Rupert Sheldrake: Why is there so much beauty in the world?

so why is there so much beauty in the world the first thing you might think is it's all in the eye of the beholder it's all about us we're predisposed to see beauty so we think there's a lot in the world but actually it's just something to do with our own minds that's a kind of hypothesis that might come forward I've been thinking about this you see unite haven't been reading thousands of books I've just been thinking about it and it's the kind of thing that I'd not thought about much before and I'm guessing that some of you have not spent a great deal of time thinking about it either because we tend to take it for granted so is it just because of us do we project it onto the onto the world well first humans are undoubtedly interested in beauty art is one of our creations and the first works of art appeared in caves 35,000 years ago what are still for us beautiful paintings we have beautiful architecture beautiful textiles beautiful jewelry beautiful pictures beautiful sculpture and we have beautiful ceramics and objects of craft beautiful woodwork so we surround ourselves with a great deal of beauty so we're obviously interested in it but there are cultural variations so it's not as if there's an absolute beauty because in some cultures music for example which is very beautiful to other people is fairly incomprehensible I lived in South India for quite a while and south indian carnatic music is for south indians incredibly beautiful for me it was beautiful but I just missed most of it I'd be sitting at these concerts and suddenly there be a gasp and several ego voila you know just absolutely loves music and I didn't notice what had happened so clearly there was a kind of aesthetics there that was passing me by and so there are cultural variations and again that might make you think well it's all in our minds but we're also interested in the beauty of nature many of us like coming to court his Island because it's so beautiful there's the beauty of the views the scenery of the trees of plants we're impressed by the beauty of butterfly wings peacock tails and there's a huge amount of beauty in the world which we only discovered quite recently through the invention of the microscope people were able to look at small forms of life like radial Aryans which live in the sea they're single-celled organisms with unbelievably beautiful spikes coming out and complex forms snowflakes are extraordinarily beautiful but until people had microscopes you couldn't see any of these details until telescopes were invented we couldn't see any galaxies or any stars any any details of any planets but until radio telescopes were invented and more powerful telescopes in the 20th century we couldn't see any galaxies outside our own now we can and many of these galaxies are extraordinary beautiful they're enormous objects in the sky they're a hundred billion light years a hundred million light years across now a hundred thousand light years across many of them there's a huge distance in space and yet when we see these spiral galaxies with those these flow patterns that they seem to show we recognize those as beauty beautiful - so why is there all that beauty in nature and why do we recognize it it's nothing to do with us these galaxies or the beauty of radial Aryans they were there long before humans existed and long before we were aware of their existence so is it just our minds recognizing this is it something about us well I think the next step in the argument that occurred to me when I was thinking about this is no it can't just be about us because think of flowers flowers we find them beautiful but flowers have been around for a hundred million years human beings modern humans have been around for a hundred thousand years and and urban civilizations for what twelve thousand years flowers long precede all of us and all the great all the different kinds of flowering plants all the different families of flowers are ancient at least 60 million years old the first flowering plants were about a hundred million years ago in the age of the dinosaurs so why a flower is beautiful Charles Darwin asked this question and in one of the rare poetic passages in the Origin of Species he pointed out there could have been no flower until there was an eye to see it flowers exist because animals have eyes there are communication between plants and animals primarily a communication between plants and and insects bees and other insects that pollinate them and butterflies most animals aren't that interested in flies but insects certainly are and this evolution of flowers has happened in response to insects looking at them insects look at them more thoroughly and we do bees crawl inside them and one of the things that we've been doing in our workshop is looking into the insides of flowers getting a bee's iView using hand lenses loops these small times ten lenses and with one of these you can actually go right inside the flower and find yourself in a kind of wraparound color scape which is what bees are experiencing but this seems to go beyond the call of duty the beauty of these flowers I mean it see how much because you do need for a bee to be attracted to a flower flowers are attractive to bees but it seems that they're gratuitously beautiful I mean you can make artificial flowers that attract bees just out a simple cutout cardboard shapes and yet these flowers are vastly more beautiful than they need to be and how is it the bees can appreciate this beauty with such small brains a bees brain contains about a million nerve cells our brains contain a hundred billion so our brains are a hundred million to a hundred million times more bigger than bees brains we've got a hundred million times more nerve cells than bees brains and yet 100 millions of our brain is enough to drive the evolution of flies so what is it about flies that bees can see and appreciate the beauty of but I think part of it is because flowers have actually quite simple symmetrical forms if we take flowers and sunflower or Daisy family we see these radially symmetrical flowers which are instantly attractive to us but they're clearly instantly attracted to insects as well it's a simple radially symmetrical Gestalt or