Why is There So Much Beauty in the World?

Why is there so much beauty in the world? The first thing you might think is it’s all in the eye of the beholder; it’s all about us. We are predisposed to see beauty, so we think there’s a lot out there in the world, but actually it’s all to do with our own minds. We project our subjective responses onto the world around us.

Well, this must be at least partly true. Humans are undoubtedly interested in beauty, and art is one of our characteristic creations. Some of the first paintings appeared in caves around 40,000 years ago, and they still seem beautiful today. We have beautiful architectures, beautiful textiles, beautiful jewellery, beautiful pictures, beautiful sculpture, beautiful ceramics, beautiful woodwork and beautiful music.

We often surround ourselves with beauty. We are obviously interested in it, but there are cultural variations. It’s not as if there’s an absolute beauty, because music, for example, which is beautiful to people in some cultures is fairly incomprehensible to people in others. I lived in South India for several years, where classical Carnatic music is for many South Indians incredibly beautiful, but I just missed much of it. I’d be sitting at a concert and suddenly there would be a gasp of appreciation all around me, but I didn’t notice what had happened. Clearly there was an aesthetic that was largely passing me by. Such cultural variations might reinforce the idea that it’s all in our minds.

But we are also interested in the beauty of nature. We are impressed by the beauty of flowers, the wings of butterflies, the iridescence of beetles and the plumage of birds, like peacocks’ tails. There is also a huge amount of beauty in the world that was discovered only in recent centuries through the invention of the microscope. For example, radiolarians, which live in the sea, are single celled organisms with a range of beautifully complex forms.

Snowflakes are extraordinarily beautiful but until people had microscopes no one could see any of these details. Before telescopes were invented, we couldn’t see most of the features of planets and stars. Only in the twentieth century we saw galaxies outside our own. Some of them have spiral shapes and other forms that we recognise as beautiful, even though they are so far away, so huge – hundreds of thousands of light-years across - and so alien to us.

Why is there all this beauty in nature, and why do we recognise it? Galaxies, snowflakes, radiolarians, butterflies and flowers existed long before humans evolved. Do we see beauty in them just because our minds are pre-disposed to project our own subjective ideas of beauty onto the world around us?

No. It can’t just be about us. Think of flowers. Most people find flowers beautiful, but flowers have been around for about 150 million years. Our species Homo sapiens probably originated about 300,000 years ago, and urban civilisations began only about 8,000 years ago. Flowers long preceded all of us. The first flowering plants arose in the age of the dinosaurs, and the history of our species has so far lasted about 0.2 percent as long as the history of flowering plants; in other words 99.8 percent of the history of flowers preceded us.

So why are flowers so beautiful? Charles Darwin asked this question in Chapter 6 of The Origin of Species and pointed out there could have been no flower until there was an eye to see it. Flowers exist because animals have eyes; they are a communication between plant and animal, primarily between plants and the insects that pollinate them, like bees and butterflies. Most animals are not very interested in flowers, but some insects certainly are, and the evolution of flowers have happened in response to these insects seeing them. Insects look at them more thoroughly than we do, bees crawl inside them, and one way in which we can get some sense of the wrap-around experience of a bee is by looking into flowers from close up, getting a bee’s eye view by using a hand lens or loupe. With a x10 lens you can enter the immersive colour-scape of flowers. Nasturtiums are particularly impressive.

As Darwin expressed it:

Flowers rank amongst the most beautiful productions of nature; but they have been rendered conspicuous in contrast with the green leaves, and in consequence at the same time beautiful, so that they may be easily observed by insects. I have come to this conclusion from finding that it is an invariable rule that when a flower is fertilized by the wind, it never has a gaily coloured corolla… Hence we may conclude that, if insects had not been developed on the face of the earth, our plants would not have been decked with beautiful flowers.

But how much beauty does a flower need to attract an insect? The beauty of flowers seems gratuitous, excessive. You can make artificial flowers that attract bees from cut-out pieces of coloured cardboard. Flowers are vastly more beautiful than they need to be. And in any case, how can bees appreciate this beauty with such small brains? A bee’s brain contains about 900,000 nerve cells; our brains contain about 86 billion, about a hundred thousand times more than bees’ brains. One hundred thousandth of our brain capacity was apparently enough to drive the evolution of flowers.

So what is it about flowers that bees see and appreciate? One reason may be that most flowers have simple symmetrical forms. Flowers in the sunflower and daisy family, the Compositae or Asteraceae, have radially symmetrical flowers that are immediately attractive to us, and also clearly attractive to insects as well. Other types of flowers come with petals in threes, fours or fives. In lilies, for example, there are three internal petals and three external petals. In wallflowers and other members of the Cruciferae there are four petals, in a cross-like arrangement. In wild roses and other members of the Rosaceae, there are five. It may not need a very complicated brain to recognize a three, four or five-fold pattern.

