The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World (61 page)

It is another regularity in nature. What is the explanation? Why are flowers beautiful?

Given the prevailing assumptions in the scientific community – which are still rather empiricist and reductionist – it may seem plausible that flowers are not objectively beautiful, and that their attractiveness is merely a cultural phenomenon. But I think that that fails closer inspection. We find flowers beautiful that we have never seen before, and which have not been known to our culture before – and quite reliably, for most humans in most cultures. The same is not true of the
roots
of plants, or the leaves. Why only the flowers?

One unusual aspect of the flower–insect co-evolution is that it involved the creation of a complex code, or language, for signalling information between
species
. It had to be complex because the genes were facing a difficult communication problem. The code had to be, on the one hand, easily recognizable by the right insects, and, on the other, difficult to forge by other species of flower – for if other species could cause their pollen to be spread by the same insects without having to manufacture nectar for them, which requires energy, they would have a selective advantage. So the criterion that was evolving in the insects had to be discriminating enough to pick the right flowers and not crude imitations; and the flowers’ design had to be such that no design that other flower species could easily evolve could be mistaken for it. Thus both the criterion and the means of meeting it had to be hard to vary.

When genes are facing a similar problem
within
a species, notably in the co-evolution of criteria and characteristics for choosing mates, they already have a large amount of shared genetic knowledge to draw on. For instance, even before any such co-evolution begins, the genome may already contain adaptations for recognizing fellow members of the species, and for detecting various attributes of them. Moreover, the attributes that a mate is searching for may initially be objectively useful ones – such as neck length in a giraffe. One theory of the evolution of giraffe necks is that it began as an adaptation for feeding, but then continued through sexual selection. However, there is no such shared knowledge to build on across the gap between distant species. They are starting from scratch.

And therefore my guess is that the easiest way to signal across such a gap with hard-to-forge patterns designed to be recognized by hard-to-emulate pattern-matching algorithms is to use
objective
standards of beauty. So flowers have to create objective beauty, and insects have to recognize objective beauty. Consequently the only species that are attracted by flowers are the insect species that co-evolved to do so – and humans.

If true, this means that Dawkins’ daughter was partly right about the flowers after all. They
are
there to make the world pretty; or, at least, prettiness is no accidental side effect but is what they specifically evolved to have. Not because anything intended the world to be pretty, but because the best-replicating genes depend on embodying
objective prettiness
to get themselves replicated. The case of honey, for instance, is very different. The reason that honey – which is sugar water – is easy for flowers and bees to make, and why its taste is attractive to humans and insects alike, is that we
do
all have a shared genetic heritage going back to our common ancestor and before, which includes biochemical knowledge about many uses of sugar, and the means to recognize it.

Could it be that what humans find attractive in flowers – or in art – is indeed objective, but it is not objective
beauty
? Perhaps it is something more mundane – something like a liking for bright colours, strong contrasts, symmetrical shapes. Humans seem to have an inborn liking for symmetry. It is thought to be a factor in sexual attractiveness, and it may also be useful in helping us to classify things and to organize our environment physically and conceptually. So a side effect of these
inborn preferences might be a liking for flowers, which happen to be colourful and symmetrical. However, some flowers are white (at least to us – they may have colours that we cannot see and insects can), but we still find their shapes beautiful. All flowers do contrast with their background in some sense – that is a precondition for being used for signalling – but a spider in the bath contrasts with its background even more, and there is no widespread consensus that such a sight is beautiful. As for symmetry: again, spiders are quite symmetrical, while some flowers, such as orchids, are very unsymmetrical, yet we do not find them any less attractive for that. So I do not think that symmetry, colour and contrast are all that we are seeing in flowers when we imagine that we are seeing beauty.

A sort of mirror image of that objection is that there are other things in nature that we also find beautiful – things that are not results of either human creativity or co-evolution across a gap: the night sky; waterfalls; sunsets. So why not flowers too? But the cases are not alike. Those things may be attractive to look at, but they have no appearance of design. They are analogous not to Paley’s watch, but to the sun as a timekeeper. One cannot explain why the watch is as it is without referring to timekeeping, because it would be useless for timekeeping if it had been made slightly differently. But, as I mentioned, the sun would still be useful for keeping time even if the solar system were altered. Similarly, Paley might have found a stone that looked attractive. He might well have taken it home to use as an ornamental paperweight. But he would not have sat down to write a monograph about how changing any detail of the stone would have made it incapable of serving that function, because that would not have been so. The same is true of the night sky, waterfalls and almost all other natural phenomena. But flowers do have the appearance of design for beauty: if they looked like leaves, or roots, they would lose their universal appeal. Displace even one petal, and there would be diminishment.

We know what the watch was designed for, but we do not know what beauty is. We are in a similar position to an archaeologist who finds inscriptions in an unknown language in an ancient tomb: they look like writing and not just meaningless marks on the walls. Conceivably this is mistaken, but they look as though they were inscribed there for a purpose. Flowers are like that: they have the appearance
of having been evolved for a purpose which we call ‘beauty’, which we can (imperfectly) recognize, but whose nature is poorly understood.

