Do animals have aesthetics?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

A beaver builds a dam.

Not all beaver dams are the same, or even close. They are custom structures that follow the particular conditions of their surroundings.

How does a beaver know to put a log here instead of there? Does he reason, based on an abstract understanding of hydrodynamics, or does it just feel right?

When he regards a dam does he analyze its engineering or just sense its sturdiness or crumminess?

I would suggest that the instinctive sense in play is similar to our senses of beauty, of attractive form. Though an odd notion it's less challenging than the alternative of beavers thinking through the engineering process.

Is the beaver's sense of beauty/harmony in dam design reducible to a surprisingly simple series of parameters? Yes, probably so. But who is to say our aesthetics are not? (We can only analyze human mental processes with our human minds so of course everything about us seems almost infinitely complex... to us.)

When animals chose mates is it anthropomorphism to say they are factoring in elements of what we would call beauty? Our standards of beauty are to some degree evolutionarily delivered and to some degree culturally/experientially derived. Is a bird any different when deciding which songs are more attractive, which shapes of tail-feathers are most desirable?

In some species of bird males build nests and females pick which nest, and thus which mate, they prefer. Do such bird construct the most durable and utilitarian nests? No. The males decorate the nests with pretty things. (In human occupied areas they incorporate colorful strips of plastic and bits of shiny foil.) Are the female birds using a standard of beauty in deciding which nests are most attractive? How could they not be?

When human littering makes shiny, colorful material available the males know to use it because they know the females will like it. The males and females share an aesthetic sense of something. They liked tin-foil a million years before tinfoil existed!

Is it entirely instinctual or, as with humans, a synergism of instinct and culture? When a bird sees females flocking to a foil-decorated nest is he likelier to incorporate some foil in his? I am guessing yes. We know that birds have culture in their songs. They are not born knowing all the tunes. Attractive riffs are invented and become popular. And in some species songs are judged for complexity of innovation.

Birds also have fashion in culture. In "leks" amles line up and females pick the dreamiest male... and almost ALL the females mate with him! The next year a different male is the in-thing but he isn't always the male most like last year's model. This "fashion" craze serves to keep the DNA of the bird population a moving tragets for parasites and viruses, but the birds don't know that. They just know that spiky tails feathers were hot last year but rounded ones are hot this year.

(A sideways example of the unimaginable complexity of the interaction of instinct and environment in birds. Some birds use a magnetic sense to migrate. Others use the stars. At some point somebody noted that navigating by stars is a problem for evolution because the earth's axis has wobbles that take many thousands of years. The sky changes slowly, but far too fast for evolution to have kept up! This requires some study... it turns out that in the nest the baby birds stare fixedly at the sky and come to identify the star that moves least during the night. That identity of that star may change over a hundred thousand years but its relative significance does not. The star that moves the least is (in the northern hemisphere) the north-most star. And from that they can memorize the configuration of stars around it. Some instinct tells them what to do relative to north but they are not born knowing where north is. The are, like humans, born with an instinct for education.)

Much of what we feel and even think is shaped by stuff we just know... a universe of specific perspectives of which we are but dimly aware, since they do not seem like perspectives at all, but rather like right and obvious truths.

That which most separates us from the animals is asking the question what separates us from the animals.

Our every trait lies upon a continuum. Within the range of life on Earth we happen to be, compared to the other animals, at the very end of several continua. But nobody thinks we are at the theoretical end of any continuum, do they? Are better mathematical minds conceivable? Are superior social instincts possible?

When elephants lament a fallen fellow and stack debris over her corpse are they behaving religiously?

On the one hand, no more so then when my cat creates intricate tee-pees of trash over her feces when she 'misses' the litter box.

On the other hand, the first thing we know about humans in any kind of civilization is that the powerful arrange to divert the energies of the people into heaping matter upon their corpse with seemingly no limit on their ambition. (Northern European Cairns, Egyptian pyramids, Meso-American pyramids, American Indian earthworks, Chinese artificial mountains like the source of the terra-cotta warriors)

Were those acts of religion? Were those aesthetically guided constructions?

