evolution is better at art then you?

reply to post by theindependentjournal

You've already been well pulled up my my esteemed colleagues* but I see they have kindly stepped back to allow me the coup de grâce.

Lean forward, if you please... that's right. Now push back the collar and let the hair hang free. We don't want the axe fouling. You'd suffer.

Ready? So...

• Every gene in your genome is a mutation, with the possible exception of one. The original one. The one that started the whole game way back in the Archaean. If you're still carrying it, which is doubtful. It probably mutated out of recognition a billion years ago. Every gene in your genome is a mutant version of an older gene. That's how you got different genes in the first place. And the genes you have are, on the whole, beneficial to you. So if you want an example of a beneficial mutation, any and every gene will do. I trust your question is now fully answered.
  

Tsk. Blood on my shoes again...

*Might as well toss OT a sop to feed his paranoia.

reply to post by 8bitbreakfast


I have a challenge for you. Drop a jar of sand on the floor. Now draw the result.

Cumple up a large ball of tinfoil, put it in a room with a lit christmas tree. Now draw that.

Going to claim god arranged that spill, the sand, broken glass, upturned lid that way?

Going to claim that a god must have aligned those folds and divinely hung those xmas lights?

If not, I highly anticipate your photorealistic renderings of each.

reply to post by noobfun

a simple grain of rice has more genetic diveristy then most animals

Michael Pollan, in The Botany of Desire, says that when it comes to biochemistry, plants are far superior to animals, and are subject to very high selective pressures, simply because they cannot move. He regards the genetic complexity of plants as only to be expected, given the amount of evolving they have had to do - and offers the rice genome, with its 50,000-plus genes, as an example.

Why Evolution is Better at Art than You Are

We've drifted far off topic (and into the usual rut), so perhaps this is a good moment to try and answer the OP question.

Although it is not very clearly presented in the OP, I think what is being asked is:

• How does a random, chance-based process like evolution produce such beauty and functional elegance?
  

The first and most obvious answer is, of course, that evolution is not a chance process. It is a winnow, as Darwin called it, which sifts chance occurrences, selects the ones most useful to its purposes and creates the conditions necessary to promote further useful chance occurrences. But this we've already been into.

The second, equally obvious answer is that evolution doesn't always produce beautiful, functionally elegant objects. I don't know many people that would call a slug or tapeworm beautiful. As for functional elegance, the bodies of plants and animals are full of useless impedimenta, evolutionary makeshifts - components originally evolved to serve one purpose and pressed into the service of another - and sheer bad design. So the second answer is that evolution isn't always better at art than you are.

And there is still another answer, which is that our aesthetic sense is also an evolved attribute. We have evolved to see certain things as beautiful and others as ugly. The capacity to enjoy beauty, and therefore to appreciate art, must have evolved before art itself (along with the rest of culture) was invented. Before there were artificial objects to admire, what was there for this aesthetic sense to operate upon? Answer: nature. We saw beauty in landscapes, sunsets, rainbows, birds and animals and, of course, each other. Natural beauty is the very touchstone of our aesthetic sense: that is why poets use natural metaphors of beauty, and compare their lovers to a summer's day. Nature is better at art than we are because all our art is modelled on nature.

reply to post by Astyanax


ill admit my botany knowledge is seriously lacking,

looks like a valid explenation for the diversity, i know plants suffer natural selection the same as all life but i never really thought about what it implies for them. still pretty dam humbaling when the mighty species homo sapien sapien get thier ass handed to them by a grain of rice though

reply to post by Vipassana


You might be interested to know that da vinci's art isn't particularly realistic. It's actually fairly stylized. The thing is, he was VERY skilled at it. To some people, it may well look better than a more true-to life style.