How Does Epistolution Explain Beauty?
The evolution of beauty is a tortured subject, because it hinges on the difficult philosophical discussion of what beauty really is in the first place. Before epistolution, this concept had no anchor to a view of what an organism really is and what it is doing here, so it was very difficult to make progress on it. After the epistolution proposal was invented, we began to have at least a conjecture about what an organism is doing with itself, an explanation for why it does what it does, that could help us to make sense of this strange phenomenon. To pose the question more pointedly, we have to separate beauty from the motivations of sexual selection. Theories of sexual selection have been explored by biologists for many decades, beginning before Darwin and continuing in the present. The most plausible explanation for sexuality and its set of evolutionary incentives appears to be a version of the Red Queen hypothesis, that sexuality evolves in order to recombine genes that can provide resistance to parasites. I won’t restate this whole explanation here, but suffice it to say that it explains why organisms are divided into sexes and why those sexes select among themselves for certain traits (like ornate feathers, bright skin patches, or cumbersome antlers) that display to their mates a genetic resistance to the types of parasites that are in abundance in the population at that time.
This hypothesis explains why gaudy and metabolically costly ornamentation exists in sexual organisms. It explains why there are such ornaments, and why organisms would seek them out. But it does not explain why those ornaments are beautiful. They could just as well be ugly. They could be misshapen, indistinctly colored, or asymmetrical. They could be hard for other species to appreciate. But instead, these ornaments of nature tend to have certain qualities, the quality of being beautiful. Of course this quality is found in many other places, including in very unnatural places, like in abstract mathematics and electronic music. Why?
The epistolution proposal reframes what beauty is by reframing what an organism is. An organism is a set of networks that sync to its niche. This means that any organism is a seeker of patterns. The search for synchrony is about seeking out forms of order that are not entirely incorporated into the body of the organism. In other words, this is a new definition of what is boring or interesting to any organism. In the epistolution view, knowledge is about the incorporation of patterns from the niche into the body. Patterns that are very easy to assimilate, or that are already assimilated, are boring, dull, and lack beauty. Patterns that are entirely incomprehensible are likewise uninteresting, because no order can be found in them. But patterns in the middle ranges, patterns that are partly known and partly unknown, are intriguing to organisms. They invite us to play with them and learn about them. The fabulous shimmering iridescence of the peacock’s tail is an expensive ornament, but it takes the form of a beautiful pattern of reflective colors because the body and brain of a mating bird like the peahen is an order-seeking biological object. The peahen, and all other animals, are looking through the world for regularities that they can comprehend, and just like us they already understand quite a lot about their niches. But what they only partially understand beckons them, and draws them nearer. Their niches and our niches are not so different from one another; there is much commonality.
The reason, then, that many animals are beautiful to us and to each other across species has nothing to do with sexual selection as such. We are attracted to many forms of beauty that have nothing to do with the sexual ornaments of the opposite sex: landscapes, tapestries, songs, poems. These are beautiful to us because they are forms of order that are partly grasped. These forms of order include the bodies of many animals, which although evolved to appeal to their potential mates are likely to be appealing to us as well because they partly encapsulate forms of order; humans have a general biophilia, or love of other organisms. This could explain why the quality of beauty is found so widely and so far from the realm of sexual reproduction.
