Beauty Happens
May 8, 2017 7:32 PM   Subscribe

"The central idea that animates the book is a longstanding one that [Richard] Prum has rebranded as the 'Beauty Happens hypothesis.' It starts with animals developing random preferences—for colors, songs, displays, and more—which they use in choosing their mates. Their offspring inherit not only those sexy traits, but also the preference for them. By choosing what they like, choosers transform both the form and the objects of their desires."



"Critically, all of this is arbitrary—not adaptive. Songs and ornaments and dances evolve not because they signal good genes but because animals just like them. They’re not objectively informative; they’re subjectively pleasing. Beauty, in other words, just happens. 'It's a self-organizing process, by which selection will arrive at some standard of beauty all by itself, in the absence of any adaptive benefit—or, indeed, despite maladaptive disadvantage,' says Prum."
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome (24 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
😍
posted by little onion at 7:59 PM on May 8, 2017


I tried to argue with my Animal Diversity teacher about this, trying to make the case that maybe it's not some kind of calculated programmed selfishness that helps drive evolution, but more squishy, feely things like beauty and love.

After all, what makes more sense, to think that a peahen, with its simple little bird brain, is thinking "Ah, this male has a large full tail and good color, this means he is healthy, carries a low parasite load, and has good genetics; therefore, I should chose to mate with him in order that my offspring have a good combination of genes which will help them survive"...

...or, "Ooooh! SEXY!!! ME LOVE YOU!"
posted by The otter lady at 8:14 PM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


The squishy feelings themselves are naturally selected.

Sort of like how evolution makes sex itself feel really good.
posted by Rumple at 8:27 PM on May 8, 2017 [2 favorites]


The squishy feelings themselves are naturally selected.

Sort of like how evolution makes sex itself feel really good.


Today I was watching that video of the sea otter mommy hugging her baby otter sleeping on her belly, and I thought, you could almost literally believe the genetic reductionism narrative that the reason this animal instinctively loves her offspring is because of genes and hormones and that's kind of scary/unsettling, because we think we human beings are so different.
posted by polymodus at 8:41 PM on May 8, 2017


Better is a noun, not an adjective. This was the thesis of Robert Pirsig in Lila, and it's desperately confronting if you're scientifically minded but goddam if it doesn't makes the universe fall into place like nothing else.
posted by Sebmojo at 9:33 PM on May 8, 2017 [1 favorite]


you could almost literally believe the genetic reductionism narrative that the reason this animal instinctively loves her offspring is because of genes and hormones

Anybody who considers a reductionistic analysis of any phenomenon to be "the" reason for it is doing reductionism wrong.

maybe it's not some kind of calculated programmed selfishness that helps drive evolution, but more squishy, feely things like beauty and love

The only things that "drive" evolution are (a) reproduction with variations and (b) death. The interpretation of evolution as a drive toward any given set of outcomes - increasing complexity, or increasing intelligence, or increasing spiritual awareness, for commonly given examples - is, in my view, an egregious misunderstanding of the principle.

Everything, not only beauty, "just happens" and there are non-reductive ways of understanding most things that frequently turn out to be practically applicable even to phenomena whose emergent complexity has rendered any purely reductive analysis completely infeasible.

It ought to be perfectly clear that not every feature that any given life form has evolved is adaptive; some, like the plumbing arrangements shared between food ingestion and breathing in vertebrates, are obviously merely tolerable.

If somebody tries to tell you that vital parts of the human experience such as beauty and love are "mere" epiphenomena that can be "explained" by the "selfish" operation of the "underlying" genetics, or that there's a purely adaptive reason for any particular human feeling or indeed for any feature at all of any particular life form, then all they're doing is revealing the squishiness of their own reasoning.
posted by flabdablet at 9:37 PM on May 8, 2017 [5 favorites]


The interpretation of evolution as a drive toward any given set of outcomes - increasing complexity, or increasing intelligence, or increasing spiritual awareness, for commonly given examples - is, in my view, an egregious misunderstanding of the principle.

I agree, but is that a limitation of the explanatory power of evolution or a limitation of our understanding? It seems well established that life has evolved from more simple to more complex/more particular/more individuated, and we can observe somewhat comparable processes on a cosmic scale. It could have happened differently, perhaps, but it didn't, so to me it's an open question whether this is a necessary development or an arbitrary one -- whether there is some reason for the richness of forms or whether it just happens.
posted by dmh at 2:07 AM on May 9, 2017


Today I was watching that video of the sea otter mommy hugging her baby otter sleeping on her belly, and I thought, you could almost literally believe the genetic reductionism narrative that the reason this animal instinctively loves her offspring is because of genes and hormones and that's kind of scary/unsettling, because we think we human beings are so different.

