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Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution
'The peacock's tail makes me sick!' said Charles Darwin. That's because the theory of evolution as adaptation can't explain why nature is so beautiful. It took the concept of sexual selection for Darwin to explain that, a process that has more to do with aesthetic taste than adaptive fitness. Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have an innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.
321 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 2, 2012
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618 people want to read
About the author
David Rothenberg
49 books23 followersDavid Rothenberg is a professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His research investigates the musicality of animals and the role of nature in philosophy. He received his BA from Harvard College in 1984 and his PhD from Boston University in 1991.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
April 18, 2012
I read enough of this book to where I am counting it as read. This book is terrible. The author is pompous and repetitive. I felt like he never made his argument, he just jumped from topic to topic and talked about them -- but never gave any "answers." Just bad bad bad.
July 31, 2015
Rothenberg é filósofo e artista, e só desse modo se explica o modo como aborda o evolucionismo na arte. A sua proposta é polémica, porque assenta num princípio, que apesar de oferecer demonstração dedutiva, corre contra outra proposta, que ainda que seja também apenas passível de demonstração dedutiva, é aceite pelas restantes ciências.
Vamos ao que nos é dito. Rothenberg faz um belo trabalho de revisão da teoria estética evolucionária, nomeadamente Denis Dutton (ver "The Art Instinct", 2008), defendendo grande parte dos seus valores, mas indo ainda mais longe. Um dos problemas que se coloca a quem baseia a relevância da arte na teoria evolucionária de Darwin, é que esta transforma a arte numa funcionalidade. Ou seja, a evolução coloca a criação estética ao serviço da optimização da espécie, o belo passa por mero atributo da conquista sexual. Esta abordagem, que é de certo modo consensual na biologia, diz-nos que a Seleção Sexual de Darwin é uma subcategoria da Seleção Natural, ou seja, uma forma de seleção que trabalha para a otimização da adaptabilidade das espécies.
O interessante deste livro é que coloca em causa esta abordagem, sem colocar em causa o evolucionismo. Rothenberg defende assim que a Teoria da Seleção Sexual, deve antes ser considerada a par com a Teoria da Seleção Natural, e não como subclasse desta. Porque o faz? Porque ao fazê-lo permite-lhe desligar o objecto da arte do funcionalismo adaptativo. Deste modo a arte pode continuar a funcionar como um exercício demonstrativo de qualidades, mas a sua apreciação não tem um propósito, antes se define por um gosto subjectivo de quem aprecia. Rothenberg trabalha todo o livro para demonstrar esta teorização, que não é fácil, já que como facilmente se perceberá, fica-se preso ao subjectivo, não existindo verdadeiramente um modo de demonstrar a abordagem.
Do meu lado, sinto-me totalmente perplexo, e incapaz de tomar um lado. De um modo mais racional, tenho muitas dúvidas sobre a exequibilidade desta teorização, mais ainda quando Rothenberg procura defender que a selecção sexual procede pelo lado feminino. Ou seja, as caudas dos pavões machos, são assim, porque as fêmeas, "grandes estetas", têm demonstrado preferência por aqueles padrões, e não outros! Rothenberg procura mesmo dizer que esta abordagem não foi aceite no tempo de Darwin, porque seria inaceitável conceber a mulher com tanto poder em pleno século XIX. Até acredito nas polémicas desses tempos, mas hoje é ainda mais polémico, mas por outras razões, ou seja, como explicar em tempos de igualdade de sexos, possa existir tanta predominância num deles? E porque apenas um deles pode ser esteta?!
Por outro lado, esta teorização tem alguma relevância quando pensamos no modo aleatório como o real natural é autogerido (ver "The Drunkard's Walk", 2008). Ou seja, tendo em conta o acaso e o aleatório que compõem o detalhe da essência deste universo, porquê acreditar que tudo tem que ter uma função concreta, tudo se dirige a um objecto predeterminado?
[IMAGEM]
Tabela de conceitos polarizadores do real
Complicado. Mas mais interessante foi a teorização que a leitura desta oposição, entre Selecção Natural e Selecção Sexual, acabou por despoletar em mim. Comecei a ver o modo dicotómico, profundamente polarizado, como concebemos a realidade à nossa volta, como a classificamos, categorizamos, através dos nossos modelos mentais, que gerando esta dicotomia, se repetem a si próprios, num ciclo contínuo e redundante. Deixo acima uma tabela com alguns conceitos e opostos, mas que poderia ser preenchida quase infinitamente, sendo que o mais relevante advém da teorização que podemos desenvolver sobre este modo peculiar que temos de conceber a realidade.
Ler com imagens e links em: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...
Vamos ao que nos é dito. Rothenberg faz um belo trabalho de revisão da teoria estética evolucionária, nomeadamente Denis Dutton (ver "The Art Instinct", 2008), defendendo grande parte dos seus valores, mas indo ainda mais longe. Um dos problemas que se coloca a quem baseia a relevância da arte na teoria evolucionária de Darwin, é que esta transforma a arte numa funcionalidade. Ou seja, a evolução coloca a criação estética ao serviço da optimização da espécie, o belo passa por mero atributo da conquista sexual. Esta abordagem, que é de certo modo consensual na biologia, diz-nos que a Seleção Sexual de Darwin é uma subcategoria da Seleção Natural, ou seja, uma forma de seleção que trabalha para a otimização da adaptabilidade das espécies.
O interessante deste livro é que coloca em causa esta abordagem, sem colocar em causa o evolucionismo. Rothenberg defende assim que a Teoria da Seleção Sexual, deve antes ser considerada a par com a Teoria da Seleção Natural, e não como subclasse desta. Porque o faz? Porque ao fazê-lo permite-lhe desligar o objecto da arte do funcionalismo adaptativo. Deste modo a arte pode continuar a funcionar como um exercício demonstrativo de qualidades, mas a sua apreciação não tem um propósito, antes se define por um gosto subjectivo de quem aprecia. Rothenberg trabalha todo o livro para demonstrar esta teorização, que não é fácil, já que como facilmente se perceberá, fica-se preso ao subjectivo, não existindo verdadeiramente um modo de demonstrar a abordagem.
Do meu lado, sinto-me totalmente perplexo, e incapaz de tomar um lado. De um modo mais racional, tenho muitas dúvidas sobre a exequibilidade desta teorização, mais ainda quando Rothenberg procura defender que a selecção sexual procede pelo lado feminino. Ou seja, as caudas dos pavões machos, são assim, porque as fêmeas, "grandes estetas", têm demonstrado preferência por aqueles padrões, e não outros! Rothenberg procura mesmo dizer que esta abordagem não foi aceite no tempo de Darwin, porque seria inaceitável conceber a mulher com tanto poder em pleno século XIX. Até acredito nas polémicas desses tempos, mas hoje é ainda mais polémico, mas por outras razões, ou seja, como explicar em tempos de igualdade de sexos, possa existir tanta predominância num deles? E porque apenas um deles pode ser esteta?!
