CHAPTER 12
This Aesthetic View of Life
John Keats ends his famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with the following lines—a message from the Urn itself:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Although Keats, writing several decades before Darwin, certainly knew nothing of evolution, his concluding lines are an oddly apt slogan for the long tradition in evolutionary biology of equating beauty with honesty. Indeed, this may be the most succinct and memorable articulation ever written of the honest advertisement paradigm.
While this may be an immortal conclusion to a poem, it is a poor guide to understanding beauty in the world. Keats’s aphorism is really a flatitude—a faux insight that acquires its supposed profundity by flattening the intellectual complexity of the world. It does damage while claiming to be a glorious solution.
By contrast, Shakespeare—predating Darwin by centuries rather than decades—portrays a character with a much richer perspective on truth and beauty. In act 3, scene 1 of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Hamlet encounters his beloved Ophelia, who has recently shunned him without explanation. Ophelia, whose actions are being directed by her father, returns Hamlet’s love letters and claims she no longer values his poetry because “rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.” Hamlet is understandably hurt by her actions and suspicious of her motivation because he knows he is innocent of her accusations. Because Ophelia is both as gorgeous as ever and obviously lying, Hamlet instigates his own inquiry into the relationship between truth and beauty.
HAMLET: Ha, ha! Are you honest?
OPHELIA: My lord?
HAMLET: Are you fair?
OPHELIA: What means your lordship?
HAMLET: That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.
OPHELIA: Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
HAMLET: Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner
transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the
force of honesty can translate beauty into his
likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the
time gives it proof. I did love you once.
Here, wily Hamlet gives a far more skeptical account of the “commerce” between beauty and truth than Keats’s Urn. Beauty, he says, can transform truth into a bawd—a whorehouse madam, a procuress of a false and superficial love. Indeed, Hamlet makes the decidedly Fisherian proposition that it is the power of beauty that actually subverts honesty. Hamlet’s paradox is the challenge we all face in reconciling the seductive force of beauty with the great desire to see beauty as having a higher purpose, as being an absolute good, as reflecting universal, objective quality.
On the one hand, we have Keats’s poem, whose lines are a perfect representation of our deep desire to see beauty as an “honest” signifier of quality, of some kind of superiority. On the other hand, we have Hamlet, whose life experience has taught him that beauty is not truth; it is merely beauty, signifying nothing but itself, and often in fact at odds with truth. On the one hand, an insistence on “meaning”; on the other, an acceptance that the arbitrary power of beauty can undermine truth. These conflicting views are at the very heart of the contemporary scientific debate I have been engaged in in this book.
This same intellectual divide was explored by Isaiah Berlin in the essay The Hedgehog and the Fox, in which he analyzed an ancient Greek aphorism as a metaphor for a contrast in intellectual styles: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
According to Berlin, an intellectual Hedgehog, in search of a “harmonious universe,” sees the world through the lens of a single “central vision.” The Hedgehog’s intellectual mission is to propagate this great vision at every opportunity. An intellectual Fox, by contrast, has no interest in the seductive power of a single idea. The Fox is drawn instead to the subtle complexities of a “vast variety of experiences,” which he does not attempt to fit into a single all-embracing framework. Hedgehogs are on a mission. Foxes play for the joy of it. And like children, whenever they want, Foxes drop their toys and start a new game.
The intellectual styles of Berlin’s Hedgehog and Fox provide further insights into the co-discoverers of natural selection: Darwin the Fox, and Wallace the Hedgehog. Having each intuited the mechanism of adaptive evolution by natural selection, the two diverged radically in how they elaborated on this key insight. To deal with the diversity of phenomena he observed in nature, Darwin proposed additional biological theories of phylogeny, sexual selection, ecology, pollination biology, even ecosystem services (for example, in his study of the ecological impact of earthworms), and more. Each theory was subtly different, requiring new arguments, types of thinking, and data. Wallace, on the other hand, despite his empirical breadth, strove to establish a “pure Darwinism” in which all of biological evolution was distilled down to the single omnipotent explanation of adaptation by natural selection.
