Science and Aesthetics
Aparthib
For reference below are the links to the previous nine write-ups in this series:
- Science, Objectivity &; Postmodernism
- Science vs. Mysticism &; Philosophy
- Science, Logic, Faith, Beauty.. etc
- Science, Miracles &; the Paranormal
- On the Nature vs. Nurture Debate
- A Scientific View of Life Death Immortality:
- Brain and Religion
- Freewill vs. Predestination
- The Evolutionary Origin of Morality
This essay is an attempt on my part to create a conscious awareness among readers about the intimate connection between art and science, a fact that I deeply appreciate and which is often ignored or unappreciated by even some highly qualified intellectuals. I am not a scientist, there is no pretense of any original scientific idea being proposed, but merely an attempt as a science writer (however amateurish) to cull and present the wealth of literature that exists which confirm and explain the nature of this connection between the art and science. In this essay I would like to touch three different aspects of the art- science connection. Firstly the correlation of art and science, i.e. what objective scientific factor maps to specific subjective notions in art and beauty, secondly the brain's role in artistic perception, and thirdly the evolutionary origin of the sense of art and beauty. It was a clich� to say that beauty (or art in general) defies definition, it is said to be in the eye of the beholder. Art or beauty, like consciousness, is to be perceived, not understood. But that clich� is now a bit outdated. There is nothing taboo in science. Definition, a universal one, of art may not exist. But to insist that art and beauty (more specifically the sense of art and beauty) is to be perceived, not understood (nor can it be understood) does not wash anymore in view of the modern insights of science, the science of evolution to be precise. Definition is not that fundamental or profound in understanding something we universally agree exists, like beauty and consciousness. More fundamental is to understand the scientific basis of the origin of the existence of those things we agree do exist. Evolutionary biology (or Evolutionary psychology to be precise) does offer a fundamental explanation of the emergence of a universal artistic sense in human species. Also historically a stereotypical attitude existed among poets and writers about a supposed contradiction between artistic sense and science. Here I mean science in a general sense to include mathematics and logic as well. English poet John Keats quite paradoxically, accused Newton of ruining the beauty of rainbow by explaining it with the laws of optics, while famously stating that "truth is beauty" in another context. Other poets have also made oblique references to science and logic in their poems, like Eugene Cummings, Emily Dickinson (e.g "A color stands abroad, on solitary fields, that science cannot overtake but human nature feels.."), Wordsworth and many others. Another historical figure who contributed to this anti-science myth was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who seemed to have an almost utter disdain for science. It is worthwhile to mention the story of Nobel Physicist Feynman (in the book "No Ordinary Genius" by Christopher Sykes) who was once told by his artist friend holding up a flower: "I as an artist, see how beautiful the flower is. But you as a scientist, take it apart, and it becomes dull". To which Feynman responded that he sees the same beauty that the artist does, but he in addition sees the inner beauty of the flower as well, seeing how the tiny cells make up its petals, how the beautiful color of the flower arose out of an evolutionary adaptation to attract the insects to pollinate, all of which the artist friend missed. Another poet, Walt Whitman said in his poem "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer", how he listened to an astronomy lecture and got tired and bored, walked out of the room, into the mystical moist night so he could look up in perfect silence at the stars. An apt yet respectful response to Whitman's poem was given by Victor Weisskopf in his foreward to the book "Atoms of Silence" by distinguished astronomer Hubert Reeves saying "Hubert Reeves knows what the astronomer said; but he also is out there and looks up with Walt Whitman in silence at the stars" (p-x, "Atoms of Silence"). Feynman commenting on the poem by Whitman in a similar way in his famous Feynman Lectures on Physics, said that he too looked at the stars on a deserted night and felt the awe and wonder, but his awe and wonder was enhanced much more to realize that light from the star took millions of years to reach his eyes, that the stuff out of which his body is made was once belched out of by a supernova star. It does no harm to the mystery to know a little more about it, for far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Famous science writer Isaac Asimov writing on "Science and beauty" in the book "The Roving Mind" commented on Whitman's poem this way: "Of course the night sky is beautiful, but is there not a deeper, added beauty provided by astronomer?", and then goes on to describe in lyrical paragraphs the awe inspiring wonders of the stars, galaxies and the universe. It is sad that so many celebrated literaries in history have made such hollow and caustic remarks pitting science against arts and accused the pursuit of scientific truth as ruining the beauty. We marvel at the beauty of the mighty Ganges river. Does it diminish our sense of beauty once we reach Gangotri, the cowhead, the source of the mighty Ganges in the Himalyan ranges? Not so. Those who have seen it can vouch for the awe