pattern we find in flies a whole range of other flowers but they come in simple forms the flowers usually come either in the sunflower type with the sunlight design or they come with petal designs in threes fours or fives in lilies and all related plants they come in threes so we have three internal petals and then three external petals so these again it's a very simple form three I mean we don't need a very complicated brain to count to three and most pliers are based on these very simple of three four and five or multiples of that this is how stroma RIA which has three outer petals and three inner petals but it's asymmetric so it's sort of squished but it's still three plus three then some petals some flowers have petals in fours this is a fuchsia has four petals around a central part and all the cabbage family the brass a--casey including war flowers have four petals hmm and then many flowers have five petals including the iconic Holly Hogg and nasturtiums where the those three lower petals are different from the two upper petals but again it's a five fold pattern and it's got a simple bilateral symmetry rather than being radially symmetrical here's another five fold pattern the flower of phlox so these what I'm suggesting is that these simple patterns where you have multiplicity within the whole threes fours fives or radially symmetrical patterns are forms of beauty because they show an order a pattern a symmetry of a fairly easily ground spoke of graspable kind easily enough for insects to grasp and find attractive but also attractive to us with these vastly more complex brains now humans have taken the beauty of flowers further through plant breeding and plant breeders start with wild flowers and then select varieties like double petals varieties to end up with the kind of thing we find in hollyhock garden there are a number of different species here no one's quite sure we've done in our group we've done counts my own count came to about 60 different species of flower in the garden in flower at the moment some people got 90s some of someone got 70 anyway there's a great many different flowers in hollyhock garden and those that have been bred as varieties have had a sort of extra beauty added through selection and plant breeding but some of the plants in the garden of species and bred they're basically domesticated wild species and still have a nick draw the newBeauty so that's one thing why should insects appreciate beauty in the first place that's the next question why is it that insects would appreciate the beauty of flowers and help but trigger off this fantastic cascade of floral evolution well it turns out that animals of many many species have a very strong aesthetic sense butterflies for example often have extraordinary beautiful wings there are many beetles that have remarkable iridescent colors many fish particularly tropical fish have very beautiful forms many birds have beautiful plumage the most obvious example being the peacocks tail and many mammals are very beautiful and of course many people are very beautiful too so why is it that the say much beauty among animals as well as plants and again Darwin was one of the first people to turn his attention to this question and Darwin worked out that it is he explained it in terms of what he called the theory of sexual selection it's all about sex well plants are - the Flyers are about male and female and pollination it's basically it turns out to be all about sex both in flowers and animals but the within the animals what Darwin showed is that in many animal care animal species particularly in birds the competition is for females to choose the most beautiful male the females are the ones who do the choosing and the males who once you have the beautiful display if you think about it peacocks have extraordinarily beautiful tails and feathers whereas peahens a rather dodgy looking by comparison if you if you look at pheasants the male pheasants have much more splendid plumage than the female pheasants and this is true of many many bird species and some birds that aren't necessarily that beautiful themselves to create displays of beauty like bowerbirds which collect objects and arrange them in a kind of installation for to attract females so females have this great sense of male beauty female peacocks choose according to which male peacock has the most beautiful plumage and this is the basis of their sex or choice now in reptiles and mammals as Darwin pointed out it doesn't work in terms of beauty first and foremost among mammals and among many reptiles as Darwin put it the law of battle prevails among sexual competition in mammals is primarily to do with competition between males usually through fighting and trials of strength and as he points out even vegetarian and quite Pacific animals like hares can fight to the death in the mating season moles too will do this and Darwin's method was to pile up evidence upon evidence upon evidence until his case is totally overwhelming and I read Darwin's book on sexual selection and he just does it at chapter after chapter you know in most mammal species the males are bigger than the females why not because they need B to be bigger to to because of predators because both male and females subject to predation because they need to be bigger to fight other males in many mammalian species males have horns and females don't why because they need them for fighting and display in many species they have tusks the males have tusks and if the females have them they're much smaller why because they need them for fighting and Darwin then points out that the same applies to chimpanzees gorillas and other Apes and he then reported from early anthropologists traveling through North America who found it in tribe after tribe that they visited at the main form of sport for young men was wrestling and the winner of the wrestling match got the girl so this sort of similar patterns occur in humans and male competition is of course something that's not unfamiliar to most of us in all sorts of arenas that means that in and in reptiles - there's it tends to be male fights between males then the winning males get to choose the female so here female beauty becomes important rather than male beauty because the once you