The conflict between the Hedgehogs and the Foxes in evolutionary biology continues unabated to this day. In recent decades, adherents of the thoroughly foxy, Darwinian subdisciplines of phylogeny and developmental evolution (a.k.a. evo-devo) have worked to restore their places in an evolutionary biology that has been dominated, indeed hijacked, by adaptationist Hedgehogs. In this book, I have argued that the Darwinian theory of aesthetic evolution should also be restored to evolutionary biology. Each of these Darwinian subdisciplines focuses on diversity itself—the “vast variety” of specific instances—rather than on law-like generalizations of adaptive process.
Darwin concluded The Origin of Species with an inspired and poetic evocation of the “grandeur in this view of life.” Later, in The Descent of Man, he articulated an equally moving grandeur in an aesthetic view of life. It has been my goal to revive Darwin’s theory of aesthetic evolution and to present the full, distinctive richness, complexity, and diversity of this aesthetic view of life. Here, I want to conclude by discussing how an aesthetic view of life can have a positive impact on science, on human culture, and on the development of a newly respectful and productive relationship between them.
In many ways, Darwin’s idea that the aesthetic evaluations involved in mate choice among animals constitute an independent evolutionary force in nature is as radical today as it was when he proposed it nearly 150 years ago. Darwin discovered that evolution is not merely about the survival of the fittest but also about charm and sensory delight in individual subjective experience. The implications of this idea for scientists and observers of nature are profound, requiring us to acknowledge that the dawn bird song chorus, the cooperative group displays of the blue Chiroxiphia manakins, the spectacular plumage of the male Great Argus Pheasant, and many other wondrous sights and sounds of the natural world are not merely delightful to us; they are products of a long history of subjective evaluations made by the animals themselves.
As Darwin hypothesized, with the evolution of sensory evaluation and choice comes the emergence of a new evolutionary agency—the capacity of individual judgments to drive the evolutionary process itself. Aesthetic evolution means that animals are aesthetic agents who play a role in their own evolution. Of course, this fact would be unsettling to a Wallacean Hedgehog who believes that the power of the idea of natural selection lies in its all sufficiency—its ability to explain everything. However, I am afraid that, to quote another passage from Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth…[t]han are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Richard Dawkins once described evolution by natural selection as the “blind watchmaker”—the impersonal, inexorable force that produces functional design from variation, heritability, and differential survival. This analogy is entirely accurate. But because natural selection is not the only source of organic design in nature, as Darwin himself was the first to recognize, Dawkins’s analogy remains an incomplete description of evolutionary process and the natural world. The blind watchmaker cannot actually look at nature and see all the stuff that he hasn’t made and cannot explain. Indeed, nature has evolved its own eyes, ears, noses, and so on and the cognitive mechanisms to evaluate these sensory signals. Myriad organisms have then evolved to use their senses to make sexual, social, and ecological choices. Although animals are not conscious of their role, they have become their own designers. They are no longer blind. Aesthetic mate choice creates a new mode of evolution that is neither equivalent to nor a mere offshoot of natural selection. The concept of aesthetic mate choice is at the heart of Darwinian aesthetics, and it remains a revolutionary idea to this day.
The aesthetic view of life reveals new ways in which evolutionary biology has been hampered by failing to recognize the aesthetic agency of individual animals. For example, we can see that much of the scientific study of sexuality has been characterized by a deep anxiety about the subjective experiences of sexual pleasure and desire—especially when it’s a matter of female pleasure. A symptom of this anxiety is the great lengths that evolutionary biologists have gone to avoid engaging with sexual pleasure and desire altogether. After the rejection of Darwin’s aesthetic view of mate choice, sexual desire and pleasure had to be explained away as mere secondary consequences of natural selection.
Unfortunately, the anxious remove of sexual science from sexual pleasure was built into the structure of scientific objectivity—into the discipline of science itself. To imagine animals as aesthetic agents with their own subjective preferences was considered anthropomorphic. Scientific “objectivity” came to require us to discount or ignore the subjective experiences of animals. Adaptive, anhedonic theories of mate choice were developed to explain animal mating behavior and reproduction, and these theories were proposed to be sufficient to explain the evolution of human sexuality. Sexual pleasure was not only laundered from scientific explanation; it was banished as an appropriate subject of science. The result was generations of antiaesthetic sexual biology—such as Zahavi’s handicap principle, or the upsuck theory of female orgasm—which entirely ignored and denied the existence of subjective experience of sexual pleasure.