and mystical feelings (both are essential to artistic sensitivity). that it generates. Seeking for the scientific truth is similar to seeking the Gangotri. Science seeks the Gangotri of other beauties in nature, rainbow was one such example. Science rather deepens the sense of beauty that is already within us. Because every discovery of the truth pushes the mystery one more level further. The ultimate mystery still remains and inspires scientists to go even further, in a constant pursuit of the Gangotri of the Gangotri and so on, keeping alive an eternal inspiration and urge for creativity, the two quintessence of artistic creativity. Famous British astronomer Sir James Jeans writing on "Science and Mysticism" in his "The Nature of the Physical World", quotes from a page on winds and waves in a textbook of hydrodynamics, and then compares it with the aesthetic experience of actually watching the sea waves dancing in the sunshine. The remarkable symmetry in nature which inspired Einstein in his discovery of the profound laws of relativity and gravitation was to him a thing of utmost beauty. But Einstein also enjoyed the beauty of music, in addition to the beauty of nature. He used to play violin. It is relevant here to mention a quote by Einstein: "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas." as it appeared on May 1, 1935 issue of New York Times. Nobel Laureate Physicist Dirac also emphasized the need to appreciate beauty in Physics and credits a sense of beauty for his remarkable insight into arriving his famous Dirac's equation for which he received the Nobel Prize. He claimed that a "keen sense of beauty" enabled him to discover the wave function for the electron in 1928. As Dirac famously remarked reminiscing that discovery in the May 1963 issue of Scientific American magazine: "I think there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. .... If seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete agreement between the result of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further developments of the theory..." The Nobel laureate Physicist Chandrasekhar who wrote a 650 page mathematical tome "The Mathematical Theory of Black Holes" also wrote a book called "Truth and Beauty" in which he emphasized the role of sense of beauty behind the motivation of scientific thinking. He says in the book that to him art, as seen from the scientist's point of view, seems to be all the richer for it, contrary to popular belief that rationality strips art of its elemental passion. He also drew the parallel between the works of Shakespeare, Beethoven, Shelley with the beauty inspired approach of scientists for the search of the truth. So behind all the profound discoveries lie the motivation from a sheer metaphysical sense of beauty and mystery of the universe. Our own Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose of Bangla also stressed this harmony between arts and science in his essay "Poetry and Science" (Kobita o Biggan), and much later, poet and mathematician Quazi Motahar Hussein in his parallel essay titled "The Poet and the Scientist" (Kobi o Boigganik). Let me mention yet some more examples. What can be more apt than a book resulting from the collaboration of a professor of Englsih and a professor of Phyics to drive home the intimate harmony between science and arts? Thomas Vargish and Delo E. Mook, in their book "Inside Modernism: Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative", write: "...we treat the Special and General Theories of Relativity as important modernist works of art, the most important for our purpose because they contain and express with the highest intensity the values that for us define Modernism." (See http://yalepress.yale.edu/YupBooks/viewbook.asp?isbn=0300076134) G.N. Watson, one of the most distinguished mathematicians of the early twentieth century said that some of Ramanujan's mathematical formulas gave him the same thrill as Michelangelo's "Day," "Night," "Evening" and "Dawn" in the Medici chapel in the San Lorenzo in Florence. (From p-545 of Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics, Oxford UP, 1989) Quantum physicist and philosopher David Bohm (Wh recently passed away) in his paper "On the Relationships of Science and Art" in the book "Data: Directions in Art, Theory and Aesthetics", Anthony Hill (ed..1968, London), also emphasizes the unity of art and science by tracing the parallelism between the artistic evolution beginning with Monet and C�zanne and going on to the Cubists and to Mondrian and the development away from representation and symbolism and toward what may be called 'pure structure' that took place in mathematics and in science. As I mentioned earlier art cannot be defined in a simple word. The existence of art is agreed to by its effect on human mind. If art is identified by the joy and pleasure that it creates in the mind and the creativity that goes into its creation, then quite easily science is an art form and scientists the artists of this art form. Just as music, painting, poetry are distinct art form, so is science. It is as baseless to say that science (or scientists) cannot appreciate arts as it is to say a musician canot appreciate poetry. A superstring theorist engages in the string research with an immense sense of appreciation and sensitivity for beauty. String theory is as elegant if not more as any sophisticated work of art. The fact of artistic element in scientific truth is also true for any fundamental science including molecular biology. It is no wonder that Molecular Biology professor Bonnie Bassler says in the 17 July 2003, issue of Nature magazine in response to the question "What' s the one thing