I was brought here by my experience with Rosamond Wolff Purcell's previous book, Owl's Head, in which she lovingly illuminates and documents a hoarder's lair. Her partnership with Stephen Jay Gould is interesting for similar and other reasons: conversation is at the core of her practice and these partnerings, yet here there is a conscious pairing, balancing and mirroring between practitioners of two disciplines that have connected and repelled over centuries. You can see it here, as Purcell observes Gould using her photographs as "semaphores, signifying not just the physical reality of appearance of an object, but a wealth of underlying meanings -- natural, cultural, and visual."
This candid dualism expands to Gould's own reasoning. "The much maligned practice of taxonomy, the ordering and classification of organisms, takes a culturally imposed backseat to the more interventionist and generalizing style of experimentation and quantification in science. But taxonomy should be viewed as one of the most fundamental, and most noble, of scientific pursuits -- for what can be more basic than the parsing of nature's rich and confusing complexity? Our categories, moreover, record our modes of thought, and taxonomy therefore teaches us as much about our mental functioning as about nature's variety."
As someone who has primarily approached science through the access points of art and personal experience, I'm encouraged by this kind of work, hopeful about the role of each discipline as a buoy to the other.
Stephen Jay Gould and Rosamond Wolff Purcell, Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet
from Taxonomic Notes, by R. Wright Barker, 1960