Por outro lado, esta teorização tem alguma relevância quando pensamos no modo aleatório como o real natural é autogerido (ver "The Drunkard's Walk", 2008). Ou seja, tendo em conta o acaso e o aleatório que compõem o detalhe da essência deste universo, porquê acreditar que tudo tem que ter uma função concreta, tudo se dirige a um objecto predeterminado?
[IMAGEM]
Tabela de conceitos polarizadores do real
Complicado. Mas mais interessante foi a teorização que a leitura desta oposição, entre Selecção Natural e Selecção Sexual, acabou por despoletar em mim. Comecei a ver o modo dicotómico, profundamente polarizado, como concebemos a realidade à nossa volta, como a classificamos, categorizamos, através dos nossos modelos mentais, que gerando esta dicotomia, se repetem a si próprios, num ciclo contínuo e redundante. Deixo acima uma tabela com alguns conceitos e opostos, mas que poderia ser preenchida quase infinitamente, sendo que o mais relevante advém da teorização que podemos desenvolver sobre este modo peculiar que temos de conceber a realidade.
Ler com imagens e links em: http://virtual-illusion.blogspot.pt/2...
December 17, 2012
I've done some heavy reading on both evolutionary and artistic theory before and felt interested in some melding of the two, but Rothenberg really misses the mark through his lack of organization and muddled goals. It's an unsuccessful bridge of the disciplines.
January 19, 2023
It's interesting reading a book which gets such a low score on Goodreads. Other reviewers call it rambling, incoherent, and repetitive; they say that it asks questions but never answers them; that it starts off interesting but quickly devolves into tedium.
Those other reviewers are right, but I actually kind of enjoyed the book anyway. Or at least I learned some things from it. I wouldn't recommend reading it, but it did contain a couple interesting ideas.
Ostensibly, the book is about the evolution of beauty: how do humans and other species perceive beauty, and are there any commonalities between species? If there are, what constraints in nature cause different animals to evolve similar sense of beauty? These are interesting questions, which the author introduces in the first chapter. But then, instead of attempting to answer them, he spends the rest of the book musing on history of science and philosophy of art.
Problems with the book:
1. The biggest problem is that it starts out sounding like a pop science book, but as soon as you get past the first chapter, you realize it's not. Like, the first chapter reads like a completely ordinary pop science intro: clear, easy-to-read prose; a concrete motivating example (the bowerbirds, a species of bird which makes art); and an interesting scientific question. So you expect the author to follow this up with standard pop science content: summaries of experiments that researchers have done, followed by explanations of their results. But Rothenberg hardly does any of that; instead, the rest of the book reads more like a lit review, basically just talking about what other scientists and artists have already said on the topic.
2. The second problem is that it's just poorly written. The writing style tends to be more "musing" than "argumentative", by which I mean, Rothenberg doesn't lay out a clear thesis and then try to defend it; instead, he just sort of wanders from point to point, roughly staying on topic within a given chapter, but with no obvious structure. If you try very hard, you can extract some sort of argument out of what he's saying, but this is nontrivial, and requires a lot of exertion on the part of the reader.
3. Also, the text tends to be very abstract and philosophical, without many concrete examples. Which I'm ok with in general, but in this book it created two problems: (a) these abstract, philosophical comments might work ok if organized into a clear and coherent argument, but just ended up being sort of incoherent and incomprehensible when placed in Rothenberg's flitting, musing style that jumps lightly from topic to topic; and (b) the first chapter really made it seem like this was going to be a light, fluffy pop science text, so I was disappointed to have lots of incomprehensible abstract morass to wade through.
4. Since each chapter was just musing on past literature, with lots of long, detailed quotes from other writers, and since Rothenberg's abstract, rambling prose was often so difficult to make sense of, it often just felt like his writing was some sort of sawdust-and-glue filler intended to pad the space between the quotes he was using.
5. In Rothenberg's defense, I don't think he wrote this book in haste. I don't think he was just trying to pad the word count as quickly as possible prior to some publication deadline. I think he is extremely sincere, and this really is the book he intended to write. He defends his own rambling, musing style, saying that he's not so much intending to educate as to inspire. On the last page of the book, he writes: "I almost want to just sing out the praises of these patterns rather than explain them to you. In the end I am a bad explainer, a mediocre storyteller, but an enthusiastic reveler – just pay attention, open your mouth in astonishment, and let the beautiful touch you, if not consume you." An admirably honest statement, and a fine sentiment, I suppose, but Rothenberg just isn't a good enough writer to pull it off. Someone like Carl Sagan or Loren Eiseley could ramble and have it be uplifting and inspiring. David Rothenberg cannot.
Stuff I learned (science):
Anyway, all of that said, I actually did learn a decent amount from reading this book, so let me list some of the facts I learned / ideas I encountered:
* Humans are not the only animals which make art. There is also a bird called the bowerbird, which builds complicated bowers to attract mates, and decorates them with blue objects from its environment. These bowers serve no functional purpose; they are not used for nests, or shelters, or anything else; the males simply build them to appeal to the females. Other animals do aesthetic displays – peacocks have beautiful feathers, nightingales sing beautiful songs, other birds do beautiful dances – but bowerbirds are the only other creature to actually construct an object, that is separate from their own body, purely for its artistic merit.
* Bowerbirds' bowers are part of their mating display; the males construct them for the purpose of attracting a female. So when we, as humans, are thinking about the internal, subjective experiences of these birds, there's a tendency to think just in terms of mating: to assume that, when the female bowerbird sees a male's bower, what she feels is something akin to horniness. Rothenberg argues that actually, what the female bowerbird experiences is something more akin to a sense of beauty. Over the millennia, bowerbirds have evolved an aesthetic, artistic sense which leads them to prefer some bowers over others, and this is not dissimilar from humans' appreciation of artwork. I had not considered this idea before, and so I found it very interesting.
* Once we consider that animals might possess a sense of aesthetics, we can ask: how might this differ across species? Are there commonalities in what different animals find beautiful? Rothenberg notes that birdsong slowed down sounds much like whalesong sped up. Why did these two very disparate species evolve similar-sounding songs? How do animals' senses of aesthetics evolve in general?
* This is when Rothenberg gets into the lit review. He says that Darwin proposed two mechanisms by which evolution occurred: natural selection and sexual selection. Natural selection is very much based on environmental constraints: traits randomly evolve, and then get selected for (or against) based on what helps the species survive. Sexual selection, on the other hand, is more arbitrary: traits such as the peacock tail evolve simply because the females of the species happen to find them attractive. According to Darwin, this process was completely and totally random. Later, Fisher proposed the idea of "runaway traits", where e.g. female peacocks preferred bigger and bigger tails, leading males to grow bigger and bigger tails, leading to a feedback loop. This adds a little bit of order and reason to the story, but still treats things like specific birdsongs as arbitrary.
* Rothenberg notes that this view (that sexual selection is arbitrary) is uncommon, or even heretical, in modern biology. Modern biologists tend to follow the view of Zahavi, who proposed that sexual selection is actually just a subset of natural selection, and that males are really just signaling their genetic fitness; for instance, a male peacock's tail is a costly signal of his health, since it shows that he has excess bodily resources to devote to such a display. Proponents of this viewpoint believe that most of what's interesting about sexual selection can be explained by natural selection. Rothenberg disagrees.
* Then Rothenberg discusses an ornithologist named Richard Prum, who is apparently one of the few biologists to go against Zahavi's orthodoxy. Prum believes that the laws of physics impose certain constraints, restricting which sorts of patterns can evolve in nature. For instance, Prum studies the coloring of birds' feathers, explaining which sort of patterns can arise, using a variant of Turing's spots-and-stripes equations. And throughout the book, Rothenberg also mentions a few other physical constraints, such as patterns in how an animal's horns can curl. However, within those physical constraints, Prum believes that it truly is arbitrary how any particular species's sense of aesthetics will evolve.
* Rothenberg disagrees. He thinks there are patterns, that certain aesthetic preferences get repeated across species, and that these reveal some sort of universal tendency towards certain aesthetic judgments. Otherwise, why would whalesong sound so much like birdsong?
* Frustratingly, Rothenberg makes almost no arguments in favor of his position. He devotes lots and lots of text to arguing against others' positions, but instead of defending his own point of view, he mostly just... states what he believes, over and over again. This is particularly frustrating when his viewpoint is so easy to defend! I can think of all sorts of ways that aesthetic universals might arise. (a) For instance, perhaps there are constants within neural wiring, such that animals' senses of aesthetics are biased in a certain direction. (b) Or perhaps there are constants in our perceptual systems, which make certain things easier to perceive. For instance, in human eyesight, the four primary colors are the ones which are easiest to perceive, and it would be hard to imagine this not shaping our aesthetics at all. © Or perhaps our senses of aesthetics are heavily shaped by nature, and we're mostly likely to find things beautiful when they're common (or uncommon) in the natural world; this could explain how all species' senses of aesthetics might coevolve. These are three random hypotheses that were essentially trivial to pull out of my ass. Obviously they're pure speculation, but Rothenberg doesn't shy away from speculation, so I am led to conclude that he simply has a malfunctioning ass.
Stuff I learned (art):
So that's what I learned about science from reading this book (it wasn't much). Perhaps more interesting is what I learned about art.
* Rothenberg is a proponent of modern art, but he takes care to distinguish between two trends in 20th-century art: (1) the infamous "what is art?" sort of pieces, like Duchamp's urinal or John Cage's silent piece of music, and (2) abstract art, like Jackson Pollock's chaotic splattered paintings – things which are not representational, but instead explore the beauty in patterns, textures, shapes, and colors. Rothenberg is critical of the "what is art?" stuff, but is a big fan of abstract art, saying that it has extended our concept of art, helping us to recognize more things as beautiful. Now that our concept of art has expanded to include things like twigs and branches arranged in a pleasing manner, or shapes arranged artfully on a canvas, we can look at nature and come to recognize things in it as art, when we wouldn't have before. (He gives the example of artists who make temporary outdoor sculptures out of twigs, leaves, rocks, and so on, noting that these are (a) beautiful and (b) really not too far off from what bowerbirds are doing.)
* While discussing these topics, Rothenberg gives a quick overview of some of the big trends in modern art; as I've never studied modern art before, I found this really interesting. He talks about artists such as Piet Mondrian, Max Bill, and the Bauhaus movement, who wanted to abstract art away into the purest, simplest mathematical forms, or to develop a visual grammar of aesthetics. These artists liked straight lines and clear geometry, and had detailed philosophies underlying their work. Then there were other artists, like Jackson Pollock, who simply splattered paint on a canvas, but in such a way that there were still underlying geometric regularities.
* Interestingly, Rothenberg finds all of this art genuinely beautiful. And he holds the (according to him) "old-fashioned" view that art should be beautiful, that it should drawer the viewer in, and have some inherent visual appeal, even before the viewer knows what it means or how it fits into the history of the art world. In contrast, he describes the views of an art philosopher named Danto, who said that anything could be art, if the art community was willing to accept it as such; it's art if you place it in a gallery and interact with it as art. Danto thinks that our senses of what is art evolve arbitrarily; he's the art theory counterpart to biologist Richard Prum. Rothenberg disagrees with Danto.
* Rothenberg also has lots of thoughts on the relationship between art and science. He seems to view them as equal but opposite forces in our society, things which are inherently pitted against one another, even as he argues for a closer cooperation between them.
* Although he insists loudly that he does think science can explain the evolution of aesthetics, if scientists would only ask the right questions, his prose is constantly peppered with framings which make it sound like science and art are two separate lines of inquiry, that science can't explain spiritual things like beauty, that scientific explanations are necessarily mechanistic and joy-sucking, and that reason and emotion are separate domains – old ideas which really don't belong here. It almost seems like Rothenberg is trying to convince himself that he doesn't believe these anymore, but they keep slipping through in the way he writes. For example:
p37: "No one who feels emotion or admiration in the face of beauty really wants it to be explained away by science. The testing and statistical analysis that characterize modern scientific reason can easily want to tear beauty up into its tiniest components."
p71: "But how much do we need to find a reason for beauty? No adaptive explanation, no matter how ingenious, can eras the sheer magnificence of what nature has managed to evolve. The progress of science must find a way to acknowledge such an insight."
* One of his main ideas in the book is that art should influence science more. He notes that science has influenced art plenty; lots of artists have taken inspiration from the beauty of organic forms, or have used ideas from science in their artistic creation. But, according to him, there have been fewer occasions when art has deeply influenced science. Over and over again, he declares that art should influence science, that it can influence science, and yet he gives almost no examples of where it has. He talks about one artistic experiment, using something called "sonoluminescence", where sound vibrations excite a chemical into giving off light; an artist worked with chemists on this project, and together they ended up advancing the field's knowledge of how sonoluminescence can work. Yet this is just one meager, paltry example. Given how strongly Rothenberg insists that art should have a place in science, you'd think he could come up with more! (One wonders, for instance, what he might think of the modern neural-network-generated art, and how this has advanced the state of machine learning.) It feels like he is almost pleading with science to consider art as a source of inspiration.
Quick chapter summaries:
Because I am a compulsive note-taker...
Chapter 1: introduced bowerbirds; introduced the idea that animals might have a sense of aesthetics; asked the question of how this might have evolved.
Chapter 2: this was the least coherent chapter. He states the big ideas of the book, then does some lit review on early scientists and their relationship to art/beauty, focusing on Darwin and a few of his early successors, Haeckel, Bolsche, and Thompson, all of which (according to Rothenberg) had an appreciation for beauty which later scientists lacked.
Chapter 3: talked about Richard Prum, Zahavi, and the question of whether sexual selection truly is arbitrary.
Chapter 4: talked about the history and philosophy of modern art.
Chapter 5: talked about camouflage: both the type that blends in with one's surroundings, and another type, like dazzle camouflage for WWI ships, which is very visible but confuses the eye into being unable to follow what's going on. Talks about squids and their remarkable camouflage/color-changing abilities. Argues (unconvincingly) that there's no clear line between coloring which is intended to stand out and coloring which is intended to blend in.
Chapter 6: talks about the relationship between art and science; spends most of the chapter quoting famous scientists and exploring their viewpoints on this topic. Argues that science and art can work together, which, of course they can; this only seems like an issue in Rothenberg's weird view where science and art are these two opposite poles in society.
Chapter 7: talks about a new, even more modern form of art: "relational art", where the art can simply be an interaction between performers and visitors to the gallery; there does not have to be any physical object involved. Tries (unconvincingly) to connect the ideas of relational art to a different trend: human zookeepers encouraging or training elephants to produce paintings.
Chapter 8: talks about cave paintings; asks what they can teach us about the fundamentals of human art. Doesn't really answer this question, but says that cave paintings incorporate "phosphenes", basic geometric images of the sort which appear when one closes one's eyes. Then talks about neuroscientists who are trying to study aesthetic perception; they in fact use abstract art because it's easier to control and vary in their experiments.
Chapter 9: talks about artists who are incorporating modern science into their works (via things like computer-generated imagery, cellular automata, etc.), and then concludes.
Anyway, don't read this book; it's not worth anyone's time.
Those other reviewers are right, but I actually kind of enjoyed the book anyway. Or at least I learned some things from it. I wouldn't recommend reading it, but it did contain a couple interesting ideas.
Ostensibly, the book is about the evolution of beauty: how do humans and other species perceive beauty, and are there any commonalities between species? If there are, what constraints in nature cause different animals to evolve similar sense of beauty? These are interesting questions, which the author introduces in the first chapter. But then, instead of attempting to answer them, he spends the rest of the book musing on history of science and philosophy of art.
Problems with the book:
1. The biggest problem is that it starts out sounding like a pop science book, but as soon as you get past the first chapter, you realize it's not. Like, the first chapter reads like a completely ordinary pop science intro: clear, easy-to-read prose; a concrete motivating example (the bowerbirds, a species of bird which makes art); and an interesting scientific question. So you expect the author to follow this up with standard pop science content: summaries of experiments that researchers have done, followed by explanations of their results. But Rothenberg hardly does any of that; instead, the rest of the book reads more like a lit review, basically just talking about what other scientists and artists have already said on the topic.
2. The second problem is that it's just poorly written. The writing style tends to be more "musing" than "argumentative", by which I mean, Rothenberg doesn't lay out a clear thesis and then try to defend it; instead, he just sort of wanders from point to point, roughly staying on topic within a given chapter, but with no obvious structure. If you try very hard, you can extract some sort of argument out of what he's saying, but this is nontrivial, and requires a lot of exertion on the part of the reader.
3. Also, the text tends to be very abstract and philosophical, without many concrete examples. Which I'm ok with in general, but in this book it created two problems: (a) these abstract, philosophical comments might work ok if organized into a clear and coherent argument, but just ended up being sort of incoherent and incomprehensible when placed in Rothenberg's flitting, musing style that jumps lightly from topic to topic; and (b) the first chapter really made it seem like this was going to be a light, fluffy pop science text, so I was disappointed to have lots of incomprehensible abstract morass to wade through.
4. Since each chapter was just musing on past literature, with lots of long, detailed quotes from other writers, and since Rothenberg's abstract, rambling prose was often so difficult to make sense of, it often just felt like his writing was some sort of sawdust-and-glue filler intended to pad the space between the quotes he was using.
5. In Rothenberg's defense, I don't think he wrote this book in haste. I don't think he was just trying to pad the word count as quickly as possible prior to some publication deadline. I think he is extremely sincere, and this really is the book he intended to write. He defends his own rambling, musing style, saying that he's not so much intending to educate as to inspire. On the last page of the book, he writes: "I almost want to just sing out the praises of these patterns rather than explain them to you. In the end I am a bad explainer, a mediocre storyteller, but an enthusiastic reveler – just pay attention, open your mouth in astonishment, and let the beautiful touch you, if not consume you." An admirably honest statement, and a fine sentiment, I suppose, but Rothenberg just isn't a good enough writer to pull it off. Someone like Carl Sagan or Loren Eiseley could ramble and have it be uplifting and inspiring. David Rothenberg cannot.
Stuff I learned (science):
Anyway, all of that said, I actually did learn a decent amount from reading this book, so let me list some of the facts I learned / ideas I encountered:
* Humans are not the only animals which make art. There is also a bird called the bowerbird, which builds complicated bowers to attract mates, and decorates them with blue objects from its environment. These bowers serve no functional purpose; they are not used for nests, or shelters, or anything else; the males simply build them to appeal to the females. Other animals do aesthetic displays – peacocks have beautiful feathers, nightingales sing beautiful songs, other birds do beautiful dances – but bowerbirds are the only other creature to actually construct an object, that is separate from their own body, purely for its artistic merit.
* Bowerbirds' bowers are part of their mating display; the males construct them for the purpose of attracting a female. So when we, as humans, are thinking about the internal, subjective experiences of these birds, there's a tendency to think just in terms of mating: to assume that, when the female bowerbird sees a male's bower, what she feels is something akin to horniness. Rothenberg argues that actually, what the female bowerbird experiences is something more akin to a sense of beauty. Over the millennia, bowerbirds have evolved an aesthetic, artistic sense which leads them to prefer some bowers over others, and this is not dissimilar from humans' appreciation of artwork. I had not considered this idea before, and so I found it very interesting.
* Once we consider that animals might possess a sense of aesthetics, we can ask: how might this differ across species? Are there commonalities in what different animals find beautiful? Rothenberg notes that birdsong slowed down sounds much like whalesong sped up. Why did these two very disparate species evolve similar-sounding songs? How do animals' senses of aesthetics evolve in general?
* This is when Rothenberg gets into the lit review. He says that Darwin proposed two mechanisms by which evolution occurred: natural selection and sexual selection. Natural selection is very much based on environmental constraints: traits randomly evolve, and then get selected for (or against) based on what helps the species survive. Sexual selection, on the other hand, is more arbitrary: traits such as the peacock tail evolve simply because the females of the species happen to find them attractive. According to Darwin, this process was completely and totally random. Later, Fisher proposed the idea of "runaway traits", where e.g. female peacocks preferred bigger and bigger tails, leading males to grow bigger and bigger tails, leading to a feedback loop. This adds a little bit of order and reason to the story, but still treats things like specific birdsongs as arbitrary.
* Rothenberg notes that this view (that sexual selection is arbitrary) is uncommon, or even heretical, in modern biology. Modern biologists tend to follow the view of Zahavi, who proposed that sexual selection is actually just a subset of natural selection, and that males are really just signaling their genetic fitness; for instance, a male peacock's tail is a costly signal of his health, since it shows that he has excess bodily resources to devote to such a display. Proponents of this viewpoint believe that most of what's interesting about sexual selection can be explained by natural selection. Rothenberg disagrees.
* Then Rothenberg discusses an ornithologist named Richard Prum, who is apparently one of the few biologists to go against Zahavi's orthodoxy. Prum believes that the laws of physics impose certain constraints, restricting which sorts of patterns can evolve in nature. For instance, Prum studies the coloring of birds' feathers, explaining which sort of patterns can arise, using a variant of Turing's spots-and-stripes equations. And throughout the book, Rothenberg also mentions a few other physical constraints, such as patterns in how an animal's horns can curl. However, within those physical constraints, Prum believes that it truly is arbitrary how any particular species's sense of aesthetics will evolve.
* Rothenberg disagrees. He thinks there are patterns, that certain aesthetic preferences get repeated across species, and that these reveal some sort of universal tendency towards certain aesthetic judgments. Otherwise, why would whalesong sound so much like birdsong?
* Frustratingly, Rothenberg makes almost no arguments in favor of his position. He devotes lots and lots of text to arguing against others' positions, but instead of defending his own point of view, he mostly just... states what he believes, over and over again. This is particularly frustrating when his viewpoint is so easy to defend! I can think of all sorts of ways that aesthetic universals might arise. (a) For instance, perhaps there are constants within neural wiring, such that animals' senses of aesthetics are biased in a certain direction. (b) Or perhaps there are constants in our perceptual systems, which make certain things easier to perceive. For instance, in human eyesight, the four primary colors are the ones which are easiest to perceive, and it would be hard to imagine this not shaping our aesthetics at all. © Or perhaps our senses of aesthetics are heavily shaped by nature, and we're mostly likely to find things beautiful when they're common (or uncommon) in the natural world; this could explain how all species' senses of aesthetics might coevolve. These are three random hypotheses that were essentially trivial to pull out of my ass. Obviously they're pure speculation, but Rothenberg doesn't shy away from speculation, so I am led to conclude that he simply has a malfunctioning ass.
Stuff I learned (art):
So that's what I learned about science from reading this book (it wasn't much). Perhaps more interesting is what I learned about art.
* Rothenberg is a proponent of modern art, but he takes care to distinguish between two trends in 20th-century art: (1) the infamous "what is art?" sort of pieces, like Duchamp's urinal or John Cage's silent piece of music, and (2) abstract art, like Jackson Pollock's chaotic splattered paintings – things which are not representational, but instead explore the beauty in patterns, textures, shapes, and colors. Rothenberg is critical of the "what is art?" stuff, but is a big fan of abstract art, saying that it has extended our concept of art, helping us to recognize more things as beautiful. Now that our concept of art has expanded to include things like twigs and branches arranged in a pleasing manner, or shapes arranged artfully on a canvas, we can look at nature and come to recognize things in it as art, when we wouldn't have before. (He gives the example of artists who make temporary outdoor sculptures out of twigs, leaves, rocks, and so on, noting that these are (a) beautiful and (b) really not too far off from what bowerbirds are doing.)
* While discussing these topics, Rothenberg gives a quick overview of some of the big trends in modern art; as I've never studied modern art before, I found this really interesting. He talks about artists such as Piet Mondrian, Max Bill, and the Bauhaus movement, who wanted to abstract art away into the purest, simplest mathematical forms, or to develop a visual grammar of aesthetics. These artists liked straight lines and clear geometry, and had detailed philosophies underlying their work. Then there were other artists, like Jackson Pollock, who simply splattered paint on a canvas, but in such a way that there were still underlying geometric regularities.
* Interestingly, Rothenberg finds all of this art genuinely beautiful. And he holds the (according to him) "old-fashioned" view that art should be beautiful, that it should drawer the viewer in, and have some inherent visual appeal, even before the viewer knows what it means or how it fits into the history of the art world. In contrast, he describes the views of an art philosopher named Danto, who said that anything could be art, if the art community was willing to accept it as such; it's art if you place it in a gallery and interact with it as art. Danto thinks that our senses of what is art evolve arbitrarily; he's the art theory counterpart to biologist Richard Prum. Rothenberg disagrees with Danto.
* Rothenberg also has lots of thoughts on the relationship between art and science. He seems to view them as equal but opposite forces in our society, things which are inherently pitted against one another, even as he argues for a closer cooperation between them.
* Although he insists loudly that he does think science can explain the evolution of aesthetics, if scientists would only ask the right questions, his prose is constantly peppered with framings which make it sound like science and art are two separate lines of inquiry, that science can't explain spiritual things like beauty, that scientific explanations are necessarily mechanistic and joy-sucking, and that reason and emotion are separate domains – old ideas which really don't belong here. It almost seems like Rothenberg is trying to convince himself that he doesn't believe these anymore, but they keep slipping through in the way he writes. For example:
p37: "No one who feels emotion or admiration in the face of beauty really wants it to be explained away by science. The testing and statistical analysis that characterize modern scientific reason can easily want to tear beauty up into its tiniest components."
p71: "But how much do we need to find a reason for beauty? No adaptive explanation, no matter how ingenious, can eras the sheer magnificence of what nature has managed to evolve. The progress of science must find a way to acknowledge such an insight."