Ask an elephant.

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Dogs have a 'sense of fairness' but are shitty at basic arithmetic.

For example, treats. My two dogs clearly understand that the other dog just got a treat and now they deserve one as well. Unfortunately their ability at basic arithmetic is atrocious, so on dog2 receiving the balancing treat to dog1, dog1 now has an issue with treat fairness, as dog2 just received a treat so now dog1 is owed one. Repeat ad dogium.

[Abq_Sarah]

11. I have to give them treats simultaneously

And they have to be the same size. Each dog watches the other to make sure they're not getting "cheated".

[Catshrink]

2. They must have some sense of aesthetics.

My dog adjusts just so into his little nest. He can do this very quickly, for example, if I get up in the middle of the night to tinkle, I return to find his nest built and him fast asleep so that moving his 30 pound carcass is like trying to budge a 2 ton boulder.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

9. My cat is a feng shui practitioner

She is obsessed with positioning herself, and other things, in mysterious but consistent relationships and angles.

Beats me, but she's anxious if she's not pointed just so.

Arranges socks like the Nazca lines all across the living room. (Hasn't spelled out anything yet.)

[Catshrink]

14. Does she circle precisely 2.5 times before plopping down?

I had one cat who I swear was OCD. His pillow on the bed had to be just so or he'd whine. I am truly pwned.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

21. Yes, in fact.

Not necessarily 2.5 but seldom a round number.

[Cleita]

3. I have a theory about monument building.

It seems to have arisen in agrarian societies. Since there are times of the year when tilling, growing and harvesting are not being done, I believe the chiefs or kings employed the idle farmers in building monuments whether temples, palaces or tombs to keep the tribe and later the nation cohesive. It also provided employment where there could be want. Sure slaves did a lot of the dirty work, but it seems monuments were pretty much built by free men for the most part who received stuff back in return like a place to live and food. Of course raiding other nations for metals, desirable goods and slaves brought us war as an institution as well because the kings raiding their own people for wealth wouldn't be kings for very long so conquering neighboring tribes and plundering their goods was a more acceptable way and spreading the wealth through employment of the farmers during the idle season seemed to be the way we started building things.

As far as religion, well any leader who wanted to remain king, had to make the people afraid of certain Gods, especially the ones he claimed descent from to retain power during bad times.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

7. Very much right, but not wholly answering the question

Agricultural societies not only can have a population surplus, they must have a surplus. In ancient Egypt the intricate irrigation system would survive most annual floods but be destroyed by the really bad floods. And when destroyed the entire system had to be rebuilt fast or everyone would starve.

In the off years that surplus labor built giant stone things.

That explains how monuments were possible but doesn't explain why, of all conceivable uses of such armies of surplus labor, various sorts of epic burial mound were universal.

The Romans didn't go in for that sort of thing and used similar energies to build stone roads, stone aqueducts, etc. Such things would have economically advanced any civilization more than literally heaping rocks as high as they could go. (The Egyptian "bent pyramid" suggests that, like European cathedral builders, they may have even sometimes sought to stack rocks even higher than gravity was happy with.)

As with most things, an interplay of human nature and practical reality. Whenever we developed the overwhelming desire to be buried agriculture was nowhere on the horizon. (Cro-magnons buried their most cherished dead with artifacts and decorations.)

When agriculture came along suddenly our primitive innate desire was able to explode in scale and complexity.

[geckosfeet]

4. In so much as functional design has aesthtics, yes, animals have an aesethic.

Think about a truly good design. Its beauty does not derive from appearance. We appreciate simple functional understandable creations. Creations that appeal to and provide for our innate needs and behaviors become near and dear. I think that animals understand this as well.

[Dappleganger]

5. One of our dogs has a 'blankie' in his crate.

He whines like a baby when he notices that it's gone.

The other doxie has a habit of stealing one piece of warm laundry and dragging it to her crate to snuggle down with in her nest.