about science that you wish the public understood better?" : "That we are not nerds, but artists. That what we do and what we are is exciting, creative and fun." The scientific basis and connection of art has been explored by a number of scientists and is also an ongoing pursuit of many contemporary scientists and philosophers. Many have discovered some systematic mathematical patterns and structures behind patterns or objects commonly identified with beauty. This has given rise to a cross-disciplinary field of "Computational Aesthetics". One of the early pioneer in computational aesthetics was the great American mathematician and former president of the American Mathematical Society (1924-26), George David Birkhoff, known to physics students for his famous ergodic theorem. He tried to assign some objectivity to beauty with such notions as order, complexity and beauty coefficient (or aesthetic measure) in the late 20's and 30's. He wrote a paper "Mathematical Theory of Aesthetics and its applications to Poetry and Music",in the Rice Institute Pamphlet, 1932, 189-342. he followed up with a lecture tour explainiung his research. On the basis of his objective notions he did some calculations to indeed show why snowflakes, flowers etc are more beautiful than some other not so beautiful objects. Birkhoff has also worked out specific versions of his formula for the auditory dimension of poetry, and for melodies. Later a group of literary theorists in Germany in the fifties, headed by Max Bense developed the theory of information esthetics -- a Birkhoff-like model of beauty judgments, formulated in terms of Claude Shannon' s information theory. Further developments in informational aesthetics was made in the late sixties by the psychologist Emmanuel Leeuwenberg in Nijmegen. I am just mentioning the works of these scientists. Their work involves elaborate detail and which I cannot do any justice to in this sketchy overview, nor am I qualified to do so. Readers should consult appropriate literature in interested in pursuing further. Alert readers should realize that all such theories of aesthetics are attempts to correlate or map subjective beauty with some objective measures. They do not explain why beauty is perceived/ felt in human minds in those objects of beauty possesing those objective characteristics,i.e the normative aspect of art appreciation, the "hedonic tone", as Evolutionary Psychologist Victor Johnston calls it. For that we have to turn to evolutionary psychology. Now Unless one believes in soul (despite there being no clear objective definition or evidence for it's existence), one cannot avoid confronting the indisputable fact that humans (which include their brains) are the products of evolution. Evolution, itself being an emergent effect of the underlying fundamental laws of nature (Physics to be precise), all human traits and pursuits like art and music and human affinity for them are ultimately traceable to the laws of physics itself. But we don't need (nor is it practicable) to go to that deep level of physics for understanding every human trait. The language of evolutionary science suffices for such an understanding. Just as we can understand what a piece of software does simply by examining its high level code (visual basic, C etc), without having to analyze its underlying assembly or machine code), similarly we can understand human traits in the language of the laws of evolution (natural selection, mutation, genetic drift, adaptation etc). The new science of evolutionary psychology has already made great strides in understanding a broad range of human emotions and traits (morality, sexuality..). Since beauty, arts, morality and virtually all human traits and pursuits are creations "in" human mind(brain), so if humans (i.e all the organs) are the products of evolution, so are these traits. They cannot be supernaturally implanted in human mind from some transcendental world (As a proponent of divine origin of human existence would suggest). We can call "love", "beauty of a flower, child, a woman.." all as divine, sublime, ethereal, but these are mere words to express human emotional affinity for arts. At the bottom lurks the stark truth that nothing is too divine or sublime to transcend the laws of physics. There is no evidence for such transcendence. There is ample evidence to offer a plausible explanation of the emergence of not just life but also the emergence of consciousness and human traits and emotions. Of course the laws of physics can be viewed (As Einstein did) as divine (Obviously the laws of physics are not created by human, its the other way around), if one has to invoke divinity at all, as an ornament of expression. One particular aspect of human emotion is the urge to appreciate and attribute beauty to objects (material and non-material) Beauty is perceived in real objects like flower, gems, or in non- material objects like poetry, songs. But whatever the object of the appreciation of beauty, the common aspect of those objects are they all carry certain information, patterns or arrangement that convey meanings to human mind, the end result being that they arouse the pleasure centers of human brain. So the deeper question is why or how did this mapping (or cause-effect relationship) between certain information or pattern and the pleasure center of the brain arise in humans. As I argued earlier it must be rooted in the evolutionary mechanism. All human traits are either direct adaptation to the evolutionary selection pressure, or are the byproducts or side-effects of such adaptive strategies for survival, the so called spandrel effect. Spandrel is the term used for the spaces between the pillars of an