posted on Dec, 10 2008 @ 02:31 AM
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.