The Sunday Read: 'Beauty of the Beasts'

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2021

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The bright elastic throats of anole lizards, the Fabergé abdomens of peacock spiders and the curling, iridescent and ludicrously long feathers of birds-of-paradise. A number of animal species possess beautifully conspicuous and physically burdensome features. Many biologists have long fit these tasking aesthetic displays into a more utilitarian view of evolution. However, a new generation of biologists have revived a long-ignored theory — that aesthetics and survival do not necessarily need to be linked and that animals can appreciate beauty for its own sake. Today on The Sunday Read, a look at how these biologists are rewriting the standard explanation of how beauty evolves and the way we think about evolution itself.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There's a really beautiful flower called the snake's head fridillary.
0:21.9	It blooms in the spring with these wine-colored nodding petals that have checkers on them.
0:27.6	They almost look like a snake's skin.
0:29.9	I grow them in my garden, and sometimes I just want to stare at them all day.
0:35.6	Flowers have completely mesmerized people throughout history and across cultures, but our
0:40.7	obsession with flowers is puzzling.
0:43.9	We're not bees or hummingbirds.
0:46.8	There's no obvious evolutionary advantage for our species to be so fixated on flowers,
0:53.6	and yet we're still so drawn to them.
0:56.8	Flowers are just beautiful.
1:00.2	I'm Ferris Jaber.
1:01.2	I'm a contributing writer for The New York Times magazine, and I wrote a story about quest
1:06.7	to explain the origins and purpose of beauty in nature.
1:12.3	You know, the peacock is sort of the mascot of animal beauty.
1:16.4	Male peacocks have these massive fanning, many-eyed tails with stunning shades of gold
1:21.7	and turquoise that help them attract mates.
1:25.1	But that plumage has evolved to be so big that it literally weighs the males down.
1:31.1	It makes them more noticeable and vulnerable to predators.
1:34.7	So why would they carry such a big burden?
1:38.0	The usual explanation has been that beauty in the animal kingdom is a kind of code.
1:43.7	Ornaments like the peacock's tail are supposed to convey useful information about a potential
1:48.8	mate's health and fitness.
	...

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