If it helps - cross species adoption is pretty common in mammals (and sometimes not even of other mammals - to wit, dogs adopting birds).
posted by Deoridhe at 2:29 AM on May 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


I've heard a similar idea to this phrased as the hypothetical “green beard” gene; one which manifests itself (in males) through a vivid green beard and (in females) as a profound attraction to green beards, and thus ensures its own propagation.
posted by acb at 4:09 AM on May 9, 2017


Thanks for this post! I love science and I love beauty, so it's nice to see those two crazy kids getting along again.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:00 AM on May 9, 2017 [1 favorite]


It seems well established that life has evolved from more simple to more complex/more particular/more individuated

I strongly recommend scrutinizing that assumption with an extreme scrute. I expect you'll find it doesn't actually fit reality all that well.

I also used to believe that there was some kind of overall drive toward increasing complexity, but I think that was largely based on musings about possible ways for the whole being-alive project to have got kicked off in the first place. These days I'm paying rather more attention to actual observation of actual life, and I'm now completely unconvinced that there actually exists any reasonable metric for its overall complexity at all, let alone such a metric that displays a long-term tendency to increase.

Biodiversity is at least somewhat measurable, and might be said to serve as a proxy for some kind of overall complexity. And there have been periods in the history of life on earth where biodiversity has been much higher than it is right now, and periods where it's been lower.

There are also plenty of instances of evolutionary arms races, where increasingly subtle attacks get countered by increasingly complex defences; but the thing about arms races is that there's always the possibility that one side or the other will actually win one (often in a somewhat pyrrhic fashion) and render the whole thing unnecessary. So, naturally, there are also plenty of instances of this very thing really happening in real ecologies, bringing on episodes of sudden massive simplification.

It's at least arguable that human-induced climate change is facilitating just such a simplification even as we speak.
posted by flabdablet at 5:46 AM on May 9, 2017 [3 favorites]


One more thing: if it seems to an observer that the further back in history you peer the simpler what you find seems to be, that's only to be expected; everything looks simpler as you get further away from it.
posted by flabdablet at 5:52 AM on May 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


It’s been an uphill struggle, partly because the arbitrary nature of the idea is so distasteful to some. Prum recalls discussing his ideas with a “well-respected, center-of-the-road, evolutionary biologist,” who took it all in and said: But that’s nihilism!

This specifically, and I guess basically the whole article, is a good reminder of how pervasive meaning-finding is in human thought, even among people who have been trained extensively in thinking as objectively as possible. Meaning-finding (or meaning making?) isn't a bad thing; at a lower, material level it gives us the ability to survive, and on a more metaphysical level it gives us the desire to live, but it also sneaks in and assigns meanings that we don't rationally agree with. Like that biologist apparently had tied natural selection to some much deeper idea about the meaning of life in a way that was preventing him from considering this new idea.
posted by bracems at 6:34 AM on May 9, 2017


Part of the resistance to Prum's hypothesis is, according to the article, that some people are resistant to the idea that animals have subjective experiences. This gets back to the "hard problem of consciousness." I have my favored theory about this, but let's just say that anyone who has a dog or has known a dog is pretty certain that they are conscious. They have a subjective live. They are not automatons. The fact that we find some birds especially beautiful does not make our ideas about birds subjective experiences anthropomorphic. Do we not have some common ground, we animals? Do we not bleed?
posted by kozad at 7:16 AM on May 9, 2017


They have a subjective live. They are not automatons.

Why would one assume that an automaton couldn't have subjective experiences?

Speaking as an intricately complex automaton, I certainly do.
posted by flabdablet at 10:48 AM on May 9, 2017


Indeed, can you say that a simple thermostat does not have a subjective experience of the temperature being “under” or “over” its level? It'd be an extremely simple subjective experience, and not one one can anthropomorphise like a mosquito, a dog or a human stranger (and how do you know they have a mind that works like your own?), but, as Daniel Dennett suggested, it would count as a form of binary, one-dimensional consciousness.
posted by acb at 11:01 AM on May 9, 2017


It seems well established that life has evolved from more simple to more complex/more particular/more individuated

Life has done these things, but not only these things. Evolution can and does also move in the opposite direction, resulting in loss of complexity where that becomes advantageous. There are numerous examples in nature.

Rather than seeing evolution as driving towards complexity, it's more like a continual struggle between adaptability and specialisation.

Competition for resources drives specialisation, allowing a species to exploit a particular niche, but this makes the highly specialised species more vulnerable to loss of that niche.

