Richard Prum: evaluation

Transcript context

…I have cardinals and blue jays in my backyard. I enjoy them greatly. I like their colors. If bird aesthetics are arbitrary to the mating processes of birds, why do I also find it beautiful? Isn’t that a funny coincidence? That is deeply cool. I think that’s because humans are intelligent, and we have time on our hands and excess cognition and curiosity to burn, and that leads us to become fascinated by nature. But interspecific aesthetic regard is a fascinating thing. In the case of color and the case of song, it’s explicable in some ways because at least some of this is physics. There is an inherent wavelength relationship between various color combinations. The same for acoustics, in which we can imagine the harmonic relationship between notes in a bird song, just like we could analyze a piece of music. The real fundamental mystery is why do flowers smell beautiful? That one does not have [laughs], at least immediately, appealing answers because, it turns out, there are no receptor genes in common between a bee and a human, and they’re responding to the same flower odors in a similar way. I don’t think it’s because the olfactory space is just filled with all sorts of other things, and that’s where they’re left, and we learn about that. I think they are generally positive. I think there are graduate-level research questions to be pursued in interspecific aesthetic impression. Building on that example, what can avian evolutionary theory learn from how flowers attract pollinators through signals? It seems they use color, they use nectar, they use deceptive mimicry, but it can’t be the same kind of Fisherian co-evolution if the final result is beautiful. Doesn’t that imply it’s not Fisherian co-evolution that is generating the beauty?…

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