The lab has a favorite flattened football she takes from room to room and when we go outside. Otherwise she doesn't do anything special wrt sleeping or 'nesting.'

[rocktivity]

6. I believe what's beautiful to a beaver is a dam that WORKS.

I believe their ultimate goal is function rather than form. Any resulting physical or aesthetic beauty is icing on the cake.

On the other hand, there's a species of bird who build structures in hopes of attracting a mate.

:headbang:
rocktivity


P.S. In case you missed it: World's biggest beaver dam discovered in northern Canada

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

8. Yes, but does he calculate?

He wants a dam that works but unless he is calculating then his sense of what will work is guided by some abstract inner-standard. I am not suggesting that a beaver thinks of his sense of soundness of dam design as aesthetic. But unless beavers have reasoning capacity we have not discovered the sense must be a general sense of rightness.

Look at this site and it feels that a dam should go from this tree to that tree. I doubt he actually thinks, "If I build it this way a latter flood will wash it away." He just knows that this feels most right.

There must be some math... some angular relationships and such. But, as with our appreciation of certain shapes and proportions, the underlying math is not conscious.

When we look at two paintings we usually like one more but when asked to explain why we are mostly just making something up... trying to add a gloss of reason to our gut-level reaction.

I cannot imagine that beavers reason well enough to mentality model construction. If we were able to ask why dam design x makes them happier than dam design y they would probably be in the same spot we are in trying to rationalize our favorite color.

Again, I am not crediting beavers with a lot of sophistication. Their simplicity is why I think their design is more tied to a beaver aesthetic than to engineering as we understand it.

Yes, I did see the beaver dam article. Great stuff! That's what inspired this typing exercise.

[rocktivity]

12. I do think they're guided by an instinctive "abstract inner standard"

the same kind of instinct that tells baby sea turtles which way the water is. But I think beavers are also aided with a sense of good old fashioned trial and error.

I have a friend who named her online marketing program after the beavers who constantly jammed the streams on the golf course where she worked. If their dam or dwellings were destroyed or sabotaged, they'd just spend the night rebuilding even stronger ones. Their death or relocation were the only permanent solutions.

I don't think they say, "If I build it this way a latter flood will wash it away" so much as "Oops, it washed away--let me angle the sticks another way."

:headbang:
rocktivity

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

13. Yes. It is funny that we marvel at the clever architecture of European cathedrals...

...without realizing how much of their design was a centuries-long trial-and-error process.

Cathedral collapses were a constant problem. The great cathedrals we see today all share the trait that they didn't collapse so of course they are all pretty nicely made cathedrals.

It was assumed forever that flying buttresses helped keep cathedrals from collapsing until 20th century engineers were able to demonstrate for certain that the buttresses support nothing but their own weight. So how did they become a standard feature? Because they look, given our innate sense of things, like they would help support a cathedral and in the trial and error process some cathedral with flying buttresses achieved an unusual size without collapsing. So everyone added the (useless) supports to their designs.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

10. To Late to EDIT: Not all leks are like the one described

I did not add the necessary caveats. A lot of birds have leks--males lining up for display as females walk around and chose. The behavior of all the females picking the same male is, however, not universal.

In the birds that do that there is an annual fashion craze in male desirability and this years model is not always the male most like last year's model.

The concentration of DNA is risky but combined with somewhat arbitrary annual fashion it keeps the local bird population's gene pool a moving target for viruses and parasites. The whole gene pool makes extreme, concentrated moves, like trying to shake off something clinging to your neck.

Such birds were probably genetically "bottle-necked" through some extreme disease situations that made such seemingly odd behavior species-universal.

[bobbolink]

15. Pack rats collect shiny, glittery things they have absolutely no use for.

I are a pack rat. ^_^

[troubledamerican]

33. Video: Octopus steals diver's shiny videocamera

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/04/video-of-octopus-stealing-divers-camera-victor-new-zealand.php

[-..__...]

16. Master nest builder... the bowerbird.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPbWJPsBPdA

The male can be extremely meticulous in choosing how to construct and decorate his nest for the sole purpose of attracting a mate.

