The author quickly throws away the idea that it's a food signal on the basis of imperfection, but this doesn't make sense given it's likely still a useful and largely costless signal. Wanting to be around plants with energy available for flowering probably correlates with being around food sources. I'd be surprised if it didn't.
We of course do also find fruits emotionally appealing, both in literal visual beauty (a bowl of fruit being a common painting trope), and, more strongly, they taste pretty good too.
The idea I came up with when I first heard this question is that flowers are often markers of a healthy ecosystem and food web with lots of animals and plants which may be sources of food, even if the actual flowering plant itself isn't edible.
Of course the "why did this" evolve questions are usually impossible to answer, though it can be fun to think about possibilities.
The fruits of our cave years were small and unappealing. Our modern fruit is 100% bred to be bigger and tastier looking. But these are wholly alien looking things from a historic standpoint. So we bred them to look delicious to us, humans.
Definitely not, geographically-speaking. If your hunter-gatherer group is deciding where to settle down for a while then the area with tons of flowers growing everywhere is far more likely to have abundant available food than one where no flowers are growing at all.
If you think about how modern people use flowers today (indoor plants decorating their homes and outdoor plants landscaping their property) then it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that we evolved to prefer flowers in the environments in which we live, not as a hard-wired signal that "this plant is edible" which is clearly unreliable.
I think the question is highly related to "why are feathers and rainbows beautiful" and while rainbows signal rain, it's connection to food surely at most half of the story.
It seems to me that most of the arguments about beauty go in one of two directions-- mathematically measurable symmetry factors (including everything from the average length of a flower petal in a given blossom to fractals & the golden ratio) or "it's all subjective".
Personally, I have never seen a flower I didn't find beautiful that I recall. I just did an image search for "ugly flowers" and I didn't see a single one I didn't like. Perhaps the subjectivity argument carries more weight in the end.
One thing that does not seem to have been mentioned in the article is the simple fact that flowers feature overt hue (I.e. are colorful).
Chromatic vision in primates, insects, birds and fishes seem to have co-evolved in response to items of luxury. In the case of humans it was fruit, in the case of insects and birds it was flowers. These islands of chromatic intensity signaled ‘loot-boxes’ of high super-high carb content.
The carb came at a cost to the plant, but in return they got to spread their seed far and wide.
Chromacity seems to exist as a layer on top of lightness, and has certainly evolved as an afterthought to it. furthermore, in some ways chromatic vision seems to contradict Lightness vision in its form. Proof? Just compare the saturation map of a vase of flowers to its lightness map. They are rarely similar.
As a painter, I am especially intrigued by this. These mechanisms seems to account for our overtly emotional response to color, as opposed the functional nature of lightness. I.e. color = special treat.
Despite this, I believe that the prime stimulus of a flower is its shape (silhouette). This aspect of perception is prime in all animals (and in art) and the chromatic expression of a flower serves only to emphasize this shape.
Flowers have their form to aid in reproduction via insects. Their aesthetic qualities are for the attraction and guidance of pollinators
The better question is why humans THINK flowers are beautiful. Even hunter gatherers can appreciate flowers.
Well a place abundant with flowers is a place with good soil, light, and water. A good environment will bear fruit and sustain plants and prey for hunting and gathering
Ah, all these arguments seem to be too much of a reach for me. I have a much simpler theory as to why we think flowers are beautiful.
One of our distant evolutionary ancestors was a small primate that fed on the nectar of flowers, kind of like bees. Speaking of, it probably also lived in hives, hence why humans also tend to live in hives (well, cities, same thing).
True, but it is an interesting question in its own right, while the conclusion, while it says something important, is somewhat anodyne and is not strongly dependent on the flowers argument.
0xBABAD00C's post does not actually address either question, as the body of the post makes it clear that the title question is not about the flower-insect relationship.
Not really conflating. The original question just seems stupid/meaningless and it’s meta fascinating that people apparently attach something to it.
Things look different. Some things look better than others. Among the things that look best are flowers. There’s nothing else particularly interesting about flowers.
Among all the various things in the universe, some will look good and others will look bad. Or they’d all look the same, I guess, which they don’t. So given that, flowers looking good is not something that requires an explanation?