A scientific anxiety about sexual pleasure persists in much of the contemporary science of mate choice. The result is a sanitized sexual science that lacks the theory and vocabulary necessary to investigate and explain sexual pleasure in the natural world and ourselves.
A bizarre consequence of this traditional framework is an inexplicable inversion in the rationality of nature. Because animals are denied aesthetic agency, we conclude that animal choices reflect the universal and rational hand of natural selection. But, of course, we understand that humans can be highly irrational when it comes to sex and love. So, because animals lack the cognitive ability to escape from the brute laws of adaptive logic, dumb animals are more rational than we are. Ironically, in this view, human cognitive complexity only provides us with the novel opportunity to be irrational!
Another important implication of an aesthetic view of evolutionary biology concerns the painful history of political and ethical abuse during the twentieth century—eugenics. Eugenics was the scientific theory that maintained that human races, classes, and ethnicities have evolved adaptive differences in genetic, physical, intellectual, and moral quality. Eugenics was also an organized social and political movement to employ this flawed scientific theory to “improve” human populations through the social and legal control of mate choice and reproduction. Because eugenics specifically concerned the evolutionary consequences of mate choice, it remains deeply relevant to human sexual selection and aesthetic evolution.
For multiple reasons, evolutionary biologists are uncomfortable discussing eugenics. First, between the 1890s and the 1940s, every professional geneticist and evolutionary biologist in the United States and Europe was either an ardent proponent of eugenics, a dedicated participant in eugenic social programs, or a happy fellow traveler. Full stop. Few of us are eager to confront this embarrassing, shameful, and sobering truth. Second, eugenics provided a pseudoscientific justification for abuses of human rights at every level—from everyday racism, sexism, and prejudice against the disabled, forced sterilization, imprisonment, and lynching in the United States, to the Nazi-engineered genocide of Jews and Gypsies, and mass murder of the mentally handicapped and homosexuals in Europe. Eugenics is the most egregious example of the destructive misuse of science in all of human history. Science gone bad. Really bad.
Last, another uncomfortable truth is that much of the intellectual framework of contemporary evolutionary biology was developed during this enthusiastically eugenic period in our discipline. Most evolutionary biologists would like to believe that eugenics ceased to be an issue in evolutionary biology after World War II, when evolutionary biologists rejected eugenic theories of racial superiority. But the uncomfortable fact is that some core, fundamental commitments of eugenics were “baked into” the intellectual structure of evolutionary biology, and they contributed to the flawed logic of eugenics. Without providing a detailed analysis here, I want to illustrate how aesthetic evolution provides an essential antidote to this poisonous intellectual history.
Eugenics and population genetics were both developed during the period when mate choice was either entirely rejected or presumed to be essentially identical to natural selection. This was the same period when Darwinian fitness was redefined and expanded to subsume all of sexual selection. As we have seen (chapter 1), “fitness” to Darwin referred to the capacity of an individual to do tasks that contributed to one’s survival and fecundity, just like physical fitness. In the early twentieth century, fitness was redefined as an abstract mathematical concept—the relative success of one’s genes in subsequent generations. This new definition of fitness confounded variation in survival, fecundity, and mating/fertilization success into a single concept, obscuring the differences between the Darwinian concepts of natural and sexual selection. Despite this redefinition, the original connection of fitness to adaptation was retained. In this way, the rejection of Darwin’s concept of arbitrary aesthetic mate choice was forged into the language of modern evolutionary biology, making it almost impossible to talk about reproduction and mate choice in anything other than adaptive terms.
The new broad definition of fitness meant that all selection is, and should be, about adaptive improvement. Arbitrary mate choice was essentially defined out of existence, which is why arbitrary mate choice has had such a hard time in the discipline ever since. This intellectual stance contributed directly to the logical inevitability of eugenic theory. If one accepted the facts of natural selection, human evolution, heritable variation within and among human populations, and variation in human “fitness” and “quality,” then the logic of eugenics was practically inescapable. And in fact, no one in the discipline escaped it. What was missing from both the eugenic framework and all of evolutionary biology was the possibility of arbitrary, aesthetic mate choice.