In the light of these arguments I can see only one explanation for the phenomenon of flowers being attractive to humans, and for the various other fragments of evidence I have mentioned. It is that the attribute we call beauty is of two kinds. One is a parochial kind of attractiveness, local to a species, to a culture or to an individual. The other is unrelated to any of those: it is universal, and as objective as the laws of physics. Creating either kind of beauty requires knowledge; but the second kind requires knowledge with universal reach. It reaches all the way from the flower genome, with its problem of competitive pollination, to human minds which appreciate the resulting flowers as art. Not great art – human artists are far better, as is to be expected. But with the hard-to-fake appearance of design for beauty.

Now, why do
humans
appreciate objective beauty, if there has been no equivalent of that co-evolution in our past? At one level the answer is simply that we are universal explainers and can create knowledge about anything. But still, why did we want to create aesthetic knowledge in particular? It is because we
did
face the same problem as the flowers and the insects. Signalling across the gap between two humans is analogous to signalling across the gap between two entire species. A human being, in terms of knowledge content and creative individuality, is like a species. All the individuals of any other species have virtually the same programming in their genes and use virtually the same criteria for acting and being attracted. Humans are quite unlike that: the amount of information in a human mind is more than that in the genome of any species, and overwhelmingly more than the genetic information unique to one person. So human artists are trying to signal across the same scale of gap between humans as the flowers and insects are between species. They can use some species-specific criteria; but they can also reach towards objective beauty. Exactly the same is true of all our other knowledge: we can communicate with other people by sending predetermined messages determined by our genes or culture, or we can invent something new. But in the latter case, to have any chance of communicating, we had better strive to rise above parochialism and seek universal truths. This may be the proximate reason that humans ever began to do so.

One amusing corollary of this theory is, I think, that it is quite possible that human
appearance
, as influenced by human sexual selection, satisfies standards of objective beauty as well as species-specific ones. We may not be very far along that path yet, because we diverged from apes only a few hundred thousand years ago, so our appearance isn’t yet all that different from that of apes. But I guess that when beauty is better understood it will turn out that most of the differences have been in the direction of making humans objectively more beautiful than apes.

The two types of beauty are usually created to solve two types of problem – which could be called pure and applied. The applied kind is that of signalling information, and is usually solved by creating the parochial type of beauty. Humans have problems of that type too: the beauty of, say, the graphical user interface of a computer is created primarily to promote comfort and efficiency in the machine’s use. Sometimes a poem or song may be written for a similar practical purpose: to give more cohesiveness to a culture, or to advance a political agenda, or even to advertise beverages. Again, sometimes these purposes can also be met by creating
objective
beauty, but usually the parochial kind is used because it is easier to create.

The other kind of problem, the pure kind, which has no analogue in biology, is that of creating beauty for its own sake – which includes creating improved criteria for beauty: new artistic standards or styles. This is the analogue of pure scientific research. The states of mind involved in that sort of science and that sort of art are fundamentally the same. Both are seeking universal, objective truth.

And both, I believe, are seeking it through good explanations. This is most straightforwardly so in the case of art forms that involve stories – fiction. There, as I mentioned in
Chapter 11
, a good story has a good explanation of the fictional events that it portrays. But the same is true in all art forms. In some, it is especially hard to express in words the explanation of the beauty of a particular work of art, even if one knows it, because the relevant knowledge is itself not expressed in words – it is
inexplicit
. No one yet knows how to translate musical explanations into natural language. Yet when a piece of music has the attribute ‘displace one note and there would be diminishment’ there is an explanation: it was known to the composer, and it is known to the
listeners who appreciate it. One day it will be expressible in words.

This, too, is not as different from science and mathematics as it looks: poetry and mathematics or physics share the property that they develop a language different from ordinary language in order to state things efficiently that it would be very inefficient to state in ordinary language. And both do this by constructing variants of ordinary language: one has to understand the latter first in order to understand explanations of, and in, the former.

Applied art and pure art ‘feel’ the same. And, just as we need sophisticated knowledge to tell the difference between the motion of a bird across the sky, which is happening objectively, and the motion of the sun across the sky, which is just a subjective illusion caused by our own motion, and the motion of the moon, which is a bit of each, so pure and applied art, universal and parochial beauty, are mixed together in our subjective appreciation of things. It will be important to discover which is which. For it is only in the objective direction that we can expect to make unlimited progress. The other directions are inherently finite. They are circumscribed by the finite knowledge inherent in our genes and our existing traditions.

That has a bearing on various existing theories of what art is. Ancient fine art, for instance in Greece, was initially concerned with the skill of reproducing the shapes of human bodies and other objects. That is not the same as the pursuit of objective beauty, because, among other things, it is perfectible (in the bad sense that it can reach a state that cannot be much improved on). But it is a skill that can allow artists to pursue pure art as well, and they did so in the ancient world, and then again during the revival of that tradition in the Renaissance.

There are utilitarian theories of the purpose of art. These theories deprecate pure art, just as pure science and mathematics are deprecated by the same arguments. But one has no choice about what constitutes an artistic improvement any more than one has a choice as to what is true and false in mathematics. And if one tries to tune one’s scientific theories or philosophical positions to meet a political agenda, or a personal preference, then one is at cross purposes. Art can be
used
for many purposes. But artistic values are not subordinate to, or derived from, anything else.

The same critique applies to the theory that art is self-expression.
Expression
is conveying something that is already there, while objective progress in art is about creating something new. Also,
self
-expression is about expressing something subjective, while pure art is objective. For the same reason, any kind of art that consists solely of spontaneous or mechanical acts, such as throwing paint on to canvas, or of pickling sheep, lacks the means of making artistic progress, because real progress is difficult and involves many errors for every success.