But why did insects appreciate the beauty of flowers in the first place, helping to propel the processes of floral evolution? Well, animals of many species are both beautiful themselves and have a strong aesthetic sense. Many butterflies, for example, have extraordinarily beautiful wings; many beetles have remarkable iridescent colours; many fish, particularly tropical fish, have beautiful colour-patterns; many birds have beautiful plumage, such as the peacock’s tail.

So why is it that there’s so much beauty among animals as well as plants? Again, Darwin was one of the first biologists to turn his attention to this question. He explained it in terms of what he called sexual selection. It’s all about sex – well, flowers are about sex too; their attractiveness is about pollination. But among animals, Darwin pointed out that in many animal species, particularly in birds, there is a beauty competition between males. The females are the ones that choose. For example, peahens are rather dowdy by comparison with peacocks. Among pheasants, males have much more splendid plumage than females, and the same is true of many other bird species. Some birds that aren’t necessarily very beautiful themselves create displays of beauty like bower birds, which collect objects and make a kind of installation to attract females.

However, in many reptiles and mammals, unlike in birds, as Darwin pointed out, sexual selection has less to do with beauty. As he put it, among males the “law of battle” prevails. Sexual competition between male mammals is usually through fighting and trials of strength. Darwin noted that even vegetarian animals like hares can fight to the death in the mating season. Then the winning males get to choose among the females. So in some mammals, including humans, female beauty becomes more important than male beauty.

Evolutionary psychologists had a great time with this, taking the Darwinian agenda much further. They make utilitarian points couched in evolutionary terms. Secondary sexual characteristics in females that men will find attractive are ones that are to do with reproduction. Since humans walk upright, breasts became important as an aspect of female beauty. Protruding breasts are mostly made of fat tissue and are not necessary for producing milk; chimpanzees and other apes don’t have them because they don’t walk upright, according to this theory. Wide hips are important for childbearing, and are hence attractive, while a good complexion is a sign of health and therefore fertility. Based on these principles, evolutionary psychologists make the rather obvious prediction that women will pay a lot more attention to clothes and cosmetics than men.

These Darwinian arguments about sexual selection help us to see why there might have been driving evolutionary principles that favour beauty, but as Darwin himself said, they don’t explain the sense of beauty itself. Why is it that peahens find the displays of feathers by peacocks beautiful?

The ability of insects to respond to the beauty of flowers may well be because they had already been responding for millions of years to the beauty of the opposite sex in their own species. Their already-existing sense of beauty may have spilled over to an appreciation of flowers, and not just the shape, but also the colours and in some cases alluring smells as well.

We find beauty throughout the animal kingdom. Even in plants, whose vegetative parts are not involved in reproduction or attracting insects, there are many beautiful structures. Why?

I think that all this beauty suggests that the way minds work has something in common with the way that forms appear in nature. There’s a kind of resonance between minds and the natural world. The ability of an insect to recognise the three-fold mandala-like pattern of a lily is because something in its nervous system and its mind resonates with that.

One general principle of organization in nature is that self-organising systems are made up of parts within wholes. At each level the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Everywhere, at all levels, there are nested hierarchies or holarchies. Within atoms there are nuclei made up of parts – neutrons and protons, themselves made up of quarks. Around the nuclei are electrons in a series of orbitals, which are standing-wave structures, some are like figures of 8, some are doughnut-shaped. Then atoms are joined together in molecules in which the whole molecule has a form which binds together the atoms within it; electron waves enclose the entire molecule like a kind of envelope holding it together. Molecules can come together in ordered arrays within crystals, as in snowflakes. In living organisms, cells have a wholeness that is more than the sum of their parts, and so do the tissues, made up of cells, and the organs, made up of tissues. And then organisms can form whole societies of organisms, like schools of fish, or flocks of birds, or termite colonies, where the whole is more than the parts at a yet higher level.

We see the same general pattern of organisation in the solar system in which the whole is a system made up of parts, like the planets with their moons. And the whole solar system in turn is part of the galaxy; the stars are like cells within its body.

Our minds also work in terms of parts and wholes, nested in hierarchies or holarchies of organisation. We see things in wholes that contain parts that are wholes at a lower level. Language works like this too. The phonemes, the basic sounds, make up words and the words are in phrases and the phrases in sentences. In each case there’s a patterning of the parts within a higher-level whole, within a higher-level whole, within a higher-level whole.