* One of his main ideas in the book is that art should influence science more. He notes that science has influenced art plenty; lots of artists have taken inspiration from the beauty of organic forms, or have used ideas from science in their artistic creation. But, according to him, there have been fewer occasions when art has deeply influenced science. Over and over again, he declares that art should influence science, that it can influence science, and yet he gives almost no examples of where it has. He talks about one artistic experiment, using something called "sonoluminescence", where sound vibrations excite a chemical into giving off light; an artist worked with chemists on this project, and together they ended up advancing the field's knowledge of how sonoluminescence can work. Yet this is just one meager, paltry example. Given how strongly Rothenberg insists that art should have a place in science, you'd think he could come up with more! (One wonders, for instance, what he might think of the modern neural-network-generated art, and how this has advanced the state of machine learning.) It feels like he is almost pleading with science to consider art as a source of inspiration.
Quick chapter summaries:
Because I am a compulsive note-taker...
Chapter 1: introduced bowerbirds; introduced the idea that animals might have a sense of aesthetics; asked the question of how this might have evolved.
Chapter 2: this was the least coherent chapter. He states the big ideas of the book, then does some lit review on early scientists and their relationship to art/beauty, focusing on Darwin and a few of his early successors, Haeckel, Bolsche, and Thompson, all of which (according to Rothenberg) had an appreciation for beauty which later scientists lacked.
Chapter 3: talked about Richard Prum, Zahavi, and the question of whether sexual selection truly is arbitrary.
Chapter 4: talked about the history and philosophy of modern art.
Chapter 5: talked about camouflage: both the type that blends in with one's surroundings, and another type, like dazzle camouflage for WWI ships, which is very visible but confuses the eye into being unable to follow what's going on. Talks about squids and their remarkable camouflage/color-changing abilities. Argues (unconvincingly) that there's no clear line between coloring which is intended to stand out and coloring which is intended to blend in.
Chapter 6: talks about the relationship between art and science; spends most of the chapter quoting famous scientists and exploring their viewpoints on this topic. Argues that science and art can work together, which, of course they can; this only seems like an issue in Rothenberg's weird view where science and art are these two opposite poles in society.
Chapter 7: talks about a new, even more modern form of art: "relational art", where the art can simply be an interaction between performers and visitors to the gallery; there does not have to be any physical object involved. Tries (unconvincingly) to connect the ideas of relational art to a different trend: human zookeepers encouraging or training elephants to produce paintings.
Chapter 8: talks about cave paintings; asks what they can teach us about the fundamentals of human art. Doesn't really answer this question, but says that cave paintings incorporate "phosphenes", basic geometric images of the sort which appear when one closes one's eyes. Then talks about neuroscientists who are trying to study aesthetic perception; they in fact use abstract art because it's easier to control and vary in their experiments.
Chapter 9: talks about artists who are incorporating modern science into their works (via things like computer-generated imagery, cellular automata, etc.), and then concludes.
Anyway, don't read this book; it's not worth anyone's time.
June 25, 2014
David Rothenberg makes an ambitious attempt to tackle the topic of the relationship between art and science. The book starts off with some interesting question, but quickly becomes a bit repetitive, and Rothenberg's final answers to his questions are simply too vague. Also, the book is a bit sketchy, with long interviews with people who Rothenberg finds worth to quote in lenght, as well as with some parts that read almost like the author's diary or something. Too bad - the first chapter was promising so much more.
February 5, 2013
I understood this to be a book written by an artist not a scientist. I know post Lehrer everyone wants their science served up on a meaty researched plate, but I enjoy Rothenburg's dabbling on the evolution of aesthetics. I enjoyed the meandering. Also I didn't interpret Rothenburg's writing to be arrogant although many people seem to think so.
April 19, 2012
I couldn't even finish this one. What a crock! If the author had been a little less full of himself, maybe I could have made it beyond page 40.
February 13, 2014
Horribly written with no concrete ideas, fluffy filler language and general BS.
Anything can be published now a days apparently.
Horrendous.
Anything can be published now a days apparently.
Horrendous.
December 30, 2020
I thought it’d be similar to Richard O. Prum’s The Evolution of Beauty but I was severely wrong. The author was repetitive and never really made any point before he rambled for pages of different bird’s same categorized activity. I’m as interested in evolution as I can be but this book really exhausted my patience and curiosity when I was not even half way thru.
What bothers me a ton more is that this author doesn’t even major/expert in any fields that are remotely related to biology/natural history/ornithology. If you prefer reading carefully researched theories logically and professionally supported by valid and clear evidence, don’t waste your time.
What bothers me a ton more is that this author doesn’t even major/expert in any fields that are remotely related to biology/natural history/ornithology. If you prefer reading carefully researched theories logically and professionally supported by valid and clear evidence, don’t waste your time.
Read
April 12, 2022Profound. I’ll never view nature (including human animals) and/or art in the same way. Highly recommended.
January 8, 2015
A fascinating book. Rothenberg admits near the end that he's not a storyteller, and the book does meander a bit. At times, it errs on the side of skipping lightly across philosophy and science rather than digging into the meat of the matters, at least to my taste. But Rothenberg's stated goal is to spark wonder and appreciation, not to make an ironclad argument, and in that he certainly succeeds.
The central question of the book (is sexual selection simply a special, semi-random subset of natural selection, or is there some additional mechanism -- an 'aesthetic selection' -- that guides life towards beauty?) is answered 'probably the latter', but Rothenberg can only begin to grapple with what that additional mechanism might be, and how it might work. The problem is that there's really not much agreement (among artists or scientists) on what 'aesthetics' is, except in very vague terms like 'balance, but not too much balance', or 'you know it if you see it'. What Rothenberg has done is gather a rogue's gallery of artists and scientists who have wrestled with the question, presenting their opinions and findings, and it's great stuff. Some of the most intriguing bits:
- The researcher into birdsong who suggested that truly great art, among humans and other animals, might lie at the intersection of 'popular' and 'skilled'
- The MRI researcher who found that beautiful works activate areas of the brain associated with 'reward', while 'ugly' works activate areas associated with 'movement' (presumably to get away?)
- The result, found across several disciplines, that humans particularly enjoy works that have a fractal dimensionality of 1.5
- That 'abstract' visual art may have appeal because it is processed primarily by the more 'basic' parts of our visual cortex that process edges and curves, rather than 'higher-level' neurons that identify objects.