arch that is not an intended part of the arch design but is nevertheless an unavoidable consequence of the arch design. Spandrel is a special case of expatiation, where a feature originally selected was reselected to adapt to a different selection pressure. Spandrels are adaptations with no real survival values. Artistic sense is viewed by most evolutionary psychologists as spandrels of evolution. Incidentally I must remind the readers that survival in evolutionary terms means propagating the genetic code to offspring's, it does not refer to the physical survival of a human (If a human dies after propagating his/her gene, then evolutionarily that person has survived). A human body is a temporary repository to store the genetic code which has been propagating generations after generations over millenia. That aesthetics has biological root was suggested quite sometime ago by even a non-scientific literary Frederick Turner in his book "Natural Classicism", where he expressed his view of aesthetics as expressions of primordial biological preferences. But the decisive book based on hard science of evolution that inspired many evolutionary psychologists was the 1992 book : "The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture" a collection of essays by many researchers edited by evolutionary psychologists Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. Several books and articles have appeared since then further giving a firm foundation to this new paradigm of the origin of art. A widely acclaimed book is Nancy Eiken's "An Evolutionary Perspective on the Nature of Art" which is inspired by an earlier book by E. Dissanayake, "Homo aestheticus: Where art comes from and why". Readers can read this book online at: http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?action=openPageViewer&docId;=23426455 In the book Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, (1999), edited by Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner the editor remarked that �The evidence is steadily mounting,� and further remarked in the their introduction, �that if we wish to understand our profound and long-standing impulse to create and enjoy art we are well advised to attend to our evolutionary heritage. . . . Even if art is for art�s sake, it follows that we seriously consider what that purpose means in Darwinian terms. A very well-written scholarly article on the evolutionary adaptive origin of art is: "Is Art an Adaptation? Prospects for an Evolutionary Perspective on Beauty" by Univ. of Torornto Philospher Ronald de Sousa published in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 62 Issue 2 Page 109 - June 2004. Readers can read the article on line at Sousa's site at: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/%7Esousa/artfunction/art.htm In his book "Evolution and Literary Theory", author Joseph Carrol not only argues for a Darwinian explanation of art(Literaure in partiular), but also debunks the poststructuralist (Postmodernist) dogma of textualism of leading exponents, Derrida, Foucault and their many disciples who claim that the pursuit of objective insight into anything is an impossible endevour. Interested readers can check Carroll's website at: http://www.umsl.edu/~engjcarr British astronomer and prolific author John Barrow also has discussed the evolutionary origins of aesthetic sense in chapters 23 and 24 (Aptly titled "Aesthetics") of his book: "Between Inner Space and Outer Space". The primitive sense of beauty among our early hominid ancestors emerged due to its adaptive value. In a hostile terrain, constantly exposed to predatory threats, the adaptive trait was to appreciate terrains and land shapes that favored survival. That may explain whay landscape art became particularly attractive to humans. Also plain landscape was favorable to survival, as it was easier to spot predators. So liking a plain landscape would be evolutionarily more adaptive. In other words there is a utilitarian basis (evolutionarily speaking) for artistic likings. Not every individual human being may be consciously aware of this fact of nature in everyday life. There is no reason to be. Humans are ultimately programmed machines, with a remarkable property that *some* (due to spandrel effect) humans are consciously aware of the fact that they are programmed machines. Over time that utilitarian basis of artistic sense may have ceased to exist but the evolutionary instincts of attraction for art and beauty lingered on like a vestigial organ and took on its own independent existence as more sophisticated art appreciation. Also it must be emphasized that we cannot trace every shade or nuance of art (e.g. surrealism) directly to specific evolutionary adaptation. As the analogy of spandrel illustrates there can very well be unintended (but inevitable) byproducts of evolutionary strategies due to its very trial and error nature. Artistic sense as a general instinct is what evolution prescribes in humans. By products of that general prescription through individual variations (due to mutation or non-deterministic environmental effect) may arise which may not be directly adaptive in evolutionary terms and which may be quite sophisticated. All these show how simple sense of beauty might have evolved. But we know the complex are built from the simple by repetition. Barrow also discusses how affinity for certain shapes and colors could have been evolutionarily more adaptive to our primitive ancestors leading to the appreciation for flowers, paintings and other shapes, colors patterns etc. He also mentions an indirect evidence that musical sense also is rooted in evolution by citing the the 1975 discovery of two physicists, Richard