The Friday Fillip: Immortal Hand or Eye?

• Author: Simon Fodden
• Date: January 16, 2015

What is it about beauty? You can’t eat it. You can’t spend it. You can’t get agreement on it. Yes, what is beauty, anyway?

Some would say it depends on whom you ask — that is, that beauty lies, well, not in the holder but in the beholder, a projection, in effect. Others would espouse a version of that in which the beholder is an entire culture and beauty is a matter of group-think. Still others go even wider, making beauty a phenom of nature, which is more or less to say that beauty is an objective reality at least in the biosphere.

It’s this last view that interests me today. What is nature doing with beauty — if, indeed, it’s doing anything at all with it? Well, assuming for the moment that nature is implicated, the answer would be “using it,” because nature, disciplined by simply everything including its own self, does not have the resources to mess about for no reason at all.

There are scientists looking into this. The science of beauty sounds like a contradiction in terms, doesn’t it? Makes you want to say something like, “Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!“. The ducks probably feel that way about Richard Prum. He’s an evolutionary ornithologist (see why science is cool? I mean, what are you? a lawyer — plonk). And he’s into duck sex. The study thereof. He’s got a piece on Edge called Duck Sex, Aesthetic Evolution, and the Origin of Beauty. (As with most Edge material, you’ll find a video and an audio recording as well via that link.) His thesis, broadly put is:

The world looks the way it does and is the way it is because of their vital importance as sources of selection in organic diversity, and as a result we need to structure evolutionary biology to recognize the aesthetic, recognize the subjective experience [of beauty].

He’s tackling the matter of beauty and ornamentation in the business of sexual selection, which is not the same as natural selection. The latter has you surviving (or not) long enough to get to the dance; sexual selection has you going home (or not) with someone, whether or not you brung them to it. Prum wants to re-invigorate Darwin’s original position with regard to sexual selection, his “broader aesthetic perspective that recognizes that sensory delight, attraction.” At the moment it seems that most biologists favour Wallace’s notion of ornament: that it serves to advertise reproductive fitness in some important respect, and that a mate’s response is largely unconscious, indeed, determined by biology.

I won’t rehearse...