... Nicholas Humphrey's account of beauty, in Prospect, won't do. Trapped in an instrumental world - of utility, not violins - he explains it like the peacock's tail: a matter of sexual display. But this is surely a case of evolution explaining away what it purports to explain. If you don't like the aesthetic insights of Scruton and Tallis on music, which challenge this reductionism, then how about the hard observation of the physicist, that the beauty of equations is a key test of their explanatory power. Humphrey would say that the perception of beauty in the physicist's equations arises because they represent stable forms, and we are attracted to stable forms because stability is desirable in a sexual partner. Is it just me, or are you thinking, 'shaggy dog story'?
Also, while it is common to cite entropy, is it not fair to point out that it seems to apply principally to the inorganic world? As I understand it, the chemistry of the carbon compounds follows an opposite trajectory, toward states of increasing molecular complexity.
More precisely, the processes of life are anentropic, yet still as subject to entropy as everything else in the Universe seems to be. The complexity of organic chemistry (hydrocarbons) does tend to increase under the situations of making and sustaining life, but it also tends to fall apart past a certain point. Entropy is unavoidable: we all eventually die. How we resist entropy, which is life's innate tendency, is what matters.
ReplyDeleteThe peacock's tail made Darwin weep.
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ReplyDeleteConsolation
by Wisława Szymborska
Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.
True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.
[The rest can be found here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177886 ]
vay kardesım
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