Although I do not think that contemporary sexual selection theory or research is actually eugenic, I do think that evolutionary biology did not overcome its eugenic history—our eugenic history—merely by rejecting theories of human racial superiority during the twentieth century. Obvious and uncomfortable intellectual similarities remain between eugenics and current adaptive mate choice theory. Eugenic theory and social programs were concerned with both the presumed genetic quality of offspring (that is, good genes) and the cultural, economic, religious, linguistic, and moral conditions of the family as the locus of human reproduction (that is, direct benefits). The twin eugenic concerns for genetic and environmental quality are still echoed in the language of adaptive mate choice today. The contemporary term “good genes” actually shares the same etymological roots as “eugenics”—from the Greek eugenes for wellborn or noble (eu, good or well; and genos, birth). Eugenics was also explicitly anti-aesthetic and anxious about the maladaptive consequences of the seductive power of sexual passion. In general, the eugenic commitment to the idea that all mate choice is, and should be, about adaptive improvement persists today in the language and logic of adaptive mate choice.
The adaptive commitment of most contemporary researchers makes it difficult to investigate the evolution of human variation in ornamental traits, because to do so would require judgments to be made among human populations as to genetic and material quality. One reason why evolutionary psychology is so focused on the evolution of human universals—that is, behavioral adaptations that are shared by all humans—is that applying the same adaptationist logic to investigate evolved variations among human populations would explicitly resurrect eugenic research.
To permanently disconnect evolutionary biology from our eugenic roots, we need to embrace Darwin’s aesthetic view of life and fully incorporate the possibility of nonadaptive, arbitrary aesthetic evolution by sexual selection. This requires more than a tacit recognition of the mathematical existence of Fisher’s runaway theory. It requires undoing the Wallacean transformation of Darwinism into a strict, adaptationist science and abandoning the default expectation that all mate choice is, or should be, inherently adaptive. To sever our historical connections to eugenics, evolutionary biologists should restore the Darwinian view by defining natural and sexual selection as distinct evolutionary mechanisms and conceiving of adaptive mate choice as the result of specific, special interactions between these mechanisms. Accordingly, evolutionary biology should adopt the nonadaptive, Beauty Happens null model of the evolution of mating preferences and display traits by sexual selection.
The explicitly anti-aesthetic goals of eugenic social programs can be seen in this illustration from a popular eugenic test, You and Heredity, by Amram Scheinfeld (1939). The illustration contrasts “socially and eugenically desirable traits in women.” Sexual passion and desire were equated with the maladaptive consequences of unregulated mate choice.
The reincorporation of aesthetic evolution into evolutionary biology can permanently inoculate the discipline against the intellectual fallacies of its eugenic past. Adopting the Beauty Happens null model breaks the logical inevitability of eugenic thought by formalizing the expectation of a nonadaptive, or even maladaptive, outcome (see chapter 2). The resulting, genuinely Darwinian evolutionary science will allow anyone to pursue the investigation of adaptive mate choice in any animal, including humans, but the burden of proof on adaptive mate choice will be appropriately high. Evolutionary biology will be the better for this change. And so will the world.
A truly unexpected, personal consequence of adopting Darwin’s aesthetic view of life has been the discovery of new insights into the evolutionary impact of sexual coercion and sexual autonomy. When Patricia Brennan first proposed to work with me on the evolution of duck genitalia, I thought to myself, “Well, I’ve never worked on that end of the bird before.” I figured we would learn a lot of interesting anatomy, but I never imagined how the project would grow or that the results would transform my view of evolution so profoundly and raise so many surprising new directions and implications.
Of course, it has long been clear that sexual coercion and sexual violence are directly harmful to the well-being of female animals. But the aesthetic perspective allows us to understand that sexual coercion also infringes upon their individual freedom of choice. Once we recognize that coercion undermines individual sexual autonomy, we are led, inexorably, to the discovery that freedom of choice matters to animals. Sexual autonomy is not a mythical and poorly conceived legal concept invented by feminists and liberals. Rather, sexual autonomy is an evolved feature of the societies of many sexual species. As we have learned from ducks and other birds, when sexual autonomy is abridged or disrupted by coercion or violence, mate choice itself can provide the evolutionary leverage to assert and expand the freedom of choice.
