Art, science, and the creative ape

This is the concluding article in a series of three that explores the importance of remaining human and humane in an era currently awash with dehumanising artifice. In writing these essays, I wanted to examine what makes us peculiarly human as opposed to just another planetary species. I wanted to ponder what sets us apart from our fellow earth dwellers and whether those characteristics are worth protecting as we bid to establish our untimely demise through poorly considered behaviour.

Our physical demise is certain, of course; that’s the nature of planetary entropy. But do we really want to fast-forward the process for humanity in pursuit of questionable notions of ‘gain’?

Only recently, a senior employee of one of the world’s most valuable corporations, Anthropic, has warned there was a greater than 10% chance that AI technology could “kill all humans” in the next decade. Evan Hubinger, Alignment Science Lead at the leading AI development company, also claimed that Anthropic did not have a plan to ensure that ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence: a hypothetical future stage of artificial intelligence where self-determining machines capable of independent action vastly exceed human intelligence and cognitive capabilities across every single field) was ‘aligned’, meaning that it did no harm. It was an admission at the highest level of corporate strategy that the existential risks to all of us are worth taking in the pursuit of power and profit.

The development of ASI is the current holy grail of scientific research, and its relentless pursuit dovetails nicely with the work of English zoologist and surreal painter, Desmond Morris, that forms the backbone of these three articles. At the risk of repetition, Morris suggested in his 2013 book The Artistic Ape that there are only three characteristics that differentiate humans from other species. They are the ability to create art, science, and religion, and he more specifically defines those three mental engines of intent as:

Art: making the extraordinary out of the ordinary - to entertain the brain.
Science: making the simple out of the complicated - to understand our existence.
Religion: making the believable out of the unbelievable - to reduce the fear of death.

In the previous two articles, I explored the cultural context of art,¹ then the intersection of art and religion.² But what of science? Ironically, the process of simplifying the complexities of our material existence has led to comprehension of the quickest routes to human and planetary destruction. That information in the metaphorical hands of an unregulated, indomitable, and amoral intelligence arguably heightens the likelihood of such destruction being unleashed. Could the considered interplay between all three of Morris’s singularly human concerns help avoid such catastrophic consequences? I sincerely hope so, but even within those intrinsically humane concerns, we run into some hazardous mainstream ideological narratives.

I’m trying to focus on doing as much of God’s work as possible right now, and if that leads to the end times, OK.

(JD Vance - Vice President of the United States of America 2026)

Art and Science met in a quaint, somewhat dubious little experiment documented by Morris in The Artistic Ape. He tells how Congo,³ a young chimpanzee in the nineteen-fifties, was given paper and paint and observed in his response. Over time, Congo didn’t just hurl the pigment at the sheet randomly; he displayed and developed an unmistakable, intrinsic sense of visual balance. He kept within the margins, balanced asymmetric compositions, and threw furious tantrums if someone dared interrupt his creative flow before he decided the work was finished. Crucially, Congo didn't care about bananas or any other form of nutrition while painting. It turned out that in Congo’s case, the reward wasn't food; the reward appeared to be the self-determined joy of making marks on an empty surface.

As a man who has found sustenance for over 30 years in daubing pigment onto a variety of surfaces in my studio, I find Congo’s behaviour, albeit in the experiment's slightly weird environment, deeply comforting. It suggests that in the long hours spent ruminating, whether a smudge of burnt umber here or there elevates or ruins the harmony of an entire painted composition, I am not simply engaging in a bourgeois intellectual ritual, unique to high culture. I am actually accessing my inner hairless ape, expressing my evolutionary itch to pattern the chaos.

Humanity likes to construct grand, high-minded scaffolding around our cultural achievements. We’ve invented art critics, multi-million-pound auction houses, impenetrable gallery wall texts written in an esoteric dialect of pseudo-philosophy, and I gratefully acknowledge my own place within that heritage. But strip away the prose and the prosecco, and art remains as Morris identified: a biological, creative imperative to explore visual order, rhythm, and intrigue. Could art be more appropriately considered part of the evolutionary toolbox with which we devise solutions to the problems of our own making?

