charles Darwin. He will offer a discussion of Darwin: his childhood history in the Unitarian Church; the influence of his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who had an early theory of evolution which he published as a poem; his education at Cambridge as a theologian; and the loss of his beloved daughter, Annie, at age 10, and how all that influenced his eventual willingness to follow evidence, not faith.
Steve thinks it will be interesting to compare aspects of artistic creativity with those of scientific creativity. Both require a hell of a lot of work; both follow rules and both break rules to make advances. But there are some intriguing differences. For example, we would never have had Beethoven’s Violin Concerto without Beethoven, but we would have arrived at the theory of evolution without Darwin. Likewise, with any specific painting, book, or composition compared to the formula for the attraction due to gravity that Newton first presented or E=mc2 from Einstein. Science eventually arrives at all these ideas, but the first person to get there usually has some marks of genius, and maybe some events in their personal history that moved them in a particular direction.
During this lecture, Steve will illustrate some of his topics with some musical interludes from his CDs about Darwin, evolution and other anthropological themes and end with a little concert entitled “The Single Best Idea Anybody Ever Had.” Hopefully, this unusual perspective will enlighten, intrigue and entertain all the mental health professionals and artists at this conference. If this lecture goes well, maybe the next one will be about Galileo whose father was a music teacher, giving him an early idea of melody and harmony which he extended to the models of the solar system that he built!
For more information about the seminar, go to: www.aimed.com