Voss and John Clarke, at the University of California, Berkeley that many classical and modern musical compositions which are liked by most are closely approximated by what they call 1/f type spectral noise over a very wide range of frequencies. It is the universality of such characteristics in the music of all cultures that point to the common evolutionary basis of such liking in our evolutionary past. It would be highly coincidental that all cultures developed a similar musical sense if it was not due to evolution. Also the fact that human brain is attuned to certain musical sounds, as modern neurological studies of the interaction between brain and music has revealed (See the November '04 issue of scientific American for a recent article on Music and the Brain by Norman Weinberger) , strongly suggests an evolutionary root of musical sense, since brain, like any other organ is also a product of evolution. The fact that even fetuses within the womb respond to music discriminatively (as cited in the SciAm article referred to earlier as well as on p-37 of the book "The Science of Music" by Robin Maconie (1997) lends additional evidence favoring the genetic (thus evolutionary) basis of musical sense. Another research into the connection between brain and arts that should be mentioned is that by neuroscientists Ramachandran (Author of the best seller "Phantoms in the Brain") of the Center For Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego. In the paper titled "The science of art" in the Journal of consciousness Studies, 6/7, 15-41, Ramachandran &; Hirstein detail their views based on neurological research on various aspects of art perception viz,(a) The logic of art: whether there are universal rules or principles; (b) The evolutionary rationale: why did these rules evolve and why do they have the form that they do; (c) What is the brain circuitry involved? They arrive at what they call "Eight laws of aesthetic experience" analogous to the Buddha�s eightfold path to wisdom). An important sense of beauty among humans is the appreciation for beauty of the opposite sex. This is very well understood in evolutionary terms and extensive literature exists reflecting the findings and views of many evolutionary psychologists on the insight into the evolutionary basis of sense of beauty of other humans (of opposite sex), which we will refer to as sexual beauty. To put it in one line, the findings of Evol. Psychology is that sexual beauty is an indicator of good health and genetic fitness, which is what evolution cares all about. The traits that men consider beatiful in women are those that indicate female genetic fitness (like fertility). A leading pioneer is Devendra Singh of Univ. of Texas at Austin. He has identified waist to hip ratio of women as one such fitness indicator. When a male identifies a woman as pretty he may not be consciously aware of the waist to hip ratio, it is just instinctively wired by evolution. Evolutionary biologists like David Buss, Desmond Morris, Robin Baker and many others have identified many such markers of beauty. Among males one such fitnes marker is facial symmetry which women instinctively perceives as male beauty. Those who have seen the documentaries on sex on discovery/TLC (Like the multipart series of the Huamn sexes, the Science of Sex, The Sex Files) and some other channels must be familiar with some more of these aesthetic fitness markers. The fact that artistic sense or aesthetic sense is rooted in sexual selection of the brain has been the the recurring theme of English biologist and science writer Matt Ridley, in his verbose book "The Red Queen". More recently in the paper titled "Aesthetic fitness: How sexual selection shaped artistic virtuosity as a fitness indicator and aesthetic preferences as mate choice criteria" by psychologist Geoffrey Miller in the Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 2(1), 20-25 (Special issue on Evolution, creativity, and aesthetics) reiterate the biological basis of aesthetics and the sexual selection factor in particular. Readers can check the following URL for an online version of the article: http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/aesthetic_fitness.htm Let me conclude this overview by listng some more relevant books on this specific topic: * The Artistic Animal: an Inquiry into the Biological Roots of Art Alexander Alland Jr., Anchor Books, 1977 (http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?action=openPageViewer&docId;=1361773) * Evolutionary Aesthetics, edited by Eckart Voland and Karl Grammer Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2003. * The Bard on the Brain: Understanding the Mind through the Art of Shakespeare and the Science of Brain Imaging by Paul Matthews and Jeffrey McQuain, Univ. Chicago Press, 2003 * The Biological Foundations of Music edited by Robert Zatorre and Isabelle Peretz, New York Academy of Sciences, 2001 * Cross-Pollinations: the Marriage of Science and Poetry by Gary Paul Nabhan, Milkweed Press, 2004 * Evolution and Literature - D.A Evans, South Dakota Review. * Connections: the Geometric Bridge between Art and Science by Jay Kappraff, McGraw Hill, 1991 * Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc by Arthur I. Miller, Basic Books, 2001 * Where mathematics comes from; How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being - Lakoff &; Nunez (2000) * Physics and Music: the Science of Musical Sound by Harvey White and Donald White, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1980 * Physics and Psychophysics of Music by Juan Roederer, Springer Verlag, 1995 * Physics of Musical Instruments by Norman Fletcher and Thomas Rossing, Springer Verlag, 1998