The central question of the book (is sexual selection simply a special, semi-random subset of natural selection, or is there some additional mechanism -- an 'aesthetic selection' -- that guides life towards beauty?) is answered 'probably the latter', but Rothenberg can only begin to grapple with what that additional mechanism might be, and how it might work. The problem is that there's really not much agreement (among artists or scientists) on what 'aesthetics' is, except in very vague terms like 'balance, but not too much balance', or 'you know it if you see it'. What Rothenberg has done is gather a rogue's gallery of artists and scientists who have wrestled with the question, presenting their opinions and findings, and it's great stuff. Some of the most intriguing bits:
- The researcher into birdsong who suggested that truly great art, among humans and other animals, might lie at the intersection of 'popular' and 'skilled'
- The MRI researcher who found that beautiful works activate areas of the brain associated with 'reward', while 'ugly' works activate areas associated with 'movement' (presumably to get away?)
- The result, found across several disciplines, that humans particularly enjoy works that have a fractal dimensionality of 1.5
- That 'abstract' visual art may have appeal because it is processed primarily by the more 'basic' parts of our visual cortex that process edges and curves, rather than 'higher-level' neurons that identify objects.
March 27, 2012
I picked this book up because it seemed like it would be an interesting read. While I think the author makes several good points about sexual selection being too narrow to accurately understand evolutionary designs like the peacock's tail or the cuttlefish's natural ability for camouflage. However, the chapters either felt like individual short articles or repeated themselves alittle too much. Not the most coherent book, but does raise some interesting thought points.
June 24, 2013
Some parts of this were really engaging but he got a bit too side tracked and I think lost his audience through much of this book. I couldn't find any evidence, any "points", or even any real connection to this book for some reason, other than the bowerbird parts and few bits about the arts.
August 13, 2016
Boring. Sweeping generalizations about the philosophy of science but no science. Returned skimmed.
June 30, 2012
A beautiful book and provocative.
May 17, 2012
I did try with this, but gave up. It rambles incoherently and had arrived nowhere by the time I lost patience.
May 20, 2015
Love the topic, not the book.
December 20, 2019
This book is most interesting when it is sharing stories from nature about how animals behave in ways that would suggest they have a human-like appreciation for the beautiful. His thesis here is that sexual selection is not subsumed beneath natural selection but that instead animals and nature as a whole select for beauty. The standard view would be that sexual selection is subsumed under natural selection and that the whims of females in selecting males for gaudy display, for example, are only carried forward through the evolutionary time periods if they are also indicative of a greater ability to survive. Rothenberg things that sexual selection selects for beauty and that it does this regardless of any connection to survival of the fittest. In other words, nature preserves beauty.
There are a lot of arguments that come to mind that run counter to this view, and these are not addressed in the book. The argument Rothenberg attempts to build is rather incoherent and the evidence he offers seems rather often to support the idea of natural selection as the main engine of evolution than it supports his idea that there is something in nature that loves beauty. He accepts Darwinism but thinks sexual selection is not just part of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. In sexual selection he sees a mechanism that reveals animals have an aesthetic sense that seeks to preserve what is beautiful and not just what is useful. As often happens when a writer is still doing his thinking while writing, the experience for the reader is not always pleasant. The book meanders and takes a long time to make its points. It fails to form a coherent whole and so left me feeling interested but not at all convinced.
There are a lot of arguments that come to mind that run counter to this view, and these are not addressed in the book. The argument Rothenberg attempts to build is rather incoherent and the evidence he offers seems rather often to support the idea of natural selection as the main engine of evolution than it supports his idea that there is something in nature that loves beauty. He accepts Darwinism but thinks sexual selection is not just part of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. In sexual selection he sees a mechanism that reveals animals have an aesthetic sense that seeks to preserve what is beautiful and not just what is useful. As often happens when a writer is still doing his thinking while writing, the experience for the reader is not always pleasant. The book meanders and takes a long time to make its points. It fails to form a coherent whole and so left me feeling interested but not at all convinced.
December 30, 2020
I fluctuated between giving this book a review of 2 and 5 (so ended in the middle). Sections of the book were difficult to follow and lacked clarity while other sections of the book I was completely emersed in.
The concept of accepting beauty for beauty sake without labelling or justifying it, is a revelation. Not all art can be explained away with natural section or even sexual selection; evolution is messy and has taken turns and twists on a long journey and the end result may not be obvious why it has developed in that way. Furthermore trying to combine art and science may be the key in our advancement and the two fields do not need to be in battle.
What threw me was how animals such as the bowerbird, elephants and cuttlefish may be creating art for beauty sake, implying that art may be primitive, instinctive and impulsive, and science should refrain from always trying to explain beauty just from the lens of sexual selection and environmental adaptation.
David gave insight into what the next generation of art might look like for us humans, suggesting it might be based on emotional connection and interaction.
The concept of accepting beauty for beauty sake without labelling or justifying it, is a revelation. Not all art can be explained away with natural section or even sexual selection; evolution is messy and has taken turns and twists on a long journey and the end result may not be obvious why it has developed in that way. Furthermore trying to combine art and science may be the key in our advancement and the two fields do not need to be in battle.
What threw me was how animals such as the bowerbird, elephants and cuttlefish may be creating art for beauty sake, implying that art may be primitive, instinctive and impulsive, and science should refrain from always trying to explain beauty just from the lens of sexual selection and environmental adaptation.
David gave insight into what the next generation of art might look like for us humans, suggesting it might be based on emotional connection and interaction.
January 25, 2020
I read Richard Prum's Evolution of Beauty and Denis Dutton's Art Instinct a while ago and wasn't really too impressed with either one. I was hoping this guy would do a better job with these subjects. He actually does talk quite a bit about Prum and Dutton's stuff in here but I didn't find his ideas any more convincing than theirs. He says a lot of things that I ALMOST agree with, not much that I really agree with though. There's just too much b.s. about modern art, philosophical fluff, romanticism, etc. Pretty disappointed with this one.
October 22, 2020
This was not one of the hot reads on the bestseller list but it was an eye-opening and instructive examination of how esthetics plays a role in natural selection. Rothenberg uses numerous examples to demonstrate that there are other factors besides strongest, most prolific, fastest that can determine mate selection and procreation standards. Often it can be the male with the most beautiful song or the animal capable of building the most attractive nest.
March 14, 2022
I see many were critical of this book…I like any book that makes me feel smarter after having read it. Rothenbergs pulling together of others in history who have said and done beautiful work and said beautiful things saved me a lot of time finding them out by myself. So I did feel smarter. I love that the peacock made Darwin sick…
June 1, 2023
This was a good book and simultaneously satisfied my curiosity and answered some of my questions on the connection between beauty, function and mathematics.
Very good book but beyond page 200 it just went on an artistic tangent I found boring.
George Birkhoff's equation on aesthetic value highly interested me. Good book.