In the later chapters of the book, I have proposed that the evolutionary struggle for female sexual autonomy played a critical role in the evolution of human sexuality and reproduction and was a critical factor in the evolution of humanity itself. But if this is true, why aren’t the women of the world enjoying the proposed fruits of this evolutionary process—universal fulfillment of sexual and social autonomy? The ongoing existence of rape, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, arranged marriage, honor killings, everyday sexism, economic dependence, and political subservience of women in many human cultures might seem to be direct evidence to falsify this view of human evolutionary history. Are we forced to acknowledge that such behaviors are an inescapable part of “human nature”—a part of our evolutionary legacy that humans will never overcome? I think not, and sexual conflict theory can help us to understand why.
Sexual conflict theory tells us that female aesthetic remodeling is not the only evolutionary force at work (see chapter 5). Males are simultaneously evolving through the force of male-male competition (another form of sexual selection), which can work simultaneously to maintain and advance sexual coercion. This process happens because there are limits to the effectiveness of female mate choice. It can expand female sexual autonomy, but it is not a mechanism for the evolution of female power or sexual control over males. As long as males continue to evolve mechanisms to advance their capacity for sexual coercion and violence, females may remain at some disadvantage. As I explained in the context of duck sex, the “war of the sexes” is highly asymmetrical—not really a war at all. Males evolve weapons and tools of control, while females are merely coevolving defenses of their freedom of choice. It’s not a fair fight.
Although aesthetic remodeling in humans has provided great advances in female sexual autonomy, I think the subsequent evolution of human culture has resulted in the emergence of new cultural mechanisms of sexual conflict. In other words, I propose that cultural ideologies of male power, sexual domination, and social hierarchy—that is, patriarchy—developed to reassert male control over fertilization, reproduction, and parental investment as countermeasures to the evolutionary expansion of female sexual autonomy. The result is a new, human sexual conflict arms race being waged through the mechanisms of culture.
More specifically, I think that the advances in female sexual autonomy that occurred over millions of years since our common ancestry with the chimpanzees (evolutionary context 2) have been challenged by two relatively recent cultural innovations—agriculture and the market economy that developed along with agriculture (evolutionary context 4). These twin inventions came into being a scant six hundred human generations ago and created the first opportunity for wealth and the differential distribution of wealth. When males gained cultural control over these material resources, new opportunities were created for the cultural consolidation of male social power. The independent and parallel invention of patriarchy in many of the world’s cultures has functioned to impose male control over nearly all aspects of female life, indeed human life. Thus, the cultural evolution of patriarchy has prevented modern women from fully consolidating the previous evolutionary gains in sexual autonomy.
This cultural sexual conflict theory poses a productive and exciting new intellectual interface between aesthetic evolution, sexual conflict, cultural evolution, and contemporary sexual and gender politics. From this perspective, for example, it is not an accident that patriarchal ideologies are focused so intently on the control of female sexuality and reproduction and also on the condemnation and prohibition of same-sex behavior. Female sexual autonomy and same-sex behavior have both evolved to be disruptive to male hierarchical power and control. These disruptive effects were likely the driving force behind the cultural invention and maintenance of the patriarchy itself.
Despite the near ubiquity of male culture dominance, this view implies that patriarchy is not inevitable, and it does not constitute human biological “destiny” (whatever that is). Patriarchy is a product not of our evolutionary history nor of human biology per se but of human culture. There is a tendency to respond to the many ills of male dominance—aggression, crime, sexual violence, rape, warfare, and so on—with weary inevitability: “Boys will be boys.” However, such “boys” are more likely products of patriarchal culture than of human evolutionary history. Analysis of the history of sexual conflict in humans indicates that males have been evolutionarily deweaponized and only culturally rearmed. Remember that men have less physical advantage in body size over women than do the famously peaceful male bonobos. The social and sexual advantages men currently enjoy over women cannot be explained as the inevitable result of our biological, evolutionary history alone.
