![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
as promised, new entries will follow, starting now with "the survival of the beautiful"
A feature story in the January 13, 2019 New York Times Magazine deals with the questions in evolution posed by beauty, or what a book of a few years ago called The Survival of the Beautiful. The elements of what many of us humans call the beautiful in nature are not only in excess of what ought to be required to attract a mate, they are frequently maladaptive to the point of dysfunction (i.e., they diminish the likelihood of the individual’s physical survival long enough to reproduce). So: why beauty? Why superfluous excess of one sort or another when utility dictates something less complicated?
Of course some of the reproductive attractors in nature are what many humans would call grotesque, just as the full range of human sexuality is such that anyone perusing its history will find it impossible to identify with all the possibilities that human beings have evolved for successive mate attraction or simple sexual arousal (and in fact, the conditions for the latter in many individuals have often militated against success in the former). But given the assumption that evolution proceeds by random mutational accident, that some trait emerges and survives purely because its payoff in terms of reproductive success outweighs its dysfunctional qualities diminishing survival, why is there so much of the sheer excess? Granted, in sheer numbers and overall body weight, self-evidently functional mutations in swarms of unnoticed insects probably predominate on the planet, but each genus and species is working autonomously, so that the sheer size of one species’ plain-vanilla successful approach to reproductive strategies has no relevance to the extravagance of the wide variety of species that go to spectacular, seemingly superfluous lengths to accomplish the same goal. (That’s the problem: on some level, this type of superfluous accident at least doesn’t do enough damage to be selected out of existence, and seems to recur again and again and again. Beauty, or superfluous complexity, gets selected for rather than against a lot more often than we would expect if random survival were really just a brutally efficient mechanism for picking the least complicated winners. It is, at the least, a brutally inefficient mechanism.)
Also to the point, why do we have aesthetic responses of pleasure and/or disgust when we encounter what we call beautiful or grotesque aspects of nature? Even if it is what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, an accidental feature of a functional evolutionary stratagem, it is a very strange spandrel. Working with Gould’s metaphor, many spandrels are just left blank. A few are filled with paintings done in a shape with which most artists would not choose to work, given an isolated canvas. Why do we try, and what varieties of things do we choose to put on our spandrels, having evolved them as an architectural feature?
All of this implies a multidisciplinary book, and if I ever find time to work through all the books about “beauty” that appeared a couple of decades ago, I am sure I’ll find passages discussing all these topics. These are just the ones I made up off the top of my head, based on past reading of sources I have totally forgotten.
As usual in meditations of this sort in my weblogs, the real point at which I am getting is not the problem of the beautiful but the problem of the New York Times article. At the moment at which I expected it to be getting down to the real issues, it ended, having made no more than one or two points about why evolution is more complex than we have thought, and there is lots of research and debate left to be conducted.
I am constantly being reminded of the diminished attention span of readers who have an immense number of things to skim through. As they say in abbreviations, tl; dr. (“Too long; didn’t read,” for the benefit of those who will read this post from the time when that abbreviation is no longer in use, which, given past internet practice, should be no more than six or seven months from now.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/magazine/behind-the-cover-beauty-and-the-beasts.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine&action=click&contentCollection=magazine®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront
Of course some of the reproductive attractors in nature are what many humans would call grotesque, just as the full range of human sexuality is such that anyone perusing its history will find it impossible to identify with all the possibilities that human beings have evolved for successive mate attraction or simple sexual arousal (and in fact, the conditions for the latter in many individuals have often militated against success in the former). But given the assumption that evolution proceeds by random mutational accident, that some trait emerges and survives purely because its payoff in terms of reproductive success outweighs its dysfunctional qualities diminishing survival, why is there so much of the sheer excess? Granted, in sheer numbers and overall body weight, self-evidently functional mutations in swarms of unnoticed insects probably predominate on the planet, but each genus and species is working autonomously, so that the sheer size of one species’ plain-vanilla successful approach to reproductive strategies has no relevance to the extravagance of the wide variety of species that go to spectacular, seemingly superfluous lengths to accomplish the same goal. (That’s the problem: on some level, this type of superfluous accident at least doesn’t do enough damage to be selected out of existence, and seems to recur again and again and again. Beauty, or superfluous complexity, gets selected for rather than against a lot more often than we would expect if random survival were really just a brutally efficient mechanism for picking the least complicated winners. It is, at the least, a brutally inefficient mechanism.)
Also to the point, why do we have aesthetic responses of pleasure and/or disgust when we encounter what we call beautiful or grotesque aspects of nature? Even if it is what Stephen Jay Gould called a spandrel, an accidental feature of a functional evolutionary stratagem, it is a very strange spandrel. Working with Gould’s metaphor, many spandrels are just left blank. A few are filled with paintings done in a shape with which most artists would not choose to work, given an isolated canvas. Why do we try, and what varieties of things do we choose to put on our spandrels, having evolved them as an architectural feature?
All of this implies a multidisciplinary book, and if I ever find time to work through all the books about “beauty” that appeared a couple of decades ago, I am sure I’ll find passages discussing all these topics. These are just the ones I made up off the top of my head, based on past reading of sources I have totally forgotten.
As usual in meditations of this sort in my weblogs, the real point at which I am getting is not the problem of the beautiful but the problem of the New York Times article. At the moment at which I expected it to be getting down to the real issues, it ended, having made no more than one or two points about why evolution is more complex than we have thought, and there is lots of research and debate left to be conducted.
I am constantly being reminded of the diminished attention span of readers who have an immense number of things to skim through. As they say in abbreviations, tl; dr. (“Too long; didn’t read,” for the benefit of those who will read this post from the time when that abbreviation is no longer in use, which, given past internet practice, should be no more than six or seven months from now.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/09/magazine/behind-the-cover-beauty-and-the-beasts.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine&action=click&contentCollection=magazine®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=6&pgtype=sectionfront