[rocktivity]

35. A bower is not a nest--it's more like a bachelor pad

The female builds the nest afterward--that is, after she's mated with the guy whose bower had the sexiest interior decoration!

:headbang:
rocktivity

[wtbymark]

17. the problem is we're not talking Aesthetics here

there is no way an animal can look at the painting of a cow and recognize it as a cow. I posit that animals have no capacity for the recognition of semblence. Is whale song or birdsong a form of communication or are they actually assembling the semblence of music? Does a wolf gaze at a sunset and contemplate its beauty or does it just subconsciously acknowledge that 'this doesn't suck'? The recognition of semblence, which is Aesthetics, is a higher cognitive function relating to reflection and perspective. I think you are personifying.

[CTyankee]

18. We can contemplate as the poet Wallace Stevens does here:

Anecdote of the Jar
Wallace Stevens

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

20. Geez wtbymark, is that a sincere reading?

When one reading of something is refutable by tautology you might try another reading. It is glaringly obvious that the word aesthetics with an "s" is being (mis)used as shorthand for "aesthetic sensibilities" rather than as a formal reference to the branch of philosophy of that name.

Of course beavers have no capacity for the recognition of semblance. (If you can get hung-up on a stray "s" I can note the "a" issue.) :)

Does a bird that composes and improvises in song perceive his song as "music"? No. Music is a human concept. Yet birds engage in many of the same sophisticated things we do with music and have ideas of better and worse in their efforts and probably derive pleasure (broadly, including reduction of anxiety) thereby.

And birds that live in Vermont do not know they live in Vermont, since knowing which trees are in something called Vermont is a uniquely human trait.

So your argument is reducible to "are beavers human beings?"

And I grant that they are not.

Now, as to your personification comment... you are defining all aesthetic experience as uniquely human so, yeah. Sure. (The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.)

But the implication of the piece is that human aesthetic experience may not be different in kind from a wolf thinking "that doesn't suck," not that wolves are human beings.

You are obviously smart. Can you not imagine a perspective from which the distinctions humans create to draw a bright line between human appreciation of beauty and whatever it is animals do is not definitive?

I can. Of course we bring more brain-power to the task but it is worth considering that our senses of taste and beauty and even of the purposeless enjoyment of such are human constructs to describe our species' particular approach to something that is at heart basic — deriving some manner of pleasure from the form and appearance of things that seems to the viewer to be a somewhat abstract pleasure.

I like looking at women's hips. It feels like an abstract pleasure but from a higher perspective it might appear specific and animal. I do not generally picture babies popping out of them yet the pleasure I derive from the forms of hips is informed by some deep evolutionary stuff about hips and babies. I suspect a beaver feels an abstract pleasure/reduction of anxiety/security in perceiving certain forms that is akin to whatever is, for a beaver, an abstract pleasure.

If a female bower bird wants to mate for life with a male bower bird because he arranged some tinfoil just right is she reasoning or feeling? If the former than we need to rethink bird intellect. If the later then the task of separating a positive feeling arising from an abstract arrangement of materials from an aesthetic response seems gratuitous.

[CTyankee]

23. Do you agree with William Blake's statement:

"Without man, nature is barren"?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

25. Agree? Hmmm...

Where man is not, nature is barren... presumably barren of human meaning.

Kind of circular.

I consider meaning to be a human concept so how could anything have meaning except in human terms?

(And I doubt the line would be embraced by nature, were nature in a position to comment.)

I dunno.

Elaboration?

[CTyankee]

29. I completely freaked out an environmentalist with that statement of Blake's!

I think what she was saying is that there is a "meaning" beyond that which is our human understanding...one that surpasses human understanding, and that is "nature's meaning." In other words, she was exalting "nature's meaning" above the human being's meaning since ours is necessarily limited and nature's is eternal. I get that. It is a rebuttal of "man is the measure of all things." Clearly, we have another view of that statement in our present consciousness, or at least I think we do!