What other questions are like this? I’m trying to figure out what perspective I’m not seeing.
- why is the Pacific the largest ocean?
- why is X star the brightest in the sky?
- why do dogs bark?
Suppose I a few dice, and one of them happens to show the highest number. Would you ask “why is this dice so high?”
there is a feedback loop between animal sexuality, its (alleged) preference for symmetry, peacocking, flowers, mimicry (like the orchids which look like bees), plant sexual selection, and back to animals. Beauty is whatever increases the rewards of this cycle for both animals and plants, humans are just the animals that found a word for it
I think that there is a possible misconception, that evolution allows (or results in) only in necessary features and thus all phenomenons must be a consequence of evolutionary advantage. Yet, if genetic changes are random (at least some of them), some features could exist just because there was no evolutionary pressure to lose them.
This is the question - why are homo sapiens thinking flowers are beautiful when they evolved for the benefit of VERY different species (insects, mostly).
I was thinking few days ago that why are fruits tasty and nutritious for humans? Our digestive system is too strong to help spread their seeds by eating them.
I guess making yourself delicious to one species might sometimes entail inadvertently making yourself delicious to another species even if the latter one isn’t beneficial. Also in many cases the fruit probably isn’t aiming to be completely eaten. They just want to be collected and taken elsewhere. Even if most of the seeds are then eaten and destroyed by digestion, a few will end up on the ground, uneaten.
Collected and taken elsewhere. This is very reasonable.
On another note, I disagree with the 'want to' wording of species evolving. This implies that evolution is in control of species and they intelligently 'design' their next offspring to be more adaptive. This confused me for a very long time about evolution.
While in reality they evolved when only mutations of the specie with adaptive traits survived. Rest died out. That's what survival of the fittest really means.
Have I just been attracted by this article like a bee would be by a flower?
It is about a pretty little concept to be argued/discussed, then lets talk about something really important at the end that I would not do trivially.
It also made me think how we are attracted to "beautiful" things - varying from smell or music to ideas or maybe even money - to be redirected away from my main route.
If your job is to attract an agent that is playing a careful balance between exploration and exploitation, while on tight computational budget, then you want to attract them with some initial hooks (e.g. bright colors) and appease their computational risk assessment module with high compressibility (e.g. symmetries and self-similar patterns).
You are probably thinking backward. I am not an expert in evolutionary biology but the beauty of flowers is something which has helped them survive. Flowers themselves didn't decide to be beautiful or they don't even know that they are beautiful. Remember that evolution is blind. It is just that their beauty was in the eyes of beholders and those beholders helped them survive.
Unless the post you are replying to has been heavily edited, I am at a loss to see how you could find in it either an assumption or implication that flowers themselves decided to be beautiful or that they know they are beautiful.
One could challenge whether it is appropriate to say flowers are beautiful to insects, though clearly that is intended to be read as attractive, which, empirically, they are (nor do you seem to dispute the proposition that they evolved to be that way), and there's no prima facie reason for their scent and appearance to invoke pleasure in most humans.
My similarly limited understanding tells me that there are a few aspects to this:
- We've evolved to find our natural habitat (which is very variable) pleasing, as that's an evolutionary advantage compared to constantly feeling uneasy.
- We are attracted to places that are different to the ones we live in, so we keep exploring and spreading.
- There's also a learned component - even if we understand that a landscape isn't habitable for us (like the desert), we're conditioned to finding it beautiful, as this is the cultural consensus.
I feel there is something of a false dichotomy between being pleased and being uneasy, as I suspect that indifference would be equally effective. We, like many other animals, have mechanisms to become indifferent to those aspects of our environment which are commonplace and neither useful nor harmful to us. While some curiosity towards novelty is arguably beneficial, a lack of caution is demonstrably dangerous.
If our aesthetic response to flowers was a direct consequence of evolutionary pressure, we would expect to find the flowers of plants having edible tubers or fruit to be especially attractive, and those of poisonous plants to be repulsive.
We don't know if tight budgeted exploration/exploitation agents find flowers beautiful. As humans we've been so much in bioeconomical surplus that we've invested in exploration of meta-patterns, that allowed us exploitation despite the variability of the environment (temporal, multi-instance, multi-agent compressibility), and maybe beauty is a proxy for this function, and as such mostly only a human experience? Or maybe beauty is merely something that inspires replication and preservation, and being on the receiving end of this is a good adaptation from any living being's perspective?
If compressibility was the only normativity, smoothest objects would be the most beautiful, a sine wave would be the most interesting symphony, but they are in fac the most banal, most unbeautiful things. Smooth object are highly compressible but also highly exhaustible, unlike organic objects.
Any painter of a natural subject knows that organic structures are far from that kind of symmetry, and actually a painting loses verisimilitude if you are too symmetrical and formulaic.
Symmetry and self-similar patterns are everywhere in living things and that seems to stem from the way structure emerges from DNA. So IMHO it would be surprising if flowers were not following this ubiquitous pattern...
I think you're right about that. It's a fundamental aspect of how biological systems tend to be structured.
Perhaps symmetry is even an indication that a particular structure is "cheap" in some sense. A less symmetric structure might require more information to store in the DNA, and therefore require longer evolution. If a symmetrical structure does the job as well as a more complicated structure, it's likely the simpler structure will prevail.
In my experience people tend to find also non-biological symmetrical / self-similar structures striking. Something about this kind of simplicity triggers our sensory systems. It's probably more bug than feature. But it might be relevant that symmetry of biological systems often indicate health. Unhealthy biological systems are less structured, less symmetrical, and identifying sickness is evolutionary advantageous.
"Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes"
Author writes like he has a picture of himself on his bedside table and an old flickr account abandoned after realising he spent all this dedication and effort on deciphering some kind of ephemeral beauty in the world other people saw, but that was somehow always just out of reach for him.
All these evolutionary arguments (e.g. “head of penis is shaped as such to clean out semen of competitors”) all sound conveniently convincing, but I’m curious if there’s any data validating them?
It’s easy to shoehorn any number of plausible theories, but how do we know one evolutionary theory is the correct one?
Clearly the arguments that sound less convincing have failed to survive and reproduce. The existence of evolutionary arguments is therefore proof of the correctness of the theory! ;)
Except penises come in quite a variety of shapes across species.
Distinguishing actual driving traits from those that just happened to ride along (i.e. men's nipples and other various vestiges, bright red colour of foxes where neither the foxes themselves, nor their predators or prey can see colour), is very hard.
> but how do we know one evolutionary theory is the correct one
IMHO, the one that works is the one most likely to result in increased gene propagation even if the percentage is minuscule in the absence of orthogonal genes.
The argument is not that X evolved to do Y, but rather X resulted in increased gene propagation as it happened to do Y.
In the example above, the head of the penis is shaped as such because that shape enables semen displacement. In the same vein, males tend to lose an erection, and therefore the [flaccid] penis loses the displacement property, after excretion because that results in not displacing one's own semen.
And if I'm being truthful, I struggle with evolution a bit. It's a bit like life. I understand how life could have eventually evolved to where we're at. But how did life _start_?
Any specific mechanism is explained as having evolved, but if so, how did it _start_?
For example, there's an HN thread explaining why bees die after they sting and why it's acceptable from a colony perspective. What put bee's on _that_ specific evolutionary track? How did it _start_?
I think a lot of people are like myself, there's a level of blind faith put into evolution. We obviously have witnessed it happening so we know it does happen, but there are so many things we can't explain for sure that forces us to have blind faith it happened via _purely_ evolutionary forces. like ... what if we find out some super advanced alien civilization seeded earth with life and managed it in some way, helping shape things. It would kind of explain a lot.
And so I continue to have blind faith that even if we don't have a concrete explanation for many of the things we see it happened via evolution, but I also understand the skepticism some people have for evolution being the sole explanation.
> I understand how life could have eventually evolved to where we're at. But how did life _start_?
Evolution doesn't explain how life started (or attempt to explain), just how it changes over time. How it started is obviously a really interesting question, but not one you can use evolution to understand. Evolution explains a specific thing, not everything.
> there's a level of blind faith put into evolution
I'd call it common sense, more than blind faith. You see a person dead on the floor with a bullet wound, and a handgun laying next to the body. Concluding that the victim was shot to death is common sense, not blind faith. In that sense, evolution is more like playing detective, all the evidence is pointing to it.
> 1. The assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition or statement for which there is not complete evidence; belief in general.
> 2. Specifically Firm belief based upon confidence in the authority and veracity of another, rather than upon one's own knowledge, reason, or judgment; earnest and trustful confidence: as, to have faith in the testimony of a witness; to have faith in a friend.
...
> 5. Intuitive belief.
We have a hypothesis that the penis _evolved_ due to it's ability to scoop out semen. A part of that hypothesis is that this is why longer penises evolved, to place semen in places that cannot be scooped out by other men.
But another explanation for larger penises is that women find them more attractive and pleasurable and therefore it increased your chance of mating.
Another would be that larger penises are statistically more likely to get a woman pregnant in general, with or without a bulbous head.
But here's one for you. The original hypothesis about the penis head came from an experiment in which they found that a single thrust could potentially pull out 90% of a competitors semen. We won't discuss the logistics (they didn't use real people), we'll have _blind faith_ that the experimenters ensured it was realistic.
Men ejaculate in spurts over a time period that is larger than what it takes to thrust a single time. This would imply the penis head also removes it's own sperm quite often.
---
The point here is that
1. We don't know, and
2. We can't know without actually documenting the process.
This sub-thread was brought about by someone saying "how do we know this is true", and the answer is, we can't know, therefore we take it on blind faith.
If you're offended by the phrase blind faith, use whatever phrase you like. But while you're doing that, please watch that youtube video. It will help you better understand why it's more useful to discuss the underlying idea than to discuss if we should be using word X or word Y.
> by someone saying "how do we know this is true", and the answer is, we can't know, therefore we take it on blind faith.
If you're talking about evolution in general, then it makes a large number of predictions about the way things are, that have borne out.
If you're talking about penises scooping out semen, the answer is we can't know, therefore we take it on faith—the answer is we don't know, and so it's one of several hypotheses—none of which are mutually exclusive. Nobody is (or should be, at least) taking it on faith, because nobody should be asserting it as definitely true.
I would be interested to see how you think this short video supports the claim you are making here, as it does not mention evolution, common sense or faith, and is ostensibly about how little knowledge one gains just by learning the name of a thing.
You don't understand how pointing out the names of things isn't the important property of a thing would be relevant in a discussion with someone who is arguing it should be called X instead of Y?
No, the claims made in the video you linked to do not show that, as you put it, "in this case, 'common sense' and 'blind faith' mean the same thing." Nor does your reply to mcphage.
correct, the video is pointing out the name you call something isn't important.
I choose to call it blind faith and the other poster prefers to call it common sense. If a 3rd person wanted to call it guacamole I'd be onboard.
The other poster insists on arguing about the name rather than discussing the interesting part, which is underlying idea. They want to do this based upon the whole "science vs religion" thing that was boring even back in the 90's when it was raging.
I have no interest in it and so I've stepped out of that conversation. Let someone else take up a stupid, useless, argument.
> The video is pointing out the name you call something isn't important.
Firstly, this is a misreading of the video. The absurdity of this position can be seen from extending your example through replacing every noun in your comments by "guacamole".
Secondly, "blind" is an adjective, and one that you use at every opportunity (except where you are looking up definitions - by the way, isn't looking up definitions an odd preoccupation for someone who doesn't see anything of importance in what you call something?) It is well-known that you cannot outright prove anything about the natural world by induction, but to lump everything that is not proven into the category of specifically blind faith ignores the epistemic value of evidence and just leads to what you call a stupid, useless, argument.
We've banned this account for repeatedly (and indeed mostly) posting flamewar comments. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> what if we find out some super advanced alien civilization seeded earth with life and managed it in some way, helping shape things. It would kind of explain a lot
A simple explanation would be that the aliens are much simpler than we are in makeup because it happened purely by evolution, and that part of our complexity came through planning.
There's just too many possibilities to so confidently claim it's kicking the can down the road.
Simplicity would be more likely to imply creation than complexity.
Simplicity implies understanding and intent.
No one would design the absolute spaghetti code mess that underlies our existence.
Look at the computers we build. Neat little rows and friendly little abstractions.
Life isn't. It's billions of years of good enough hacks layered one atop the other, and sometimes transitioned sideways from other forks of the code base.
Near half our DNA is just viral cruft that got mixed up and passed along for untold generations.
>Eight percent of our DNA consists of remnants of ancient viruses, and another 40 percent is made up of repetitive strings of genetic letters that is also thought to have a viral origin
Suppose living matter came to earth on an asteroid. That still doesn't explain how living things emerge from non-living matter.
> the aliens are much simpler than we are in makeup because it happened purely by evolution, and that part of our complexity came through planning.
That looks like argument from complexity. And it seems that complexity through planning would require an even more complex creator, not a simpler one.
> There's just too many possibilities
I don't think it makes a difference either way. If we can figure out one way of making life from non-living matter, we've cracked the code, we don't need to know how exactly it happened.
Why are flowers beautiful? For the same reason rainbows, fireworks and a million other things are beautiful: they have symmetry, vivid colors, etc that we evolved to find appealing for our own reasons, selection of mates mostly, healthy fresh food etc. Flowers are beautiful incidentally. That's my guess anyway.
It doesn't. My point is that finding people, healthy food, safe places and so on pleasant and beautiful benefits us. We use things like symmetry and color to decide if those things are beautiful. Flowers, rainbows etc just happen to have symmetry, color, simplicity, etc too so they get considered beautiful, almost by accident if you know what I mean. I believe in biology that concept is called a spandrel after the architectural term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)
I think there's an argument to be made about earthly things being beautiful in that they are signals of a habitable environments thriving ecosystems. What has somewhat mystified me however is that we find extra terrestrial things just as, if not more, beautiful. In all likelihood we should find them absolutely banal and repulsive. There is nothing interesting for life out there. And yet, I think I speak for everyone when I say, there is universal appeal in everything out there in the cosmos. From moons to planets, stars to galaxies, nebula, supernovas, blackholes, the blue planet whatever is out there, is all incredibly visually appealing to humans. We are drawn towards them like few things on earth can. There is absolutely no evolutionary reason for us to do so because life evolved without as much as a sight of outer space. It is a hostile, desolate environment and yet in the words of Buzz Aldrin when he first stepped on the moon, there is something magnificent about that desolation.
My dog has no interest in depictions of the moon or other celestial bodies as near as I can tell. Probably apes would be similar. I think we're more drawn to the (human) story around the exploration than the actual locations themselves. (Source: I watch a lot of space stuff around my dog. Come to think of it, he doesn't show much interest in landscapes around the world either.)
One thing to bear in mind is that dogs devote much more brain power to their sense of smell than we do. To them, it's a fundamental part of how they perceive the world.
... researchers were surprised to see the sheer extent of the smell wiring within dog brains.
Veterinary neuroimaging researcher Erica Andrews of Cornell University and colleagues have just mapped domestic dogs' (Canis familiaris) olfactory brain pathways using diffusion MRI scans. This technique uses differences in the flow of molecules, such as water, to create a complex map of tissue structures.
With the data the team built 3D maps of the dog brain's nerve tracts, and traced extensive white matter linking olfactory brain regions, revealing a huge, previously unknown, information highway between dogs' olfactory and visual systems.
"We've never seen this connection between the nose and the occipital lobe, functionally the visual cortex in dogs, in any species," Cornell University neuroimaging researcher Pip Johnson explains.
"It was really consistent. And size-wise, these tracts were really dramatic compared to what is described in the human olfactory system, more like what you'd see in our visual systems."
This is likely what allows our clever canine friends to function extremely well, even without sight. For example, blind dogs can still play fetch.
In that sense (!), I guess astronomy just isn't that interesting to them.
I think "habitable environments" and "thriving ecosystems" have a lot to do with the answer. I believe it's for the same reason that we instinctively like brooks and rivers – a steady supply of water is essential to survival.
Desolate landscapes used in books and films versus "flowering garden of eden"-type of depictions in these same books and films play on these instincts, as do floral motifs in graphic and architectural design.
Or compare how a bush covered in caterpillar webs makes you feel versus one covered in thousands of unblemished flowers. These are primal responses.
Maybe we are hardcoded to like our environment, you will try to live where you like. Also if you like your environment, food, and other things, you like living. And that is good for life
> Any explanation for why flowers are beautiful is going to have to draw from multiple fields: from evolutionary biology, plant ecology, cultural anthropology, and human psychology, as a start. We should be skeptical of any explanation of floral beauty proposed by a psychologist who doesn’t know about pollinators – but just as much, by a biologist who doesn’t know much psychology or cultural anthropology. This is, of course, just one flavour of the more general argument that we need thought, and education, and research, that breaks down disciplinary silos.
And yet the way tigers and leopards have their patterns formed was explained by a mathematician with simple math. You don't know what is required to solve a puzzle you haven't yet solved. It might be that there's 100 detailed reasons, it might be that there's a simple universal rule that requires almost no domain knowledge to guess.
> What’s true of floral beauty is true, in spades, of climate-change solutions.
Why?
> I can pretty much guarantee the nothing proposed by an engineer without partners in biology, economics, and the social sciences won’t solve our CO2 problem (take that, enhanced weathering). I can also guarantee that nothing proposed by a biologist or a climatologist without full consideration of engineering and economics will solve our CO2 problem.
The premise is false, the implication is shaky, the reasoning is done "by analogy" and magical thinking. It's not a very good article.
The bait-and-switch was good tho, worked on hackernews splendidly :)
Women (and men) are beautiful because that increases the likelihood of them having kids. Which makes more copies of genes that create men and women that find each other beautiful.
A better question would be "why beauty exists at all?". We could theoretically survive without it, we have other systems driving us towards something (dopamine, hunger, etc.)
We tend to assume our brains as perfectly laid machines, but we know our meat computer is anything but perfect. What if it is "interference" from nearby systems? Maybe our sexual attraction subsystem shares some neurons with recognising striking sky colours and we find them beautiful, with no real evolutionary reason.
That would explain why we do or like many things that are not necessarily useful to survive. And this is also my pet theory of consciousness: it is just a side effect caused by our pre-frontal cortex, its effect on memory, creating a sense of past and the ability to simulate future events. Those mechanism resonate together to create what we call "awareness of the self", but it is not something we have evolved directly.
I sometimes have abstract dreams with an irregular surface that slowly morphs into different shapes. It goes from being smooth and flat, to irregular shapes (that I find disgusting) and back into fractals or regular geometric shapes (that I find pleasant). The change from nice to ugly shape is evoking very strong disgust.
I think there is something to the idea that low Kolmogorov complexity is pretty.
I've also had a weird esthetic experience commuting by a bus once - it was a sunny winter day and along the road for dozens of kilometers there were power lines with unusually thick wires. There was a lot of contrast between white snow and black wires and they went up and down in a regular but slowly changing pattern that was very beautiful in the moment, but it's very hard to explain after the fact :) I was amazed by it despite commuting that same route 100s of times before and after that and never noticing it or caring about it.
Yes! Synesthesia [1] is one argument for the "interference" theory I mentioned in my comment. Sometimes the wires get tangled and a sense goes to affect a different part of the brain. A strong dose of hallucinogen will surface this behaviour even in people that are usually unaffected.
I have a form of light synesthesia [2], where I intuitively see the concept of time and age as a three-dimensional line, that slowly morphs as I grow older. Whenever someone says "I'm x years old", I subconsciously place them somewhere on that line. (Now that I think of it, years too have a particular three dimensional structure in my mind)
If it wasn't then we wouldn't get little baby sunsets, now would we? (less facetiously, the sunset itself isn't beautiful, it's the act of sitting and relaxing with enough of your core needs met while the sun goes down for another day that's beautiful.)
We of course do also find fruits emotionally appealing, both in literal visual beauty (a bowl of fruit being a common painting trope), and, more strongly, they taste pretty good too.