This week's TIME Magazine issue had an article "Man Makes Life" that had a line within that caught my attention:

...nobody doubts that it is our DNA that determines what we are ... [in the same way that] digital etchings on a CD determine the music you hear.

This struck a chord with what I read in the cover article in a recent past issue of SEED Magazine ("The Future of Science .. is Art?"). This article suggested that abstract ideas represented in concrete artwork (music, sculpture, drawings..) are more easily studied than the theoretical concepts and math themselves.