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Why on Earth are flowers beautiful? (2018)
- kuboble 4y agoAren't most flowers we find beautiful actually the effect of human selective breeding? I don't find most wild flowers in the forest or flowers of strawberries or apple trees particularly beautiful.
- saiya-jin 4y agoSome alpine meadows in full bloom are a properly beautiful sensory experience
- slfnflctd 4y agoIt 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.
- 31337Logic 4y agoWhy on Earth are women beautiful? You gotta love these click-bait titles that attempt to explain the subjective nature of aesthetics. :-/
- verdenti 4y ago[dead]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ajuc 4y agoWomen (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.
- Puts 4y agoWhy is the sunset beautiful then?
- levitatorius 4y agoYes, you mean why beauty has to be utilitarian :)
- sph 4y agoA 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.
- ajuc 4y agoI 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pleb_nz 4y agoSubjective. An ET could quite easily think they're repulsive.
- yamrzou 4y agoYour statement is subjective as well. /s Here are some criteria for beauty and why it is objective: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
- ajuc 4y agoThis is the question - why are homo sapiens thinking flowers are beautiful when they evolved for the benefit of VERY different species (insects, mostly).
- xxs 4y agoThere are two parts of that benefit: one is pollination, the other one carrying the seeds farther away. Insects don't really do the latter.
- Bjorkbat 4y agoAh, 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).
- Veedrac 4y agoThe 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.
- poulpy123 4y agoMost flowers are unrelated to food source
- whatshisface 4y agoMost flowers are food sources for the insects that pollinate them.
- poulpy123 4y agobut people aren't insects
- MaximusMindus 4y agoSome people could disagree
- chongli 4y agoDefinitely 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.
- smallnix 4y agoI believe that is the job of politicians. Pulling together experts of different fields to give them information to make such large scale decisions.
- pengaru 4y agoWhy is fruit delicious?
- xxs 4y agoIt contains sugars - easy to process and quite rare.
- empiricus 4y agosugar
- taneq 4y agoFrom the plant's side, to get us to eat it, and from our side to get us to eat it.
- pengaru 4y agoMy question was intended to be rhetorical, but since you've spelled it out - isn't this the same explanation for why flowers are beautiful? Fruits are flowers before they can be eaten as fruit; if sugar is flavor candy, then flowers are the eye candy appetizer.
- taneq 4y agoYep, pretty much. Our sense of aesthetics is a heuristic for things associated with good/useful things, rather than the other way around. :)
- 0xBABAD00C 4y agoIf 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). https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360 https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360
- changoplatanero 4y agoThe question in my mind is why is something that evolved to be beautiful to insects also beautiful to humans.
- mayankkaizen 4y agoYou 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.
- mannykannot 4y agoUnless 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.
- jrumbut 4y agoMy (lack of?) understanding is that early humans and some of our later pre-human ancestors were big insect eaters. Finding flowers beautiful makes sense, but I was recently in the desert and I found that landscape beautiful. That feels more confusing?
- ajuc 4y ago> 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 :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- felipereigosa 4y agoWhy 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.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoThat begs the question, how does it benefit humans in any way, to find rainbows etc beautiful?
- felipereigosa 4y agoIt 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spandrel_(biology)
- potamic 4y agoI 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.
- residualmind 4y agoco-evolution?
- levitatorius 4y agoI 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.
- seydor 4y agothere 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
- rafaelflores 4y agoHave 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.
- Daub 4y agoOne 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.
- printui1 4y ago[flagged]
- smusamashah 4y agoI 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.
- cal85 4y agoI 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.
- smusamashah 4y agoCollected 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.
- jpttsn 4y agoMaybe I don’t get it, but it does not seem surprising that something happens to be beautiful? Is there some reason that this something should not to be flowers? Is there some assumption that all things should be equally pretty absent special reason? Why are stones not beautiful? Why is grass sort of meh in between? Why is the rib-eye the tastiest part of the cow? Well, some part has to be tastiest. Why not the rib-eye?
- wmeredith 4y agoYou're conflating the question of "why is this thing beautiful?" with "why is anything beautiful"?
- jpttsn 4y agoNot 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?”
- agonz253 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT7DFCF1Fn8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gT7DFCF1Fn8
- _a_a_a_ 4y agoapprently a lot of people didn't get past the headline, the pentultimate paragraph (of a short read) explains it's not about flowers at all.
- mannykannot 4y agoTrue, 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.
- LarsDu88 4y agoFlowers 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