A New Interpretation of Natural Beauty and Sexual
Selection
Lu, Chenguang
Survival99#gmail.com
Abstract: Based on the Need-based Aesthetics, this paper attempts to answer two
questions about natural beauty: 1) How did this colorful nature form, which
includes colorful flowers, fruits, and avian feathers. 2) Why do People sense beauty
from natural environment or mountain-and-river paintings that lack immediate
utility? To resolve the problem with sexual selection left by
Darwin and Wallace, this paper shows some pictures of birds as evidences
to explain the logic of sexual selection related to beauty: first, the needs
relationships between birds and their foods or environments selected the female
tastes for beauty, and then, the female tastes selected the male’s appearances.
Key wordｓ：beauty sense, natural beauty, sexual selection,
evolution, colorful birds
1. Introduction
It is hard to explain that why many
birds, such as peacocks, pheasants, mandarin ducks, wood ducks, have obvious tastes
for beauty. Of cause，there are also many birds with
special colors mainly for concealment
or as signs for conveying information. To explain why a female peacock tends to
selects a more good-looking male peacock, Darwin proposed in “The Origin of
Human Beings and the Sexual Selection” [2] that human and birds select the
opposite sex not only upon viability, but also upon beauty. However,
Wallace saw the principle of Selection-upon-Beauty as an unnecessary and contradictory
supplement for the principle of survival of the fittest. The British biologist Helena Cronin listed many explanations, including the well-known one, the arms
race theory, provided by later researchers in her book “The Ant and the Peacock”[3].
However, none of these explanations
is satisfactory.
The
author proposed the Needs-based Aesthetics, affirming that needs relationship
determines the taste for beauty; the lack and dissatisfaction are more
important than utility to beauty sense. The beauty sense pushes a person to
approach and go after objects or environments that are useful to his or her survival.
From this point of view, the colorful appearances of many birds are no longer
natural secrets. This paper explores the answers for two problems mentioned
above and explains the cause of the changes of human tastes for the beauty of
natural environments.
2. The
origin of colorful nature
Natural science tells us that
colors come from natural lights. The light in essence is the electromagnetic
wave. In fact, there is a lot of invisible light.
Fig.1 Various bands of the light, Mankind
can only perceive natural light.
Why is the visible light is just
the light that appears often in nature? It is the sake of our eye’s evolution
for adaption. Our visual construction helps us to discern seven, even more, completely
different colors. Our color perceptions are only the symbols of natural light.
Insects and fish see different colors because they have different visual cells
(cones). In addition, insects also see ultraviolet light; and fish see infrared
light because their color-sensitive cells have different sensitive
characteristics.
Human has three kinds of
color-sensitive cells. The number (M) of colors perceived increases with the
number (N) of color-sensitive cells. There is M=2N. For normal
people, N=3, M=8 [6].
Fig. 2 Illustrating of the evolution of human
color vision: the number of colors perceived increases with color-sensitive
cells splitting from one to three kinds. While the vertical line moves horizontally,
the change of the areas covered by the line reflects the change of color
perception.
We may image that there were only
dull colors or lights on the earliest world without animals and plants. The nature
might gradually possess colorful flowers and fruits after animals and plants
appeared on this planet and started evolving. Those flowers and fruits reflect
lights with certain wave bands; while the animals’ eyes could gradually discern
flowers and fruits with those colors. What promoted the evolutions of flowers,
fruits, and animal eyes? It was the pressure of survival, the needs
relationship, and the demand for conveying information.
Pollen and nectar provide nourishment
to insects. Those flowers in more distinguished colors attract more insects;
and more nutritious flowers may attract more insects to come to pollen from a
long term. Therefore, if a plant has flowers in distinguished colors (in other
words, the flowers reflects lights with different spectra) and more nutritious,
this plant is likely to have more descendants.
