I’m taking a writing break to explore a NYT Magazine article that caught my eye - can read it here. And as part of the deep-dive, I ended up finding this magnificent video of the Bowerbird dance. I felt compelled to share it here. The dance (and the pupil-manipulation) is spellbinding.
Here’s a quote that delves into the core of the article: “According to this theory, ornaments evolved as indicators of a potential mate’s advantageous qualities: its overall health, intelligence and survival skills, plus the fact that it will pass down the genes underlying these traits to its children. A bowerbird with especially bright plumage might have a robust immune system, for example, while one that finds rare and distinctive trinkets might be a superb forager. Beauty, therefore, would not confound natural selection — it would be very much a part of it.
… Now, nearly 150 years later, a new generation of biologists is reviving Darwin’s neglected brainchild. Beauty, they say, does not have to be a proxy for health or advantageous genes. Sometimes beauty is the glorious but meaningless flowering of arbitrary preference. Animals simply find certain features — a blush of red, a feathered flourish — to be appealing. And that innate sense of beauty itself can become an engine of evolution, pushing animals toward aesthetic extremes. In other cases, certain environmental or physiological constraints steer an animal toward an aesthetic preference that has nothing to do with survival whatsoever.
… There are really two environments governing the evolution of sentient creatures: an external one, which they inhabit, and an internal one, which they construct. To solve the enigma of beauty, to fully understand evolution, we must uncover the hidden links between those two worlds.
…Unlike natural selection, which preserved traits that were useful “in the struggle for life,” Darwin saw sexual selection as exclusively concerned with reproductive success, often resulting in features that jeopardized an animal’s well-being. The peacock’s many-eyed aureole, mesmerizing yet cumbersome, was a prime example and remains the mascot of sexual selection today. “A great number of male animals,” Darwin wrote, “as all our most gorgeous birds, some fishes, reptiles and mammals, and a host of magnificently colored butterflies have been rendered beautiful for beauty’s sake.
…Prum thinks the evidence for the heritable benefits of choosing a beautiful mate is scant because such benefits are themselves rare, whereas arbitrary beauty is “nearly ubiquitous.” Over the years, the more he contemplated runaway selection, the more convinced he became that it was a far more powerful and creative evolutionary force than natural selection, which he regards as overhyped and boring. “Animals are agents in their own evolution,” he told me during one conversation. “Birds are beautiful because they are beautiful to themselves. … Some of the evolutionary consequences of sexual desire and choice in nature are not adaptive,” Prum writes in his recent book. “Some outcomes are truly decadent.
SUMMARY: The environment constrains a creature’s anatomy, which determines how it experiences the world, which generates adaptive and arbitrary preferences, which loop back to alter its biology, sometimes in maladaptive ways. Beauty reveals that evolution is neither an iterative chiseling of living organisms by a domineering landscape nor a frenzied collision of chance events. Rather, evolution is an intricate clockwork of physics, biology and perception in which every moving part influences another in both subtle and profound ways. Its gears are so innumerable and dynamic — so susceptible to serendipity and mishap — that even a single outcome of its ceaseless ticking can confound science for centuries. “
Overall, the in-depth article seems to illustrate the battle between two philosophies: one that says beauty functions as an extension of natural selection (the beautiful creature having spent extra energy and risked its life for beauty - thus proving its resilience) — while the other philosophy says that beauty exists purely for beauty’s sake, it is entirely unto itself and affects natural selection in a myriad of ways, or not at all. The writer concludes that beauty is too complex in nature to be able to understand, for now.