Beauty and the beasts

‘BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY,” declared the poet John Keats, carried away by a glimpse of a Grecian urn. Nowadays our fount of truth is more likely to be scientific – and beauty often has precious little to do with it.

In the century and a half since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, evolutionary theory has become the dominant lens through which most of us view the natural world. Scientists working across a range of disciplines, from geology through astrophysics to genetics, have taken Darwin's ideas and run with them, adding new and significant layers to the evolutionary model.

One area of human cognitive endeavour, however, has been conspicuously absent from this ongoing development: the arts. Science tends to avoid making aesthetic pronouncements about the natural world. Darwin himself – no slouch when it came to a heartfelt appreciation of the joys of nature – declared that the famously beautiful peacock’s tail made him feel sick. Its unwieldiness appears to fly in the face of the notion of the survival of the fittest, and even the most ardent exponent of sexual selection struggles to explain why the wretched thing has to be quite so big.

Does art have anything to say to, or about, evolution? The jazz musician and philosopher David Rothenberg believes that it does – and he will have plenty to say on the subject when he gives a talk at the Science Gallery in Dublin on St Valentine's night. In his new book, Survival of the Beautiful, Rothenberg argues that art has played a central role both in the evolution of the natural world itself and in our attitude to it.

In a previous book, Why Birds Sing, Rothenberg put forward the theory that, although birds sing in order to attract mates and repel rivals, they also sing for the sheer joy of it. The book was inspired by his conviction that when he improvised musical phrases in the presence of certain species of bird, they responded in a manner he describes as "duetting". Another book, Thousand Mile Song, saw him travel from Hawaii to Russia to play his bass clarinet while recording the sounds of whales in their native habitats.

For a man whose day job involves teaching philosophy at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Rothenberg has impressive musical credentials. His 2010 collaboration with the pianist Marilyn Crispell, One Dark Night I Left My Silent House,was described – by Le Monde, no less – as "a little miracle". A more recent recording, Whale Music Remixed, features contributions from the electronic artists Scanner, DJ Spooky and Lukas Ligeti.

Survival of the Beautiful, however, takes Rothenberg into what is, for him, relatively new territory: the visual. The book is a cornucopia of cognitive delights, exploring everything that's a treat for the eyes, from the colours of dinosaurs to whether it's a good idea to teach elephants to paint. This was, he says, a deliberate move on his part. "When you bring it up with music, this is really a strange thing for people to ponder. Why might a nightingale song and a humpback-whale song seem to have similar parallels in structure? That was the question that got me going in previous books. But if you're going to try and argue a larger theory – that aesthetics is important in evolution and nature – you have to bring in visual art.

“Visual art has a vast history of thinking about these things, and it connects directly to ideas in science and how all this diversity evolved. And it’s so much easier for us to talk about. We are more visual when it comes to analysing things. Music is much easier for people to like, and to get into, but it’s much harder to talk about.”

Rothenberg admits he knows much less about visual art than about music. But, he adds with a laugh, his wife, his mother and many of his friends are artists. He dedicated the book to his mother – who seems to have been more flustered than flattered by the gesture. “She was wondering, ‘Yes, but what are you actually going to say? How is it all going to come out?’ ”

Her concern probably stemmed from the fact that her son’s ideas have often seemed to be on a collision course with accepted scientific doctrine. Is he arguing that beauty is an essential component of the natural world rather than an accidental byproduct of evolution? “Well, yes,” he says. “But evolution is full of accidents. That’s how it progresses. And nobody is in charge, right? If you trust the account of evolution explaining how we got the living forms we have now, nobody has planned this whole thing out. So certain things end up being selected for and picked.

“A lot of those are practical. If it turns out this bird has a slightly longer wing, he can fly better and so is more successful. But you also get all these patterns and colours and strange appearances that are not useful at all. They’re just interesting. That’s what so fascinates me. For Darwin, sexual selection was very different to natural selection. Sexual selection meant all this cool, beautiful stuff that was very hard to explain. There was a dichotomy between these processes.”