get a choice the best choice of the ones who win the fights or come out top of whatever competitive scheme it is sports football cricket game games in general Business Corporations rising I mean the the the more powerful in in most situations tend to have a bigger pick and so then male competition according to Darwin relies on the the the selection depends on these criteria beauty in females and this is true in all mammals but the evolutionary psychologists have had a great time with this as you can imagine they've taken this Darwinian agenda much further forward in recent years using these kind of rather grimly utilitarian arguments but they must have some grain of truth the argument is that since humans walk upright then SEC reset secondary sexual characteristics that men will find attractive or ones that are do with reproduction so breasts become very important as aspects of female beauty it's not necessary for producing most breasts and made of fat tissue and chimpanzees and other Apes don't have protruding breasts that's because they don't walk upright according to this theory wide hips are important because of childbearing and a good complexion because it's a sign of health and therefore fertility so these are all evolutionary psychological arguments based on standard kind of biological principles and they would predict that among humans women would spend a lot more on clothes than men be more interested in cosmetics some would undergo breast enlargements they'd like to display their figures etc all of this seems very utilitarian I know but it makes biological sense so these these biological arguments about sexual selection help us to see why there might have been driving evolutionary principles that lead to beauty but as Darwin himself said they don't explain the sense of beauty itself why is it that female peacocks find this amazing display of feathers beautiful why is it that female fish find the display of the beauty of the tropical fish colors so attractive why is it the butterflies find other butterflies wings say beautiful and insects their ability to respond to the beauty of flowers may well be because they'd already been responding for millions and millions of years to the beauty of Alamut the opposite sex in their own species so why is it that this sense of beauty is dispersed through many so many animals it's not just us almost every animal species has a sense of beauty which comes out in sexual selection in choice of mates and in the case of insects spills over into an appreciation of flowers and in the case of flowers it's not just the shape it's also the colour and in some cases a beautiful smell as well so throughout all animal nature we find this beauty and even in plants which are the vegetative parts of plants which are not involved in reproduction or attracting insects like fern leaves for example we see extraordinary beauty in plant structures and leaves so why is this so I think that it suggests that the way that minds work even simple minds has work in a similar way to the way that beautiful forms appear in nature there's a kind of resonance between minds and the natural world I think that the ability of an insect to represent to recognize the three plus three fold mandala like pattern of a lily is because something in its nervous system resonates with that it may even be literally that it has sort of three fold wave patterns in the nervous system nervous systems have wave patterns within them and wave patterns can set up different forms if we look at the way that the whole of nature is organized it turns out that it has particular kinds of structure the organization of everything in nature everything that self-organizing turns out to be made up of holes within part parts within holes and the holes the whole system itself is a part of something something larger so it's what's called a nested hierarchy or or a hole a key so within atoms there are subatomic particles like electrons and neutrons and within the nucleus there are many different subatomic particles the neutron the nucleus of an atom is a hole it's a whle a hole made up of parts neutrons and protons round it are the electrons whizzing in a series of orbitals many of which are very beautiful they that some of the figures of eight type orbitals summer donut-shaped they have mathematical forms the orbitals even within the atom and then those are joined together in molecules where the whole molecule has a form which binds together the parts the atoms within it so the in a molecule there are certain electrons whiz run the entire molecule like a kind of envelope holding it together and it's made up of atoms so the molecule is a wholeness as a wholeness that includes the atoms and those can be included in crystals like in snowflakes made up of water molecules and in living organisms even cells which have a wholeness more than the sum of their parts they're in tissues in organs in organisms and then organisms can form whole societies of organisms like schools of fish or flocks of birds or termite colonies where the hole is more than the parts and we see the same general pattern of organization in the solar system the solar system is more than just the planets and the Sun the whole lot is a system a wholeness with parts within it and that in turn is within the galaxy which is as a great wholeness of the stars are like cells within the body of the galaxy and that too has a wholeness made up of parts now our minds also work that way they work in terms of parts and wholes nested in in hierarchy of levels of organization that's how we see things in in a kind of Gestalt patterns we see there's a wholeness and we see parts within them and the structure of our language works that way too if you think about it the the phonemes the basic sounds make up words and the words are put together in phrases and the phrases are put together in sentences so a sentence consists of several phrases each phrase consists of words each word consists of phonemes in each case that there's a patterning of the parts within a little higher level whole within a higher level whole within a higher level whole and this goes on right up to the entire universe galaxies come in clusters our galaxy's part of the Virgo supercluster which has 50 galaxies in