Over at LovetoLead they’re having a little debate on the subject "Is Art More Valuable than Science?" my response to which can probably be gained from the title above.

Where do people get such amazingly silly ideas from? Science has brought us things from agriculture itself (hey, if you don’t think farming is a science then you try doing it without the ten thousand years of experimentation that have already gone into it) to vaccines, jet planes and the machines upon which you are viewing these words.

Last time I went to a gallery there was a spotty geek in square glasses and a black polo neck asking "But yes, but what is art?". We know that humans have been practising art for some 20-30,000 years so far and if we’ve not yet managed to come up with a decent definition understandable by spotty geeks in black polo necks then I suggest that it’s not actually very important.

Let’s put it another way, science has brought us the incomparable beauty of landing men on the Moon, of detailing for us the satellites of Saturn and in Einstein’s equations, describing for us the very nature of the universe. Art has given us Tracy Emin’s unmade bed.

And no, there’s no point in appealing to Beethoven’s Ninth or Babylon’s Burning by The Ruts. That’s music, vastly more important than either.