And does science not do the same? We are frequently conditioned to view science and art as archetypally antipathetic enemies: the cold, calculating reductionist in the lab coat versus the chaotic, paint-splattered romantic overcome by a maximalist vision of beauty. Yet, viewed through the Morris lens, both disciplines are driven by the exact same evolutionary machinery. Both are attempts by an exceptionally inquisitive mammal to organise information and communicate meaning across the void of ignorance.

Consider what the scientist does: she observes a bewildering, chaotic universe of haphazard data, quantum fluctuations, and biological entropy, then seeks pattern. She creates an elegant formula - a simple line of code or an equation - that turns the wildly complicated into something clean, comprehensible, and orderly.

And the artist? She takes the emptiness of a blank screen, script, stage, or score - an expanse of primed linen or a block of stone - and imposes form, rhythm, and tension with the tools at her disposal.

Where science streamlines the complicated into the simple, art elevates the mundane into the extraordinary. Opposite ends of the same enquiring scale. A scientist looks at a drop of pond water under a microscope and sees a structured, self-contained ecosystem of amoebas and paramecia. An artist looks at that same drop of water and paints a cosmic tapestry of light, fluid dynamics, and existential wonder. Neither view is wrong; neither is superior. They are simply the activity of the twin hemispheres of the same primate brain trying to process the staggering fact that it exists at all.

One of the tragedies of our present age is our recent insistence on turning both art and science into mere instruments of commodified utility. I am reminded of my 1995 Manchester exhibition, The Compliance of Science, which lightheartedly adapted the strapline from a white goods manufacturer TV advertisement at the time, “Zanussi: the appliance of science.” In the exhibition notes, I bemoaned the amount of scientific endeavour expended upon designing ingenious new bottle tops rather than curing the world blights of poverty and disease. Arguably naive, the point remains pertinent. Science is applied if the price is right, if the marketplace provides incentive, not on any overriding sense of moral duty to people or planet.

Under our current cultural mandate, science is prized if it can build a faster algorithm, monetise our attention, or manufacture a slicker gadget. Art, meanwhile, is squeezed through the transactional funnel of digital validation, optimised for engagement metrics, and reduced to ‘content’ designed to be consumed in half-second swipes.

In doing so, we degrade both fields of endeavour. We forget that the greatest scientific breakthroughs - much like the greatest artistic masterpieces - did not come from a desire to maximise quarterly efficiency or increase numbers of subscribers. They came from play: our most effective mode of learning. They came from an ape messing around with sticks, observing patterns, and wondering, "What will happen if I try this…or that?"

The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.

(Carl Jung)

If we strip play and disinterested curiosity out of human endeavour, we are left with a bleak, hyper-optimised landscape. Science becomes a soul-crushing engine of consumerist commercial efficiency, while art becomes a derivative backdrop for digital advertising, both selling the same pathologically deranged package trip to oblivion for us all. Is that the one-way ticket we really want at the top of our collective bucket list?

So, how may a re-evaluation and conscious alignment of humanity’s core concerns of art, science, and religion help us in the quest to understand our place in the living world? Whether smearing oil paint across a stretched piece of cotton, sequencing DNA, or chanting mantras, we are all participating in an ancient, sacred dialogue with existence. Modern science - particularly quantum physics and ecology - is increasingly arriving at the same conclusion that animists, religious mystics, and artists have intuited for millennia: that the boundary between the observer and the observed is gossamer-thin, if it exists at all.

There is an increasing recognition in artistic, scientific, and religious thinking that we are not as separate as our individual identities seductively imply. A vision of humanity as detached intellects looking down at a mechanical planet from a position of superiority is being widely dispelled. In its place, a new understanding may emerge in which we see ourselves as the planet sensing itself, analysing itself, praying to itself, painting itself. The meaning we derive from these activities will remain questionable at the best of times, but to joyfully engage in the process is to unequivocally ensure an analogue, organic life well lived.