At the same time, if certain type of insects
have eyes that discern more colors, they are more likely to obtain nourishment in
an ease. If certain types of insects are more capable of appreciating tastes
from pollen and nectar and perceiving the fragrance and beauty of flowers, they
are likely have higher motivation in seeking nourishment Hence, this type of
insects could be retained better in the natural selection We may be able to conclude that at the
beginning of evolution, , insects had preference of certain flowers because of the
nourishment of the flowers rather than their fragrance and beauty; Flowers became
fragrant and beautiful to insects only after insects found they could get
nourishment from followers (refer to
[4]).
The taste of birds and beasts may evolve side by side with
the nourishment of fruits. More
nutritious fruits are more likely to become food of animals. Their seeds
are more likely to be spread and
hence are more likely to be retained during the natural selection. At the same
time, the birds and beasts are more likely to be retained if they are more
capable of appreciating the taste of
the fruits and more motivated to seek the fruits.
This process may be said the process
of objectification.
3.
The
Rule of Needs’ Evolution and the Significance of Beauty Sense
The Needs-based
Aesthetics concludes that human tastes of fragrance, sweet, and beauty are
formed and determined by the needs relationship and human needs evolve following
the rule: paths become ends (final goals).
Human ends grow like branches of a
big tree [3]. The root is for survival. Other ends are all produced and
developed following the rule of paths becoming ends. Eating, drinking, and love-making
were only the paths of survival at the beginning. Late, the paths became the
ends. These perceptual activities themselves became ends. For these new ends, activities
such as learning, game, dance, fishing, and hunting were only paths or means.
Late, these activities also entertain us. Our pleasant gustatory sensation makes our eating certain foods from a path into
an end; while our pleasant visual and auditory sensations makes our approaching
certain objects from a path into an end.
Our various pleasant sensations are
to lead us to treat those activities useful to survival from paths to ends. In
addition, our beauty sense is to urge us to approach certain objects or
environments, and to turn the approaches from paths into ends.
Fig. 3
The tree of needs’ evolution——the root
is for survival, the leaves are for the beauty appreciations.
4. The Changes of Mankind’s
Tastes for Natural Beauty
Grosses studied the history of
human painting and concluded ([6],278-283) that the mankind first put attention
to animals and plants from practical view, and then treated them as objects for
beauty appreciation. On the earliest rock paintings, there were only animals
without plants. Those paintings were mainly related to hunting, because at that
time, the agricultural society had not arrived yet. The plants became the
esthetic objects and entered arts only after the agricultural society came.
Although Grosses’s explanation is reasonable to some
extent, he still failed to explain other facts. For example, with the
occurrence of cities and the development of modern industry, the mountain-and
–water paintings are welcome by more people; on the contrary，machines and
factories are being discarded by human beauty appreciation, even though they
are more useful.
From the perspective of the
needs-based aesthetics, only lack, dissatisfaction, or the difference between
ideal and reality, is the cause of beauty sense. Human beings perceive the beauty
of nature because they are sick of busy and crowd cities, and want to avoid
industrial pollution and to return to cozy natural environments. Many peasants in
countryside, as I know, did not sense beauty of scenery. After living in big
city for long time, they began to yearn the scenery and to find the beauty of their
rural hometowns. Grosses mentioned that the natives lived in the place with
flowers any where, they did not think flowers beautiful. I believe that after they
have lived in a desert for several
years, they must be able to sense the beauty of the environment with flowers.
In ancient
Fig. 4. A moutain-and –water painting by
Dong Yuan (at the end of the Tang
Dynasty)——The water is a good resource for living, while the mountain is
a refuge during wars.
5. Human
Sexual Selection
Human beings select their spouse
first for the sake of survival. For
instance, when selecting a female, a man tends to first check the female’s fertility and whether the female is young
and healthy. Then he looks at whether the woman is gentle. Sometimes, a working-class
family also looks at whether the female is physically strong and is able to bring
some income. Rich families, on the other hand, possibly put more weight on the
intelligence and virtues of the female. When selecting a male, a female tends
to put more attention to his survival ability, cares about whether he is strong,
rich, and able to bring the security to the family. The survival need
determines person's preference, conversely the preference reinforces the taste of beauty. Once the
taste of beauty forms, it has relatively independent significance. It seems
that the human beings inherit the taste for beauty generation from generation. .