If patriarchy is part of a cultural sexual conflict arms race, then we should predict the emergence of cultural countermeasures to reassert and preserve female sexual and social autonomy, and so they have. Beginning with nineteenth-century feminist movements for women’s suffrage, access to education, and rights to property and inheritance, there has been a culturally coevolved effort to counteract the control of patriarchy and to reassert and advance female sexual autonomy and freedom of choice. Although it took thousands of years to happen, the results of these efforts—legal recognition of women’s suffrage, universal human rights, and the abolition of legal slavery—are demonstrations that it is possible to dismantle deeply ingrained components of patriarchy that are often, still, erroneously considered as biologically “natural.”
The concept of an ongoing, culturally waged sexual conflict arms race also allows us to understand what is at stake in the battle between contemporary feminists and advocates of conservative, patriarchal views of human sexuality. After all, control over reproduction—including birth control and abortion—is at the very core of sexual conflict.
Like the evolved sexual autonomy of ducks, feminism is not an ideology of power or control over others; rather, it is an ideology of freedom of choice. This asymmetry of goals—the patriarchal aim of advancing male dominance versus the feminist commitment to freedom of choice—is inherent in all sexual conflict, from ducks to humans. But it gives the contemporary cultural struggle over universal sexual equal rights an especially frustrating quality.
As if to justify its use of power and privilege, the defenders of patriarchy often mischaracterize feminism as an ideology of power. Feminists, they claim, are attempting to take control of men’s lives, deny them their natural, biological prerogatives, and put men in a subservient position. For example, one antifeminist legal scholar has even erroneously criticized the legal doctrine of “sexual autonomy”—which has become the basis of most rape and sex crimes law—as allegedly including the right to impose one’s own personal sexual desires upon others. However, we can see that such views fundamentally misconstrue what sexual autonomy is and how it arises either biologically or culturally.
Watching recent political battles over birth control and reproductive rights in the United States, many experienced observers have remarked, “But I thought all these issues were settled decades ago!” Unfortunately, if these events are part of a cultural sexual conflict arms race, we can expect that the struggle for female sexual autonomy will continue as each side innovates new countermeasures to neutralize the previous advances by the other.
On the other hand, feminists themselves have often expressed discomfort with standards of beauty, sexual aesthetics, and discussions of desire. Beauty has been viewed as a punishing male standard that treats women and girls as sexual objects and persuades women to adopt the same self-destructive standard to judge themselves. Desire has been viewed as another route to finding themselves under the power of men. Yet aesthetic evolutionary theory reminds us that women are not only sexual objects but also sexual subjects with their own desires and the evolved agency to pursue them. Sexual desire and attraction are not just tools of subjugation but individual and collective instruments of social empowerment that can contribute to the expansion of sexual autonomy itself. Normative aesthetic agreement about what is desirable in a mate can be a powerful force to effect cultural change. The ancient lessons of Lysistrata are clear. Individuals can transform human society through their affirmative sexual choices.
This book has taken the concept of beauty from the humanities and applied it to the sciences by defining beauty as the result of a coevolutionary dance between desire and display. Now I would like to explore the opposite—take the coevolutionary view of beauty and see how it might apply to the humanities, specifically to the arts.
Indeed, progress in understanding aesthetic evolution in nature creates a whole new opportunity for intellectual exchange between evolutionary biology and aesthetic philosophy—the philosophy of art, aesthetic properties, art history, and art criticism—which I have been pursuing in new research. For centuries, the “aesthetics of nature” has consisted entirely of investigating human aesthetic experiences of nature—whether that be looking at a landscape, listening to the song of a Rose-Breasted Grosbeak, or contemplating the shape, color, and odor of an orchid flower. However, aesthetic evolution informs us that grosbeak songs and orchids (but not the landscape) have coevolved their aesthetic forms with the evaluations of nonhuman agents—female grosbeaks and insect pollinators, respectively. We humans can appreciate their beauty, but we have played no role in shaping it. Traditionally, aesthetic philosophy has failed to appreciate the aesthetic richness of the natural world, much of which has come into being through the subjective evaluations of animals. By viewing the beauties of nature through an exclusively human gaze, we have failed to comprehend the powerful aesthetic agency of many nonhuman animals. To be a more rigorous discipline, aesthetic philosophy must grapple with the full complexity of the biological world.
