“You see that’s not a dog, that’s a good boy.” That was the line from the movie Caddyshack, which I watched again this week, and I couldn’t help but remember the first time I heard it.

I was watching with my father at his apartment in New York City. He had moved to New York after he finished medical school to go on and complete his internship and residency in internal medicine at one of the large hospitals in Manhattan.

He had chosen to do his residency at an inner city hospital because he wanted to work with people who were having a hard time. He also thought it would be more interesting than working in a suburban office park where most of the patients were upper middle class and white.

One of the things my father would sometimes do when we visited him in New York was take us to a movie.

My brother, sister and I would race each other up the stairs of the old building on Lexington Avenue so we could get there early enough for the best seats.

After Dr. K let us have those seats, he’d go around to all his friends who lived in the building and ask them if they wanted to join him for dinner before or after the movie. We could hear him from our seats as he

It’s a good boy! It’s a good boy! This is not a dog.

That’s not the first thing most people think when they see a German shepherd, but that’s what I was thinking. I really wanted to believe it was a good boy and not a dog, but this was the wrong place to make that judgment call.

The place in question was the parking lot of an orthopedic surgeon’s building. The doctor who worked there had been recommended to me by my vet, and I already knew he treated only large animals. So when I saw his name on a handicapped spot, I thought I was in luck: if he treated only large animals, surely he wouldn’t mind if my little Samoyed got to use the spot for five minutes while I did some errands.

But it turned out that my little Samoyed had disappeared—I don’t know where or when—and the large animal in question was a shepherd mix that weighed at least one hundred pounds and looked like it had been hit by an SUV. It lay on its side next to its bed, which was also its litter box and water bowl and food bowl (though how it ate out of that contraption

How do we come to love dogs more than cats? Is it because it’s easier to fall in love with something that’s friendly and enthusiastic than something that’s aloof and self-sufficient? It must be, because we don’t love babies any less than dogs or cats. As a scientific matter, babies are both less approachable and less enjoyable than either cats or dogs. Babies have no independent existence at all; they’re just bags of need. And they don’t even like us most of the time. Dogs lick us and snuggle with us whether they like us or not; babies cry whether they like us or not.

And yet, without even thinking about it, most people choose dogs over babies as pets. So it can’t just be that it’s easier to feel affection for an affectionate creature than a needy one. Maybe there’s something about how dogs behave that makes them more appealing, even if you know nothing about their particular dog per se. Maybe there’s a difference between the inner lives of dogs and the inner lives of babies that makes the dog seem more interesting despite its outward limitations.

The purpose of art is to show that everyone is the same. The purpose of science is to show that everyone is different.

Art addresses the historical problem of human tribalism. Today we have a bigger, more complex problem: we’ve collapsed many tribes into one big tribe, yet we’re still tribal. We’re at war with each other because our tribes are so small.

We’re trying to solve this by calling people names like “racist” and “sexist.” But calling someone a name doesn’t make them think they’re wrong. It just makes them hate you. It’s hard to learn something when you hate the person teaching it to you.

We need a way to conduct an argument without triggering the emotional part of the brain: just logic and data, not insults or threats or moral posturing. That’s what science does: it separates what we know from what we don’t know, and filters out the humans so all that remains is the math and physics and data.

Science has been spectacularly successful at answering questions about how things work: how many stars are there, how fast does electricity travel over a wire, why does ice float? Art has been spectacularly successful at answering questions about how things feel: why do sad songs make us tear

Science and Art are one and the same, but different. They are intertwined, but separate. And their differences are what makes them both so amazing.

There is no way to understand art without understanding science. The two work together, they affect each other, they come from the same place. Yet they are very different. Science focuses on what is, while art focuses on what could be. Science can only tell you how it is, while art can tell you how it might be. Acknowledging this difference is all that separates Art from Science; it is impossible to have one without the other.

Art and Science are dependent upon each other, but not the same thing. The more we learn about the world around us, the more we are able to add to our ability to create with it. The more we learn about the world around us, the greater opportunity we have to create something beautiful out of it. While they share a common connection and origin, they have their own abilities, their own potentials and limitations.

The most interesting art and science works are those that make us doubt what we thought we knew. This is especially true in the case of artists and scientists who live long enough to see their own ideas become commonplaces. A good example is Pablo Picasso: the artist who became a professional reproducer of other people’s ideas, but who eventually found his way back to being an artist again.

His early works made a strong impression on me, because they seemed like something brand new. His paintings looked like things I had seen before, but they weren’t. They were more than just familiar things seen in a new way. They were as if Picasso had invented a new color.

And then there was that mustache! What was with that? It didn’t look like it fit on his face; you expected it to slide off at any moment (it finally did). And the fact that he was Spanish didn’t make sense either; Spaniards didn’t grow mustaches like that.

Picasso led us to question what made sense and what didn’t. That’s why he seemed so original, and why his art still seems important today.