Such taste of beauty becomes a summary of human sexual selection experience of
many generations. The ugly feeling has the same characteristic, it also congeals
human experience for survival. For instance, a person with apparently leprous symptoms will look ugly to all people including
kids.
In addition, the understanding of human
beings after birth also affects their beauty-appreciation tastes. The more a
person thinks the object to be good and the more he likes, the more the object looks beautiful to
him or her. If an object is easy to approach, then the sense of beauty may not
be that intensive. The reason is that the significance of the beauty sense is to
urge the person to approach the object. Why do we need an image and certain distance
while we appreciate beauty? We won’t approach an object without an image of
that object in our mind, and we
won’t have enough motivation to pursue that object if it is at hand. This is
also the reason for why the lover’s eyes can see beautiful lady. There are other situations in which for example, a woman
looks pretty initially, but our rational knowledge tells us that she behaves improperly or has seriously infectious disease,
her “beauty” may gradually disappear.
In
brief, the needs relationship for survival between the opposite sexes
determines the beauty-appreciation mind. Conversely, the beauty-appreciation
mind promotes the needs relationship.
6. The
Secret of Avian Colorful Feathers
About 25 years ago, I understood
that the female peacock appreciated the male’s feathers because the female
liked eating berries.
Lately, I found the colorful
feathers of many birds reflected their needs of foods . The most evident is
that the males of several kinds of ducks have the shapes of spiral snails on
their heads. For example, the head
of the male King Eider living in
Fig. 5. Three kinds of ducks whose heads have the
shapes of spiral snails and the mandarin duck whose wings have the shape of the
clam.
(left-up: green head duck, right-up: king eider,
left-down: wood duck, right-down: mandarin duck)
The author believes that there must be a long
history for the duck to eat spiral snails and claims. The mandarin duck has a
head with the shape of the clam rather than that of the spiral snail; the
yellow tail feathers manifest the body of the claim outside its shell.
There are many other colorful
birds whose feathers or appearances reflect their needs of foods.
Fig. 6. The appearance of the Rose-crowned
Fruit Dove shows his taste of beauty to the red fruits.
Fig7 The appearances of the crake
and the pheasant show their taste to millet sprays.
Fig. 8 The guinea with the shape of the corn on its body and pheasant
with the shape of the pine corn on its body
Fig. 9 The tragopan
temminckii that likes to eat grasshoppers. [②]
Some birds also show their taste for the beauty of
environments as human beings have got.
I found several kinds of migratory birds
whose male heads had island-like or lake-like shapes. It is important for them
to find the appropriate environment while flying in sky. What they like most is
an island surrounded by the river or a lake surrounded by mountains where there
are foods and safety. The needs relationship selected their taste for the beauty
of environments that guides them to find appropriately living environments. It
is afterward that the female taste for beauty selected the male feathers.
Fig.10 The anas
Please note the partial enlarge of the
face-colorful duck. There is white color between “the green river” and “the yellow
sand beach”, which precisely simulates the white spray (for details see my
on-line article [③]).
More
examples can be seen in my homepage[④].
These examples provide answers to the difficult question about sexual selection
according to the Needs-based Aesthetics.
7.
Summery
This article discusses, from the perspective
of evolution, the origin of the colorful nature, the evolution of human needs,
and the issues about natural beauty and sexual selection. Supported by
evidences, it explains that first the needs of birds to foods and environments selected
their tastes for beauty; and the female tastes selected the male appearances
afterward.
References
1.
2.
3.
Helena Cronin, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from
4.
Chenguang Lu, “Trying
to resolve the problem left by
5.
Chenguang Lu, “Mystery of beauty sense and evolution of
needs”(in Chinese), Science and Technology University Press ,2003. (see: http://survivor99.com/lcg/english/
)
6. Chenguang Lu, “Mystery of color vision and fundamental
question in philosophy”, Science and Technology University Press, 2003
7. On
Beauty and Beauty Sense by Western Philosophers, Edited by Beijing
University Philosophy Dept., Commercial Press, 1980