Another exciting implication of this aesthetic view of life is the realization that coevolutionary change is the fundamental feature underlying all aesthetic phenomena, including the human arts. As explained throughout this book, the evolution of sexual ornaments like the peacock’s tail involves the corresponding coevolution of the peahen’s cognitive aesthetic preferences. Changes in mating preferences have transformed the tail, and changes in the tail have transformed mating preferences. We can see a similar coevolutionary process at work in the fine arts. Mozart, for example, composed symphonies and operas that transformed his audiences’ capacity to imagine what music could be and do. These new musical preferences then fed back upon future composers and performers to advance the classical style in Western music. Likewise, Manet, van Gogh, and Cézanne created paintings that pushed the genre of European painting beyond its previous bounds. The newly transformed aesthetic preferences of their audiences fed back upon new generations of artists, collectors, and museums, ultimately leading to Cubism, Dada, and other modernist art movements of the early twentieth century. These cultural mechanisms of aesthetic change in the human arts are inherently coevolutionary as well.
Once we understand that all art is the result of a coevolutionary historical process between audience and artist—a coevolutionary dance between display and desire, expression and taste—we must expand our conception of what art is and can be. We cannot define art by the objective qualities of an artwork nor by any special qualities of observer experience (that is, art is not merely in the eye of the beholder). Being an artwork means being the product of a historical process of aesthetic coevolution. In other words, art is a form of communication that coevolves with its own evaluation.
This coevolutionary definition of art implies that art necessarily emerges within an aesthetic community, or population of aesthetic producers and evaluators. In a now classic paper of aesthetic philosophy from 1964, Arthur Danto called this taste-making, aesthetic community “the artworld.” This new, coevolutionary definition of art opens up an entirely new connection between evolutionary biology and the arts.
Perhaps the most revolutionary consequence of this definition of art is that it means that bird songs, sexual displays, animal-pollinated flowers, fruits, and so on are art, too. They are biotic arts that have emerged within myriad biotic artworlds, each of them a community that fostered the coevolution of animal aesthetic traits and preferences over time.
Of course, it could be argued that any definition of art should rest on the kind of cultural transmission of ideas that we see in human artworlds. The human arts are cultural phenomena that are transformed by aesthetic ideas that pass from person to person within a social network—a cultural mechanism of aesthetic innovation and influence. If we accept a cultural definition of art, that might seem to suggest that aesthetically coevolving, genetic entities cannot be art. However, this definition will not eliminate the biotic arts. For example, nearly half of all species of birds on the planet learn their songs from other members of their own species. These bird species have avian cultures that have persisted, thrived, and diversified for over forty million years. Consequently, learned bird songs have regional variations (that is, dialects), and cultural transmission can give rise to rapid and sometimes radical changes in these songs, just the way change sometimes occurs in the human arts. Similar aesthetic cultural processes occur in whales and bats.
In short, when we get out of the art museum and the library, and look closely at the aesthetic complexity of nature, and think about how it all came into being, we find that it is difficult to define the arts in any way that will include everything we recognize as human art but exclude the aesthetic productions of all nonhuman animals.
Some aesthetic philosophers, art historians, and artists may find the recognition of myriad new biotic art forms to be more of an annoyance, or even an outrage, than a contribution to their fields. But I think there is reason to welcome this more inclusive, “post-human” view of art as a real opportunity for progress in aesthetics. Originally, we humans conceived of ourselves as being at the center of all creation, with the sun and the stars revolving around us. Over the last five hundred years, however, scientific discoveries have demanded that we reframe our view of the cosmos and our place in it. With each discovery, humans have moved further and further from the organizing center of the universe. The reality is that we live in an entirely normal solar system, in the boring backwaters of a thoroughly vanilla galaxy—literally, a cosmic Nowheresville. Although the size of earth and its distance from the sun are indeed special, in every other way our position within the cosmos is profoundly random, unpredictable, and unimpressive. While many have found this intellectual change disconcerting, I think such knowledge can only enhance our appreciation of the astounding, unexpected richness of the biological world, human existence, our conscious experience, and our technological and cultural accomplishments.