[starroute]

19. So much of human aesthetics is instinctual shorthand

Fruit is most attractive to us in appearance and smell when it's perfectly ripe and thus most nourishing. And this isn't just a matter of us judging -- the fruit itself is sending out "eat me" signals when the seeds inside are ready to be disseminated.

Attractiveness in women generally translates into "young, healthy, built for child-bearing."

Attractiveness in men tends to have two poles. In times of upheaval, women go for "rugged and aggressive." In more placid times for "cute, geeky, likely to stick around and help raise the kids."

Even the earliest hand axes nearly two million years ago were symmetrical and pleasingly shaped -- and the rule for tools ever since has been that if it looks good and feels good in the hand, it probably works better than one that's ugly and awkward.

What we experience as aesthetics is a matter of both survival and communication among individuals and species. As humans, we're capable of detaching aesthetics from its basis in survival and keeping things around just because they look good and make us feel happy. But even there, we may be training our perceptions to make fine distinctions that are essential to our actual well-being.

[boobooday]

22. I love this - that is, you ask an aesthetically pleasing question.

Studies have found that indeed, what is aesthetically pleasing to us is symmetry, an important concept in the formation of anything lasting or beautiful.

[CTyankee]

24. But in periods of art (and here I am referring to Western Art), symmetry has meant different

things. Here are two paintings, done in Italy 150 years apart. Notice the difference in symmetry:





The first is by Masolino, an Early Renaissance artist in Florence. The second is by Tintoretto, a Mannerist painter in Venice 150 years later. You will notice the nod given to linear perspective in the first work, which is missing in the second because the idea that art "needed" a vanishing point was discarded by the Mannerists as immaterial to their aesthetic. My point is that symmetry is something that means different things to different people in different times. In "modern" times look at Cubism and its departure from looking at things in the old (i.e. "representational" ways).

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

26. Yes, but bilateral symmetry has always been a baseline...

...for our aesthetic responses to most living things and objects. In painting we prefer asymmetry with balance, a subtler but related concept. (But still prefer symmetrically shaped paintings.)

Paintings aside, we prefer our children, mates, pets and most (though certainly not all) conveyances, consumer products and buildings to feature bilateral symmetry.

Amusingly, we favor symmetry in faces but a truly symmetrical face appears bizarre to us.

There are some very simple preferences we have that are not a rich aesthetic sensibility in and of themselves but that seem to be innate and thus we cannot hope to imagine an innocent aesthetic.

[CTyankee]

28. I consider art to be a reflection on how humans regard their world at the time they see

and experience the art. The art of the Early Renaissance reflected a sense of order and of scientific precision, giving man a new understanding of the natural world. The Mannerists seem to reflect the disorder of their world at that time, which I interpret as their freaking out over the religious wars after the Reformation, when order in the Western European world seemed to be fractured beyond understanding.

But I think we are considering two very different ways of looking at what "symmetry" is...

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

30. I find mannerism soothing

As a painter, I respond to the formality and exactitude of rendering.

I am sure the jumbliness and odd proportions were off-putting in the day but modern eyes are almost immune to that.

[CTyankee]

32. Yes, the Mannerists' love of the nude body and exactitude of musculature of

the human body was an extraordinary leap. That I (a non artist) can see and appreciate in Mannerism. And the agonized figura serpintinata I find very thrilling, compared to the classic contraposto (altho I find the latter a bit more soothing, to use your word!).

Interesting what you say. The NYT did a review of the recent exhibit of Bronzino drawings at the Met and compared the Mannerism period to our contemporary period today (I guess in terms of zeigeist), which I thought was intriging. You might agree with that...I don't really know myself...

[rug]

27. Of course.

[elias49]

31. I'm really enjoying these exchanges! Fascinating...

please...keep it up!

[a la izquierda]

34. I dunno, maybe.

But when I put my ear up to my dog's ear, all I hear is the ocean, or maybe some tumbleweeds. Dog is dumb as a post (but still smarter than Bush).