Extinction events [Widespread vulcanism, impact events, major climate change] tend to reduce ecological niches, heavily impacting the highly specialised species that rely on a particular habitat / food source etc.

More adaptable species have a better chance of survival in adverse circumstances, ultimately allowing them to radiate out into more specialised niches in better times.

Humans are an interesting blip in this pattern in that the evolution of intelligence has allowed us to be adaptive specialists, exploiting a wide range of habitats not because of physical specialisation, but because of our mental complexity.

Time will tell if this is viable long-term, or just a blip,
posted by HiroProtagonist at 8:33 PM on May 9, 2017 [2 favorites]


Evolution doesn't evolve towards any sort of optimality. Evolution eliminates local maladaption, but apparently there's a huge range of good enough which survives.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:22 AM on May 10, 2017


HiroProtagonist: Rather than seeing evolution as driving towards complexity, it's more like a continual struggle between adaptability and specialisation.

Nancy Lebovitz: Evolution doesn't evolve towards any sort of optimality

Yes, I agree that is what evolution is. But is that by itself sufficient to explain why we are not all sentient ferns?

What I am trying to get at is not that evolution in itself has a goal or that it has a direction. I don't think it does. It is obvious from the fossil record that there are no guarantees. Species come and go for myriad reasons, none of which suggests any kind of grand design. Still it seems difficult to argue there has been no increase in complexity overall. In some distant past there were no plants, and then at some later time there were. At some point there were no fish and then at some later time there were. We can say that things might have turned out differently, but that's not what happened.
posted by dmh at 12:23 PM on May 10, 2017


Still it seems difficult to argue there has been no increase in complexity overall

I don't think this is what anyone is arguing, and I think it would be an uncontroversial observation, that over the very long [say > 200my] term, in a relatively benign environment[1], one would be more likely to find highly complex organisms in the latter part of that period than the earlier part.

For a long time the only life was simple single celled organisms, now there are many multi-celled organisms, though keep in mind that while the multi-celled organisms are more visible and [to most of us] more interesting, all of them put together are just a tiny fraction of all the biomass of the world. So the 'overall' you use is probably less significant than you're thinking.

People familiar with evolution are wary of the kind of statements you've made because it is very easy [and common] to think of evolution as driving toward some goal of better, faster, more complex, more like us...

In evolution there is only one success: Living long enough to produce viable offspring, and on that scale, a bacterium in a cesspit is more successful than childless me.

[1] If there's life on Mars, I doubt you'd see much change in overall complexity over the last 500my, due to the harshness of the environment.
posted by HiroProtagonist at 9:37 PM on May 10, 2017


while the multi-celled organisms are more visible and [to most of us] more interesting, all of them put together are just a tiny fraction of all the biomass of the world

...and the more we investigate the structure and function of communities of single-celled organisms, the more complexity we find.

It's by no means a given that any reasonably well-defined metrics for overall complexity or even overall degree of organization have, in fact, been increasing since the first emergence of such communities billions of years ago.
posted by flabdablet at 11:06 PM on May 10, 2017


Also, given the sheer scale of the microbiome, it's at least plausible to me that all of the complexity we perceive in the macrobiome could amount to rounding errors in the complexity of life as a whole.
posted by flabdablet at 11:12 PM on May 10, 2017


For a long time the only life was simple single celled organisms, now there are many multi-celled organisms

...and because of the inherent sketchiness of the fossil record, we really have no idea how the complexity of those organisms' ecologies have changed over time.

We also don't know what impact the advent of multicellular lifeforms had on the organization of the unicellular communities that preceded them.

What looks to us like a vastly complex macroecology might well represent a streamlining and rationalization of the bacterial public transport system.
posted by flabdablet at 11:21 PM on May 10, 2017


If there's life on Mars, I doubt you'd see much change in overall complexity over the last 500my, due to the harshness of the environment

A principle akin to Parkinson's Law, that life expands to exploit the resources available, seems plausible to me; and it would seem to follow from that that while the relative harshness of two environments might give you some idea of the relative complexity of the ecosystems you might find in them, it wouldn't necessarily have much to say about how that complexity is likely to have changed over time in either.

And again, since the complexity any given observer will observe is so heavily dependent on which details they choose to ignore, I'm still not convinced that there even exists any objective standard for measuring total ecosystem complexity, let alone for making definitive claims about whether it's increasing or not.
posted by flabdablet at 4:09 AM on May 11, 2017


« Older Gas tank on E but all drinks on me   |   "How can I keep from singing..." Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments