Why on Earth are flowers beautiful? (2018)
scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com
scientistseessquirrel.wordpress.com
We of course do also find fruits emotionally appealing, both in literal visual beauty (a bowl of fruit being a common painting trope), and, more strongly, they taste pretty good too.
Of course the "why did this" evolve questions are usually impossible to answer, though it can be fun to think about possibilities.
If you think about how modern people use flowers today (indoor plants decorating their homes and outdoor plants landscaping their property) then it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that we evolved to prefer flowers in the environments in which we live, not as a hard-wired signal that "this plant is edible" which is clearly unreliable.
I don't find most wild flowers in the forest or flowers of strawberries or apple trees particularly beautiful.
Personally, I have never seen a flower I didn't find beautiful that I recall. I just did an image search for "ugly flowers" and I didn't see a single one I didn't like. Perhaps the subjectivity argument carries more weight in the end.
Chromatic vision in primates, insects, birds and fishes seem to have co-evolved in response to items of luxury. In the case of humans it was fruit, in the case of insects and birds it was flowers. These islands of chromatic intensity signaled ‘loot-boxes’ of high super-high carb content.
The carb came at a cost to the plant, but in return they got to spread their seed far and wide.
Chromacity seems to exist as a layer on top of lightness, and has certainly evolved as an afterthought to it. furthermore, in some ways chromatic vision seems to contradict Lightness vision in its form. Proof? Just compare the saturation map of a vase of flowers to its lightness map. They are rarely similar.
As a painter, I am especially intrigued by this. These mechanisms seems to account for our overtly emotional response to color, as opposed the functional nature of lightness. I.e. color = special treat.
Despite this, I believe that the prime stimulus of a flower is its shape (silhouette). This aspect of perception is prime in all animals (and in art) and the chromatic expression of a flower serves only to emphasize this shape.
The better question is why humans THINK flowers are beautiful. Even hunter gatherers can appreciate flowers.
Well a place abundant with flowers is a place with good soil, light, and water. A good environment will bear fruit and sustain plants and prey for hunting and gathering
One of our distant evolutionary ancestors was a small primate that fed on the nectar of flowers, kind of like bees. Speaking of, it probably also lived in hives, hence why humans also tend to live in hives (well, cities, same thing).
0xBABAD00C's post does not actually address either question, as the body of the post makes it clear that the title question is not about the flower-insect relationship.
Is there some reason that this something should not to be flowers?
Is there some assumption that all things should be equally pretty absent special reason?
Why are stones not beautiful? Why is grass sort of meh in between?
Why is the rib-eye the tastiest part of the cow? Well, some part has to be tastiest. Why not the rib-eye?
Things look different. Some things look better than others. Among the things that look best are flowers. There’s nothing else particularly interesting about flowers.
Among all the various things in the universe, some will look good and others will look bad. Or they’d all look the same, I guess, which they don’t. So given that, flowers looking good is not something that requires an explanation?
What other questions are like this? I’m trying to figure out what perspective I’m not seeing.
- why is the Pacific the largest ocean? - why is X star the brightest in the sky? - why do dogs bark?
Suppose I a few dice, and one of them happens to show the highest number. Would you ask “why is this dice so high?”
Here are some criteria for beauty and why it is objective: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauty/
Ah, https
On another note, I disagree with the 'want to' wording of species evolving. This implies that evolution is in control of species and they intelligently 'design' their next offspring to be more adaptive. This confused me for a very long time about evolution.
While in reality they evolved when only mutations of the specie with adaptive traits survived. Rest died out. That's what survival of the fittest really means.
It is about a pretty little concept to be argued/discussed, then lets talk about something really important at the end that I would not do trivially.
It also made me think how we are attracted to "beautiful" things - varying from smell or music to ideas or maybe even money - to be redirected away from my main route.
One could challenge whether it is appropriate to say flowers are beautiful to insects, though clearly that is intended to be read as attractive, which, empirically, they are (nor do you seem to dispute the proposition that they evolved to be that way), and there's no prima facie reason for their scent and appearance to invoke pleasure in most humans.