Very good book but beyond page 200 it just went on an artistic tangent I found boring.
George Birkhoff's equation on aesthetic value highly interested me. Good book.
September 21, 2020
This book was deeply interesting, but it could have used a proper editor to eliminate the repetition and make the flow make more sense. It really hit it's stride in the second half and I wish the book had started there.
March 1, 2021
Excellent content and interesting claims, but ultimately it meanders and throws out too many premises and comments which show the author doesn't know half the literature he's attempting to contribute to, comment on, or incorporate. Disappointing because it could have been so, so much better.
May 15, 2017
Interesting concept but boring book. Read like a thesis, and I'm not a professor; therefore, I felt no obligation to finish it.
January 15, 2014
Rothenberg picks up Darwin's sexual selection theory and runs with it for awhile. Like Darwin, he argues that there are two fundamental strains in evolutionary development. One is the random mutation and natural selection that most are familiar with. The other is sexual selection for traits that mates find attractive. This part of Darwin's theory does not get much attention. It's the lost child of evolutionary theory. Whereas the former requires that all traits perform a survival function, the latter is based on aesthetic qualities alone. Since these traits have strong aesthetic qualities, Rothenberg prefers "survival of the beautiful" to sexual selection.
While some evolutionary theorists have sexual selection as a subset of natural selection (e.g., seemingly outrageous traits serve as indicators of genetic fitness, or beauty is regarded as a product of camouflage), Rothenberg says that these are different selection processes. Then Rothenberg gets to the main thesis of his book. While aesthetic traits are arbitrary from a natural selection perspective, they are hardly that from an aesthetic perspective. Rather, art and beauty in nature follow basic physical, chemical and mathematical laws of the universe and these rules govern form that is beyond function. Patterns, shapes and color, and symmetry, rhythm, and cadence are "the poetry of natural philosophy." Females like or don't like what they see, mate with those whose traits they like, and aesthetic evolution is off to the races. The sexual selection that occurs is not from the outside, nature, but occurs through sexual partners who develop genetic offspring that embody both the desired trait and a preference for that trait. With beauty, there's competition within each species and ample room for individual members to show special stuff for their prospective mates and this provides for the variation of beauty that we see and evolution's creative edge.
Where humans fit in this picture is not so clear. In fact, I often got lost in this book. My sense is that Rothenberg's argument is about art for art's sake and that, we are, with art, tapping into some of Plato's universal forms of beauty.
The most interesting thing about this book is not art, per se, but what Rothenberg is silent on. If a good part of evolution has not much to do with natural selection, this then seems to undercut the central tenent of mainstream evolutionary theory that the "goal" of evolution is survival of the gene and its movement into the next generation. With sexual selection, natural selection is a non-factor. Males (and females?) seek to attract their mates and this is all about sex for sex sake. But, is it? The traits themselves might have no evolutionary function but if sexual attaction (and therefore, beauty of some sort) helps to promote sexual privileges, would this not be just another way to promote survival of the gene? If this is the case, then artistic creation and appreciation is a byproduct of a process designed to promote movement of genes into the next generation.
While some evolutionary theorists have sexual selection as a subset of natural selection (e.g., seemingly outrageous traits serve as indicators of genetic fitness, or beauty is regarded as a product of camouflage), Rothenberg says that these are different selection processes. Then Rothenberg gets to the main thesis of his book. While aesthetic traits are arbitrary from a natural selection perspective, they are hardly that from an aesthetic perspective. Rather, art and beauty in nature follow basic physical, chemical and mathematical laws of the universe and these rules govern form that is beyond function. Patterns, shapes and color, and symmetry, rhythm, and cadence are "the poetry of natural philosophy." Females like or don't like what they see, mate with those whose traits they like, and aesthetic evolution is off to the races. The sexual selection that occurs is not from the outside, nature, but occurs through sexual partners who develop genetic offspring that embody both the desired trait and a preference for that trait. With beauty, there's competition within each species and ample room for individual members to show special stuff for their prospective mates and this provides for the variation of beauty that we see and evolution's creative edge.
Where humans fit in this picture is not so clear. In fact, I often got lost in this book. My sense is that Rothenberg's argument is about art for art's sake and that, we are, with art, tapping into some of Plato's universal forms of beauty.
The most interesting thing about this book is not art, per se, but what Rothenberg is silent on. If a good part of evolution has not much to do with natural selection, this then seems to undercut the central tenent of mainstream evolutionary theory that the "goal" of evolution is survival of the gene and its movement into the next generation. With sexual selection, natural selection is a non-factor. Males (and females?) seek to attract their mates and this is all about sex for sex sake. But, is it? The traits themselves might have no evolutionary function but if sexual attaction (and therefore, beauty of some sort) helps to promote sexual privileges, would this not be just another way to promote survival of the gene? If this is the case, then artistic creation and appreciation is a byproduct of a process designed to promote movement of genes into the next generation.
Want to read
December 8, 2011Book web site: http://bitly.com/sy35Av
"The nerdy mind-set of modernity often suffers allergic outbreaks when confronted with the softer side of cognition. Aesthetic pleasures are then cordoned off from the serious core work of science. But David Rothenberg makes a convincing case that beauty is an intrinsic aspect of reality. He argues, among other things, that without modern art, modern science would have been hobbled by inadequately challenged cognitive habits. Beauty evolved. Perhaps we should take it seriously.
-- Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget"
"The nerdy mind-set of modernity often suffers allergic outbreaks when confronted with the softer side of cognition. Aesthetic pleasures are then cordoned off from the serious core work of science. But David Rothenberg makes a convincing case that beauty is an intrinsic aspect of reality. He argues, among other things, that without modern art, modern science would have been hobbled by inadequately challenged cognitive habits. Beauty evolved. Perhaps we should take it seriously.
-- Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget"
March 28, 2015
I'm only giving this two stars rather than one because it stimulated me to think more about *why* we should find certain aspects of nature beautiful.
Unfortunately, this badly written, self-indulgent book provides no answers or bothers to find out if anyone has come up with any convincing answers.
For the record - bower birds do not make 'art' - a nonsensical premise. The author confuses what humans might find attractive with the intention of the animal.
Unfortunately, this badly written, self-indulgent book provides no answers or bothers to find out if anyone has come up with any convincing answers.
For the record - bower birds do not make 'art' - a nonsensical premise. The author confuses what humans might find attractive with the intention of the animal.
April 25, 2012
The most interesting ideas in this book surround sexual selection in evolution. Specifically, the examples where evolved traits do not relate to signs of fitness (in the chapter "It Could Be Anything"), and selection is happening in the mind of the female based on aesthetics, rather than a contest between males.
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