I think that one of the things that we recognize when we experience beauty is this relationship between parts and wholes. When we look at a flower, like a peony, what we are seeing is a wholeness made up of coordinated parts, including the petals together with the sexual organs in the centre, the stamens and the pistils. All these parts are arranged in a proportionate and balanced way, and I think that our instinctive recognition of the harmonious relationship of parts depends on a kind of resonance with the way our minds work. There are general principles of order underlying all things.

The same goes for organisation in time, which we experience through music and song. Here again, there is a wholeness of the piece of music, which is made up of parts, like the basic rhythms and the harmonies, and the notes which together make a melody. All of these are parts, but they are coordinated together in a kind of fluid flow that has an underlying unity.

I’ve been trying to think why scenery can be so beautiful, because it does not necessarily follow the same principles. For example, there does not seem to be a great self-organising system that places islands in particular relationships with each other. There’s a fortuitousness in geology caused by collisions of continental plates and the thrusting up of mountain ranges. There are seemingly random processes at work, but I think one of the reasons for the wild Northern landscapes, as in British Columbia and Norway, being particularly beautiful is because they have been shaped by glaciers, whose flow was a kind of unifying principle, with a directional smoothing effect. Our eyes pick up the residue of the flow pattern that moved through the landscape. If there had been no glaciers, the rocks would have been more jagged and less attractive.

The fact that there is so much beauty in the universe suggests that the fundamental principles of the universe includes beauty. In fact, beauty is so all-pervasive that it can be terrifying. It can feel overwhelming, and therefore we often turn away from it because there is too much of it and it is too powerful. The poet who expressed this reaction most clearly was Rainer Maria Rilke. In his first Duino Elegy he wrote about it as follows:

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.

Probably we have all found that beauty can be utterly overwhelming, and so we turn away from it because it’s frightening. One way we experience this is if we are in an incredibly beautiful place with several other people. After a very brief period looking at the view, somebody says, “This reminds me of a place I visited in Mexico last year.” Then someone else says, “Oh yes, when I was in Japan, there was this incredible sunset over the mountains.” Almost immediately, the conversation takes you away from this immediate, all-too-present beauty, because it’s overwhelming.

In traditional Western thought about beauty, the philosopher who set the tone was Plato. He thought that the world we experience through our senses is a kind of reflection of a mind-like world outside space and time containing all the ideas or forms that can occur in nature. Every lily flower is a reflection of the ideal lily archetype that exists eternally in this transcendent mind, the realm of Platonic Forms or Ideas. Everything in this world is an imperfect reflection of the eternal world of perfect Forms.

Plato thought that this ultimate, transcendent mind had three fundamental characteristics, namely truth, beauty and goodness. This ultimate source of all nature was true because it was the ultimate reality, beautiful because it was in the nature of the ultimate reality to be beautiful, and good because it was the ultimate good, the source of all things.

In Christian theology something very like the Platonic mind is included in the three-fold being of God, the Holy Trinity. It is the Logos, the Word, the mind of God, with the same ultimate characteristics of truth, beauty and goodness. In the Roman Catholic catechism, God is Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Hence all the beauty in nature reflects this ultimate consciousness, of which beauty is an essential part.

Of course, this view is not accepted by everyone. For atheists and materialists, there can be no non-material transcendent realm; their entire belief system is based on this denial. From their point of view, beauty can only be experienced by animal nervous systems that have evolved as a result of natural selection; both beauty and the sense of beauty must serve some useful purpose, as in sexual selection, otherwise they would not have evolved.

It does not make sense for materialists and atheists to say that beauty is inherent in nature, because they believe that the whole universe is basically unconscious, and there is no consciousness beyond it. A system that is unconscious cannot be conscious of beauty. For materialists, the only conscious entities in the universe are brains, and the most conscious of all are our own brains. Thus for materialists it all comes back to the idea that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or rather in the nervous system of the beholder, both as a result of its electromagnetic patterns of activity and also because of the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine in particular regions of the brain.

By contrast, all religions and all spiritual traditions take the view that human consciousness is not the ultimate consciousness in the universe. There are forms of consciousness vastly greater than our own, and spiritual practices help to connect us with those greater forms of consciousness. In most traditional cultures, beauty has always been one of the ways in which we connect with forms of consciousness that transcend ourselves. A greater consciousness than ours has given rise to the entire cosmos, including all the beauty in nature, which is reflected in our minds. The reason we can appreciate beauty is because our minds come from the same source as all nature. Beauty is one of the essential aspects of the source of all things. And that is why there is so much beauty in the world.