Contemporary evolutionary biology has tried to erase that dichotomy, Rothenberg says. “I’m arguing that you’re missing the point if you try to make it all practical and explain away these things. In particular, you have a hard time explaining why there are these particular shapes and forms and colours.”

In the book he talks to the biologist Richard Prum. “He says people are not looking in the right places. They’re not realising that you could learn so much about how nature works by studying how art works.” Rothenberg points out that there is also a dichotomy between how biologists talk about evolution and how chemists and mathematicians talk about it. Mathematicians, in particular, are happy to use the word “beauty” without the need for a sharp intake of breath. “Biology tends to emphasise randomness. Anything goes. Anything could be picked, preferred over the generations. But these other fields say, ‘No, there are actually certain rules about how nature is put together. You find them everywhere.’ ”

FOR ROTHENBERG, OUR aesthetic sense is derived from the laws of physics. Because we have evolved in this universe, its curves and angles, swirls and spirals are what we find beautiful. He focuses on the drawings of the German biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel, which helped form the basis for a new visual aesthetic in the early 20th century, influencing such artists as Kandinsky and Ernst, as well as the architect René Binet, whose gates for the Paris exposition of 1900 were based on Haeckel’s illustrations of the radiolarian, a single-celled aquatic animal.

Rothenberg says other species, not just humans, also have this innate aesthetic sense. Perhaps because he argues his case so persuasively, scientists have labelled him wacky and new age. Does that bother him? “Sometimes,” he says. “Being wacky is fine. Being new age, well, what do you mean by that? I don’t like new age if it means a sort of watered-down spirituality and instant cosmicness without being really deep. But if the new age means trying to ask deeper questions about what’s going on today, and not being satisfied with answers that are too easy, I’m happy to be in that camp.”

What enrages scientists the most, he adds happily, is when he criticises their methods. “If I say, ‘There’s something more complex here that you’re not looking at,’ they don’t like that. But some scientists are actually listening to me, and I’m collaborating with them now to really study musicality in birdsong.

“There are some real problems in birdsong science. You’ll often hear it said that the bird with the longest, most complex song has more success at mating, so this is why these complexities exist. But it’s just not true. It’s true in one or two species – and those species are studied over and over again. For the other species it’s not true at all, but they just don’t talk about that.”

Biology, he adds, has little to say about peacocks. “Darwin said, ‘The peacock’s tail makes me sick: I can’t explain this.’ But he was someone who deepened his theory by thinking about the things he could not explain. And it’s really important that science continues to do that – to go after things you cannot explain, and think deeply about them.”

In his next book Rothenberg will be going after insects. “Insect sounds are the most primitive and the most ancient and the strangest,” he says. “How do we make sense of them?” By using electronic music, of course. The book is due to be published to coincide with the next big bloom of cicadas across the eastern United States. “That’s amazing in itself,” he says. “That insects come out every 17 years. It’s like a rhythm . . .” And he’s off, on another of his strangely beautiful riffs.

Survival of the Beautiful,

by David Rothenberg, is published by Bloomsbury. He will give a talk at the Science Gallery, Trinity College Dublin, on Tuesday at 6pm

Playing the blues: The bird that woos with art

If you were hiking through the Australian rainforest and found a pile of blue plastic spoons, you might think you’d stumbled on the remains of an Aussie picnic. But it might just be the work of a male bowerbird, which builds elaborate “bowers” not as a nest but as a kind of sculpture to attract females.

One species of bowerbird builds a tepee-like mound around a pole and surrounds it with small piles of flowers, seeds and feathers from birds of paradise, carefully arranged.

Another crafts an elaborate structure “like an exploding Christmas tree or a frozen firework”, writes Rothenberg, “decorated with hanging ornaments of moss and lichen”.

Satin bowerbirds (right), though, will settle for nothing less than bright-blue decorative materials. At a pinch, they’ll paint things blue with a pigment that they grind from fruit pulp – or raid picnic tables up to 15km away for the prized plastic spoons. If it’s really stuck, a bowerbird will kill any hapless blue bird it finds nearby, in order to use its feathers.

It is, according to David Rothenberg, evidence that bowerbirds are creating works of art.