In a similar way, I think that reframing aesthetic philosophy to remove humans from the organizing center of the discipline—to fully encompass the aesthetic productions of both human and nonhuman animals—can only enhance our appreciation of the marvelous diversity, complexity, aesthetic richness, and variable social functions of the human arts. By adopting a post-human aesthetic philosophy that places us, and our artworlds, in context with other animals, we will have a much deeper understanding of how we came to be and what is truly special about being human.
On a foggy late June morning in 1974, I stood in a large lobster boat eagerly gripping my binoculars as we pulled out of the harbor of West Jonesport, Maine. We were on our way to Machias Seal Island, at that time the southernmost nesting colony of the Atlantic Puffin (Fratercula arctica). The fog began to clear as we entered the deep water of the Bay of Fundy, and Captain Barna Norton was soon pointing out Greater Shearwaters, Sooty Shearwaters, and Wilson’s Storm Petrels—smaller relatives of the great oceangoing albatrosses—as they skimmed over the gray water.
The sun broke through as we approached the grassy fifteen-acre island with its rocky shore and white postcard-ready lighthouse. Nesting in the grass along the boardwalks that crossed the island were thousands of Common Terns. Mixed in among them were a couple hundred Arctic Terns, distinguished from the Common Terns by their entirely bloodred beaks, silvery wings, shorter red legs, grayer breasts, and longer white tail plumes. In just six weeks, these Arctic Terns would begin their epic migration—the longest of any organism—down through the southern Atlantic to spend their winter in the Antarctic Ocean, only to return to breed here next summer. As we walked along the boardwalks through the tern colony, we instigated a traveling wave of consternation. Pairs of terns took turns screaming and diving down to attack our heads with their needle-sharp beaks. Being only twelve at the time, I was one of the shortest people in the group. So, the terns conveniently swooped down on the taller members of our party, and I escaped the brunt of these attacks.
From inside several blinds looking outward to the rocky shore, I saw dozens of Atlantic Puffins with their black-and-white tuxedo plumage and their big, clownishly colorful red, orange, and black beaks (color plate 21). The puffins sat sunning and socializing with each other on the granite boulders before flying back out to sea to feed. Occasionally, a new puffin would return from the sea, beak stuffed with a dozen or more thin little fishes that hung down on either side of the beak like the silvery walrus mustache so popular with rock stars and young men at that time. After landing on the rocks, the foraging puffin would descend between the boulders to his or her burrow to feed the single chick waiting hungrily below. Among the boulders were a few pairs of Common Murres (Uria aalge) and Razorbills (Alca torda), the closest living relative of the extinct, flightless Great Auk (Alca impennis), which plied these same waters centuries before.
The day flew by, and some hours later I returned to the boat sunburned, covered in smelly tern shit, and ecstatically happy. I remained vigilant all the way back to West Jonesport in hopes of catching yet one more view of a shearwater or a foraging Arctic Tern in our wake. Many events of that day—like waking up in my tent at dawn and identifying the song of my lifer Swainson’s Thrush (Catharus ustulatus)—remain sealed in my memory over forty years later.
After I had spent months dreaming, planning, reading, and studying birds in my landlocked little hometown in southern Vermont, the experience of finally seeing the puffins and other seabirds had exceeded my wildest imaginings. The convergence of book learning and life experience—of savoir and connaissance—created a profound joy. It was an early and formative avian epiphany. In the years that followed, I would dedicate much of my life to reliving, expanding, and deepening the revelatory experience of natural history observation, scientific research, and discovery.
I realized along the way that bird-watching and science are both ways of exploring yourself in the world—parallel paths to find self-expression and meaning through engagement with the diversity and complexity of the natural world around us. But I am still astonished by the surprising new ways this continues to be true, how knowledge circles back and creates opportunity for richer, ever-deeper experiences and ever more stirring discoveries, and how that process enriches our lives.
I am still as excited for the next opportunity, the next discovery, the next new, beautiful bird, as I was on that expectant foggy morning in Maine.