The last couple of days I've been musing on naturally-occurring things which are beautiful - two days ago it was an African Tulip Tree, and yesterday it was the African Sacred Ibis. And sure, what's beautiful to me might not be beautiful to you.
But musing on beautiful things got me musing on the nature of beauty as well as the beauty of nature, and how much it might be innate to that which is beautiful, and how much is beautiful because we perceive it to be beautiful. Because that's the kind of thinking I like to get into when I'm not trying to game the health Deity or get my startup businesses going. And yes, amazingly, I am fun at parties, even if the conversation can veer off in weird directions like this.
Turns out I'm not the only one thinking about this
A recent New York Times Magazine article captures the idea that beauty is perhaps not the result of natural selection, but somehow part of the way the world works in a completely different way:
The environment constrains a creature’s anatomy, which determines how it experiences the world, which generates adaptive and arbitrary preferences, which loop back to alter its biology, sometimes in maladaptive ways. Beauty reveals that evolution is neither an iterative chiseling of living organisms by a domineering landscape nor a frenzied collision of chance events. Rather, evolution is an intricate clockwork of physics, biology and perception in which every moving part influences another in both subtle and profound ways. Its gears are so innumerable and dynamic — so susceptible to serendipity and mishap — that even a single outcome of its ceaseless ticking can confound science for centuries.
Isn't that a wonderful turn of phrase - "evolution is an intricate clockwork of physics, biology and perception in which every moving part influences another in both subtle and profound ways"? Have a look at the end of the references for a different reason I picked this out.
Darwin also thought about it
And it turns out that even the father of thinking on natural selection himself pondered this question seriously. Hypothetically, beauty would motivate against a creature's genes getting a good shot at promotion into the next round, as it were, because it doesn't just call attention to potential mates, but also to others that think it might make a fabulous meal...which kind of works against natural selection, no? So Charles Darwin grappled with this question in ways we haven't heard much about, according to that same New York Times Magazine article.
Although he co-discovered natural selection and devoted much of his life to demonstrating its importance, he never claimed that it could explain everything. Ornaments, Darwin proposed, evolved through a separate process he called sexual selection: Females choose the most appealing males “according to their standard of beauty” and, as a result, males evolve toward that standard, despite the costs. Darwin did not think it was necessary to link aesthetics and survival. Animals, he believed, could appreciate beauty for its own sake. Many of Darwin’s peers and successors ridiculed his proposal. To them, the idea that animals had such cognitive sophistication — and that the preferences of “capricious” females could shape entire species — was nonsense. Although never completely forgotten, Darwin’s theory of beauty was largely abandoned.
And here's where the thinking (again, from the same article) gets really interesting:
Now, nearly 150 years later, a new generation of biologists is reviving Darwin’s neglected brainchild. Beauty, they say, does not have to be a proxy for health or advantageous genes. Sometimes beauty is the glorious but meaningless flowering of arbitrary preference. Animals simply find certain features — a blush of red, a feathered flourish — to be appealing. And that innate sense of beauty itself can become an engine of evolution, pushing animals toward aesthetic extremes. In other cases, certain environmental or physiological constraints steer an animal toward an aesthetic preference that has nothing to do with survival whatsoever.
We are so arrogant as humans to believe that we are the only species with artistic sensibilities. I'm sure many of you have seen this video of the Japanese Puffer fish creating sand art - sometimes putting in a whole week's worth of work to do it (watch it again, if only for the awesomeness of the process...and the beauty of the result):
And those are fish. You can't tell me the lady fish are only admiring the male fish's ability to handle sand.
There must be more to beauty in nature and the nature of beauty than we comprehend.
References
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/magazine/beauty-evolution-animal.html
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/driventoabstraction/2019/01/beauty-complicates-evolution/
https://cns.utexas.edu/news/the-mating-game
Anti-reference
And here's an interesting one, in that it looks to be plagiarised from the New York Times Magazine article, dated 9 Jan 2019, the same date as the article written by the oh-so-articulate Ferris Jabr was published in the Times Magazine...so don't cite it or bother reading it - you'll see that certain key words have been substituted with barely suitable synonyms - takes some hubris to plagiarise an article from a magazine of such stature:
https://askonna.com/2019/01/09/magazine/how-beauty-is-making-scientists-rethink-evolution/
See what I mean? "...evolution is an intricate clockwork of physics, biology and notion wherein each transferring half influences one other in each delicate and profound methods" - good grief. Compare that with the quote above, which I found...beautiful.
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Yes beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And our eyes often see the same results.
Indeed....