Finding flowers beautiful makes sense, but I was recently in the desert and I found that landscape beautiful. That feels more confusing?
- We've evolved to find our natural habitat (which is very variable) pleasing, as that's an evolutionary advantage compared to constantly feeling uneasy.
- We are attracted to places that are different to the ones we live in, so we keep exploring and spreading.
- There's also a learned component - even if we understand that a landscape isn't habitable for us (like the desert), we're conditioned to finding it beautiful, as this is the cultural consensus.
If our aesthetic response to flowers was a direct consequence of evolutionary pressure, we would expect to find the flowers of plants having edible tubers or fruit to be especially attractive, and those of poisonous plants to be repulsive.
If compressibility was the only normativity, smoothest objects would be the most beautiful, a sine wave would be the most interesting symphony, but they are in fac the most banal, most unbeautiful things. Smooth object are highly compressible but also highly exhaustible, unlike organic objects.
Any painter of a natural subject knows that organic structures are far from that kind of symmetry, and actually a painting loses verisimilitude if you are too symmetrical and formulaic.
Perhaps symmetry is even an indication that a particular structure is "cheap" in some sense. A less symmetric structure might require more information to store in the DNA, and therefore require longer evolution. If a symmetrical structure does the job as well as a more complicated structure, it's likely the simpler structure will prevail.
In my experience people tend to find also non-biological symmetrical / self-similar structures striking. Something about this kind of simplicity triggers our sensory systems. It's probably more bug than feature. But it might be relevant that symmetry of biological systems often indicate health. Unhealthy biological systems are less structured, less symmetrical, and identifying sickness is evolutionary advantageous.
Author writes like he has a picture of himself on his bedside table and an old flickr account abandoned after realising he spent all this dedication and effort on deciphering some kind of ephemeral beauty in the world other people saw, but that was somehow always just out of reach for him.
It’s easy to shoehorn any number of plausible theories, but how do we know one evolutionary theory is the correct one?
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_So_Stories#Evolutionary_d...
IMHO, the one that works is the one most likely to result in increased gene propagation even if the percentage is minuscule in the absence of orthogonal genes.
The argument is not that X evolved to do Y, but rather X resulted in increased gene propagation as it happened to do Y.
In the example above, the head of the penis is shaped as such because that shape enables semen displacement. In the same vein, males tend to lose an erection, and therefore the [flaccid] penis loses the displacement property, after excretion because that results in not displacing one's own semen.
And if I'm being truthful, I struggle with evolution a bit. It's a bit like life. I understand how life could have eventually evolved to where we're at. But how did life _start_?
Any specific mechanism is explained as having evolved, but if so, how did it _start_?
For example, there's an HN thread explaining why bees die after they sting and why it's acceptable from a colony perspective. What put bee's on _that_ specific evolutionary track? How did it _start_?
I think a lot of people are like myself, there's a level of blind faith put into evolution. We obviously have witnessed it happening so we know it does happen, but there are so many things we can't explain for sure that forces us to have blind faith it happened via _purely_ evolutionary forces. like ... what if we find out some super advanced alien civilization seeded earth with life and managed it in some way, helping shape things. It would kind of explain a lot.
And so I continue to have blind faith that even if we don't have a concrete explanation for many of the things we see it happened via evolution, but I also understand the skepticism some people have for evolution being the sole explanation.
Evolution doesn't explain how life started (or attempt to explain), just how it changes over time. How it started is obviously a really interesting question, but not one you can use evolution to understand. Evolution explains a specific thing, not everything.
I'd call it common sense, more than blind faith. You see a person dead on the floor with a bullet wound, and a handgun laying next to the body. Concluding that the victim was shot to death is common sense, not blind faith. In that sense, evolution is more like playing detective, all the evidence is pointing to it.
Blind faith implies both lack of evidence ("blind"), and rigid loyalty to a specific idea ("faith"). Common sense implies neither of them.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=definition+of+faith&source...
> Faith
> 1. The assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition or statement for which there is not complete evidence; belief in general.
> 2. Specifically Firm belief based upon confidence in the authority and veracity of another, rather than upon one's own knowledge, reason, or judgment; earnest and trustful confidence: as, to have faith in the testimony of a witness; to have faith in a friend.
...
> 5. Intuitive belief.
We have a hypothesis that the penis _evolved_ due to it's ability to scoop out semen. A part of that hypothesis is that this is why longer penises evolved, to place semen in places that cannot be scooped out by other men.
But another explanation for larger penises is that women find them more attractive and pleasurable and therefore it increased your chance of mating.
Another would be that larger penises are statistically more likely to get a woman pregnant in general, with or without a bulbous head.
But here's one for you. The original hypothesis about the penis head came from an experiment in which they found that a single thrust could potentially pull out 90% of a competitors semen. We won't discuss the logistics (they didn't use real people), we'll have _blind faith_ that the experimenters ensured it was realistic.
Men ejaculate in spurts over a time period that is larger than what it takes to thrust a single time. This would imply the penis head also removes it's own sperm quite often.
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The point here is that
1. We don't know, and 2. We can't know without actually documenting the process.
This sub-thread was brought about by someone saying "how do we know this is true", and the answer is, we can't know, therefore we take it on blind faith.
If you're offended by the phrase blind faith, use whatever phrase you like. But while you're doing that, please watch that youtube video. It will help you better understand why it's more useful to discuss the underlying idea than to discuss if we should be using word X or word Y.
If you're talking about evolution in general, then it makes a large number of predictions about the way things are, that have borne out.
If you're talking about penises scooping out semen, the answer is we can't know, therefore we take it on faith—the answer is we don't know, and so it's one of several hypotheses—none of which are mutually exclusive. Nobody is (or should be, at least) taking it on faith, because nobody should be asserting it as definitely true.
That's on you, brother.
I choose to call it blind faith and the other poster prefers to call it common sense. If a 3rd person wanted to call it guacamole I'd be onboard.
The other poster insists on arguing about the name rather than discussing the interesting part, which is underlying idea. They want to do this based upon the whole "science vs religion" thing that was boring even back in the 90's when it was raging.
I have no interest in it and so I've stepped out of that conversation. Let someone else take up a stupid, useless, argument.
Firstly, this is a misreading of the video. The absurdity of this position can be seen from extending your example through replacing every noun in your comments by "guacamole".
Secondly, "blind" is an adjective, and one that you use at every opportunity (except where you are looking up definitions - by the way, isn't looking up definitions an odd preoccupation for someone who doesn't see anything of importance in what you call something?) It is well-known that you cannot outright prove anything about the natural world by induction, but to lump everything that is not proven into the category of specifically blind faith ignores the epistemic value of evidence and just leads to what you call a stupid, useless, argument.
Ouch. Funny though.
It really wouldn't!
A simple explanation would be that the aliens are much simpler than we are in makeup because it happened purely by evolution, and that part of our complexity came through planning.
There's just too many possibilities to so confidently claim it's kicking the can down the road.
Simplicity implies understanding and intent.
No one would design the absolute spaghetti code mess that underlies our existence.
Look at the computers we build. Neat little rows and friendly little abstractions.
Life isn't. It's billions of years of good enough hacks layered one atop the other, and sometimes transitioned sideways from other forks of the code base.
Near half our DNA is just viral cruft that got mixed up and passed along for untold generations.
>Eight percent of our DNA consists of remnants of ancient viruses, and another 40 percent is made up of repetitive strings of genetic letters that is also thought to have a viral origin
It's just fun to think about.
> the aliens are much simpler than we are in makeup because it happened purely by evolution, and that part of our complexity came through planning.
That looks like argument from complexity. And it seems that complexity through planning would require an even more complex creator, not a simpler one.
> There's just too many possibilities
I don't think it makes a difference either way. If we can figure out one way of making life from non-living matter, we've cracked the code, we don't need to know how exactly it happened.
https://www.sciencealert.com/dogs-smell-is-tightly-linked-to...
... researchers were surprised to see the sheer extent of the smell wiring within dog brains.
Veterinary neuroimaging researcher Erica Andrews of Cornell University and colleagues have just mapped domestic dogs' (Canis familiaris) olfactory brain pathways using diffusion MRI scans. This technique uses differences in the flow of molecules, such as water, to create a complex map of tissue structures.
With the data the team built 3D maps of the dog brain's nerve tracts, and traced extensive white matter linking olfactory brain regions, revealing a huge, previously unknown, information highway between dogs' olfactory and visual systems.
"We've never seen this connection between the nose and the occipital lobe, functionally the visual cortex in dogs, in any species," Cornell University neuroimaging researcher Pip Johnson explains.
"It was really consistent. And size-wise, these tracts were really dramatic compared to what is described in the human olfactory system, more like what you'd see in our visual systems."
This is likely what allows our clever canine friends to function extremely well, even without sight. For example, blind dogs can still play fetch.
In that sense (!), I guess astronomy just isn't that interesting to them.
Desolate landscapes used in books and films versus "flowering garden of eden"-type of depictions in these same books and films play on these instincts, as do floral motifs in graphic and architectural design.
Or compare how a bush covered in caterpillar webs makes you feel versus one covered in thousands of unblemished flowers. These are primal responses.
River rapids. Vast cliffs. Deep lakes.
These things can all kill you. I doubt extremely that beauty is related to 'habitable environments' or anything connected to survival.
Fruits are flowers before they can be eaten as fruit; if sugar is flavor candy, then flowers are the eye candy appetizer.
And yet the way tigers and leopards have their patterns formed was explained by a mathematician with simple math. You don't know what is required to solve a puzzle you haven't yet solved. It might be that there's 100 detailed reasons, it might be that there's a simple universal rule that requires almost no domain knowledge to guess.
> What’s true of floral beauty is true, in spades, of climate-change solutions.
Why?
> I can pretty much guarantee the nothing proposed by an engineer without partners in biology, economics, and the social sciences won’t solve our CO2 problem (take that, enhanced weathering). I can also guarantee that nothing proposed by a biologist or a climatologist without full consideration of engineering and economics will solve our CO2 problem.
The premise is false, the implication is shaky, the reasoning is done "by analogy" and magical thinking. It's not a very good article.
The bait-and-switch was good tho, worked on hackernews splendidly :)
You gotta love these click-bait titles that attempt to explain the subjective nature of aesthetics. :-/
We tend to assume our brains as perfectly laid machines, but we know our meat computer is anything but perfect. What if it is "interference" from nearby systems? Maybe our sexual attraction subsystem shares some neurons with recognising striking sky colours and we find them beautiful, with no real evolutionary reason.
That would explain why we do or like many things that are not necessarily useful to survive. And this is also my pet theory of consciousness: it is just a side effect caused by our pre-frontal cortex, its effect on memory, creating a sense of past and the ability to simulate future events. Those mechanism resonate together to create what we call "awareness of the self", but it is not something we have evolved directly.
I think there is something to the idea that low Kolmogorov complexity is pretty.
I've also had a weird esthetic experience commuting by a bus once - it was a sunny winter day and along the road for dozens of kilometers there were power lines with unusually thick wires. There was a lot of contrast between white snow and black wires and they went up and down in a regular but slowly changing pattern that was very beautiful in the moment, but it's very hard to explain after the fact :) I was amazed by it despite commuting that same route 100s of times before and after that and never noticing it or caring about it.
I have a form of light synesthesia [2], where I intuitively see the concept of time and age as a three-dimensional line, that slowly morphs as I grow older. Whenever someone says "I'm x years old", I subconsciously place them somewhere on that line. (Now that I think of it, years too have a particular three dimensional structure in my mind)
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