it and there then the the universe is made up of whole strings of galaxies and so the entire universe is a whole made up of parts that show themselves made up of parts that are made up of parts in this nested hierarchy so the the organization of our own bodies is like that the whole body is the whole of our organism is made up of parts like eyes and ears and noses and livers and spleens limbs and so on which are brought together in a harmonious whole every self-organizing system by virtue of being self-organizing and by virtue of being an organism or a system has to coordinate the parts in an ordered way within the wholeness that constitutes our system so I think that one of the things that we see when we see beauty is this relationship between parts and the whole when we look at flower like a hollyhock what we're seeing is a wholeness the wholeness of the flower to where the whole lot is coordinated together with parts in this case five petals and on the back five sepals the green bits of the back together with the stamens the sexual organs in the center the stamens and and the the stigmas all these parts are coordinated together in a proportionate and balanced way and I think that instinctive recognition of the balance harmony relationship of parts is in a kind of kind of resonance between the way our minds work the way our nervous systems work and it's the way our own bodies work it's the way our own societies work too so you have this these general principles of order underlying all things so in other words I'm suggesting that the same much beauty in the world because the world is made up of self-organizing systems which contain parts that are coordinated with each other and that's in space but the same goes for organization in time which we experience through music and song there again you have a wholeness of a whole piece of music which is made up of parts like the bars and the basic rhythms and the harmonies and and the notes all of these are parts but they're coordinated together in a kind of smooth flow or even a jagged flow but a flow that has a unity to it so the note the music begins in a particular key and it goes through modulations it ends and the same key it began in there's a kind of wholeness a kind of envelope around the whole piece of music and I think this again is an expression of this principle of organization in time which is common not just to the way our minds work and way we appreciate music but to the way the whole of nature works I'd been trying to think why it is that scenery is beautiful because that doesn't follow a quite the same principles that it's not the fact that there are twin islands over there and we're here it's not necessarily because there's some great self-organizing system that places islands in particular relationships to each other there's a certain fortuitous nurse in geology caused by continental collisions and mountain ranges being thrust up there's and earthquakes and volcanoes there's a certain there are certain random processes at work but I think one of the reasons the landscape here is particularly beautiful is because it's been smoothed by glaciers and flow has a kind of unifying principle and fact that glaciers flowed this way over this landscape means there's a kind of smoothing off and our eyes sort of pick up rather the residue of that flow pattern that's moved through this landscape if it hadn't had glacier as the the rocks might be much more jagged and much less attractive one of the things about beauty is that because there is so much in the universe because it suggests the fundamental principles of the universe include beauty it's terrifying it's something that overwhelms us and therefore we often turn away from beauty because there's too much of it the poet who expressed this most clearly was Rainer Maria Rilke the great German poet who was writing around the time of the first world war and in his first do we know elegy he wrote about it as follows buuuut is nothing but beginning of terror we're still just able to bear and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us he's talking there about the way that beauty can be utterly overwhelming and we turn away from it because it's so frightening and you can all you've all experienced this I've experienced it myself on Cortes Island once in an incredibly beautiful place drinks are served you're on the deck there's an unbelievably beautiful view and some says let's look at beautiful view and you look at me as stunningly beautiful but after a few seconds some Jesus oh this reminds me of so scene I saw in Mexico last year and some said oh yes well I saw something like that in Sumatra you know the sunset there was so red and you immediately the kind of conversation begins that takes you away from this terrifying beauty because it's so frightening too it's so overwhelming is so much of it people used to be terrified of mountainous scenery in Europe until the 18th century people talked about horrid crags about mountains and and horrid meaning something that induces horror they found this scenery overwhelmingly a frightening leo and overwhelming tinder romantic movement at the end of the 18th century a new fashion grew up for the sublime which was kinds of beauty like Alps the Alps or huge waterfalls or vast natural forces which people thought were they previously people had shied away from them now the romantics liked them precisely because they produce such strong emotions and a new fashion arose which never existed before for people getting to wild places and this really began around the late 18th century the fashion the change in fashion was expressed in England through gardening until the 17th century in England the gardens were like the gardens in France and the rest of Europe extremely formal geometrical patterns box hedges Yunos squares oblongs triangles completely formal representing the imposition of order upon nature by humans and most humans were afraid that you know nature was disorderly and could easily destroy them this gave this sort of safe area of order but by the end of the 18th century the fashion had completely shifted and people liked wild nature and the job of landscape gardeners in England was to create gardens that looked as if they were wild untamed nature even though they were actually artificially created to improve on nature too the idea was to make the garden look natural as opposed to artificial and so it was a kind of imitation of nature you get something of the same aesthetic and chuc China and Japan in those Zen gardens with bonsai trees which are not about formal geometric arrangements but rather ones that share a kind of wildness of nature and dr. Johnson the 18th century English literary figure when he went to Scotland wrote he said my eyes are repelled by these acres of hopeless sterility and he was longing to see cultivated fields and hedges and domesticated landscape which is what he thought beautiful he was part of the pre romantic taste for ordered landscapes but the romantic taste was for wild nature and it reached its Apogee in the 19th century in people like Emerson and Thoreau and especially John Muir and the foundation of the National Parks movement with Yellowstone being the first and the idea of this enormous grand scale sublime beauty that previously people had been rather repelled by and frightened by overwhelmed by if we look at traditional thought about beauty then the most obvious philosopher who discarded to discuss this the one who really set the tone for subsequent discussions was Plato and Plato in his philosophy and thought that the this world is a kind of reflection of a world outside space and time which exists in some supreme mind or consciousness which contains all the ideas or forms of everything that can occur in nature so every lily is a reflection of the ideal Lily archetype that exists eternally in this transcendent mind and that's the realm of platonic forms or ideas he thought that this world was an imperfect reflection of this into eternal world of perfect forms and Plato thought that the ultimate characteristic of the ultimate mind of the universe its ultimate three characteristics the three features that overrode all the others or was over arched all the others were truth beauty and goodness that this ultimate source of all nature was true because it was the ultimate reality beautiful because it was in the nature of the ultimate goodness to be beautiful and good because it was the ultimate good it was the source of all things and in Christian theology the this idea of the Platonic mind was included as in the holy trinity as the law gasps the second person of the Holy Trinity of the word and that's the sort of mind of God which takes on these characteristics of truth beauty and goodness in the Catholic catechism the supreme definition of God is the true the good and the beautiful so both traditional philosophies and religions have seen this ultimate source of beauty as God the source of all reality and that all the beauty in nature and all the organization of nature reflects this ultimate consciousness in which beauty is embedded as part of its very nature of course the this view is not accepted by everyone for atheists and materialists beauty is just something that's experienced by animal nervous systems that have evolved so that it has some use like sexual selection and it's not it doesn't make sense to say it's part of nature because there's no they think that the whole universe is basically unconscious and you can't be conscious of beauty of your unconscious so this is one of the big dividing lines between the materialist or Atheist worldview which says that nature is entirely unconscious the universe is a purposeless machine matter is unconscious the only conscious things in the universe are brains and the most conscious thing in the entire universe as far as we know is our own brains that means that the it really does come back to what I started the idea it's all in the eye of beholder it's something to do with nervous systems and beauty is something to do with release of serotonin or dopamine in particular regions of the nervous system creating a sensation of beauty whereas this view the all religions all spiritual traditions take the view that human consciousness is not the ultimate consciousness in the universe there is a forms of consciousness vastly greater than our own and the role of spiritual practices is to connect us with those greater forms of consciousness and in most traditional cultures Beauty has always been one of the ways that we do that so this is a worldview difference and there are some people probably some people in this room who just see the world as a mechanistic system which means all consciousness is confined to nervous systems and especially the nervous systems of large brains like ours but that view then does have a bit of a problem with bees and beauty because they've got so many fewer nerves than us and yet they clearly have some kind of sense of beauty but the other worldview which all religions share is that there's a this greater form of consciousness than ours and that there's greater consciousness than ours has given rise to the whole universe including the beauty that's reflected in the whole universe and reflected in our minds the reason we can appreciate beauty is because our minds come from the same source as the whole of nature and that source itself has beauty is one of his component elements it's one of its characteristic parts or aspects well that's more or less what I wanted to say I don't know if it makes sense to you whether it's too closely argued loosely argued too serious but those are my reflections on it and I'd be very interested to hear any other people and anyone else's reflections because I'm sure something some people here are artists spend their whole life producing works of beauty so do please make comments or ask questions [Applause]

Channel: Rupert Sheldrake

Views: 47,489

Rating: 4.8886309 out of 5

Keywords: Rupert Sheldrake, Evolution of Beauty, The True The Good and The Beautiful, Sexual Selection, Charles Darwin, Evolution of Flowers, Bees, Insects, Hollyhock

Id: fidhVu_7W3c

Length: 38min 40sec (2320 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/intchd]

A great talk. Thanks for sharing. So perhaps beauty is a form of communication. While the Darwinian argument gives a very logical answer, I wonder why do we find galaxies, nebulas and atomic particles so beautiful? They have nothing to do with our survival and reproduction.