Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 59 of 217 · 20 per page

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Another exciting implication of this aesthetic view of life is the realization that coevolutionary change is the fundamental feature underlying all aesthetic phenomena, including the human arts. As explained throughout this book, the evolution of sexual ornaments like the peacock’s tail involves the corresponding coevolution of the peahen’s cognitive aesthetic preferences. Changes in mating preferences have transformed the tail, and changes in the tail have transformed mating preferences. We can see a similar coevolutionary process at work in the fine arts. Mozart, for example, composed symphonies and operas that transformed his audiences’ capacity to imagine what music could be and do. These new musical preferences then fed back upon future composers and performers to advance the classical style in Western music. Likewise, Manet, van Gogh, and Cézanne created paintings that pushed the genre of European painting beyond its previous bounds. The newly transformed aesthetic preferences of their audiences fed back upon new generations of artists, collectors, and museums, ultimately leading to Cubism, Dada, and other modernist art movements of the early twentieth century. These cultural mechanisms of aesthetic change in the human arts are inherently coevolutionary as well. Once we understand that all art is the result of a coevolutionary historical process between audience and artist—a coevolutionary dance between display and desire, expression and taste—we must expand our conception of what art is and can be. We cannot define art by the objective qualities of an artwork nor by any special qualities of observer experience (that is, art is not merely in the eye of the beholder). Being an artwork means being the product of a historical process of aesthetic coevolution. In other words, art is a form of communication that coevolves with its own evaluation. This coevolutionary definition of art implies that art necessarily emerges within an aesthetic community, or population of aesthetic producers and evaluators. In a now classic paper of aesthetic philosophy from 1964, Arthur Danto called this taste-making, aesthetic community “the artworld.” This new, coevolutionary definition of art opens up an entirely new connection between evolutionary biology and the arts. Perhaps the most revolutionary consequence of this definition of art is that it means that bird songs, sexual displays, animal-pollinated flowers, fruits, and so on are art, too. They are biotic arts that have emerged within myriad biotic artworlds, each of them a community that fostered the coevolution of animal aesthetic traits and preferences over time.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  These stories of Christian girls who escaped from the brothel are minor but revealing marks of a closely shared imaginative space, and they point to the central place of sex in the fictional economy of both traditions. The writings known, somewhat unhappily, under the moniker of the apocryphal Acts of the apostles, bear a telling family resemblance to contemporary Greek novelistic writing. The apocryphal Acts are the primary vehicle of early Christian romance. The apostles, the wandering heroes of early Christianity, were an endlessly fertile source of Christian legend. Close to the divine presence, the aura of the miraculous clung to them. The institutional church claimed descent from them. The canonical scriptures testified to their historicity but left ample room to the imagination. An enormous body of Christian legend, continuously reshaped, came to attach to the heroic generation. The Acts are adventure stories, but unlike the pagan novels the Acts are historical romances, set against a backdrop recognizable as the Roman Empire of the first century. As in the pagan romance, travel and serial endangerments hold together the structure, which is episodic, sensational. The apostles are miracle workers, endowed above all with the wondrous ability to resurrect the dead. They are also preachers who come to be arrested by the Roman authorities. The apocryphal Acts , like the romances but to an even greater degree, are forensic dramas. The gathering tension between apostolic missionizing and the Roman order inevitably resolves into a judicial conflict. The apostle, in the end, is martyred, so that death substitutes for marriage as the common ending of the apostle’s story. Between the travel, miracle working, and martyrdom of the apostles, sex continually juts into the foreground of the stories. Sex functions as a primary symbolic code in the world of Christian legend, but in a radically reformulated sense. Christian romances not only preach a new model of proper sexual conduct, they also discovered a way of expressing a strikingly original romance of the eternal soul, in which this world of flux and regeneration is a façade and the reunion with God, through purity and death, is the ultimate consummation. “Nothing of yours endures, but all things, right down to human conventions, are transient.”31

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  [image file=image_rsrc3N3.jpg] CHAPTER 4Aesthetic Innovation and DecadenceIn the understory of a mossy cloud forest in the western Andes of Ecuador, a small cocoa-brown bird with a red fore crown sings from a slim perch. Bip-Bip-WANNGG! The tonal sound rings like feedback from an elfin electric guitar. Three other males within earshot call back in rapid response with increasing excitement. These are territorial male Club-winged Manakins (Machaeropterus deliciosus) at a lek displaying to attract mates. The strange acoustic quality of their songs is associated with an even stranger movement. Instead of opening their beaks to make their electronic-sounding songs, the male Club-wings flick their wings open at their sides to make the initial Bips and then snap their wings up over their backs to set their swollen and twisted inner wing feathers into rapid sideways oscillation to produce the extraordinary WANNGG sound (color plate 12). These male Club-winged Manakins are singing with their wings. We have seen that many other manakins make pop and snap sounds with their wing feathers during courtship display. White-throated Manakins make a loud pop as they stall in flight over their display logs. White-bearded Manakins make their explosive snaps as they leap between the display court and the surrounding saplings, and they produce a loud flatulent roll—a rapid series of snaps—while perched above their courts. The many variations on snap, crackle, and pop in the manakins are all feather sounds. The existence of these nonvocal communication sounds is evolutionarily baffling, because manakins all have perfectly good vocal songs that remain an important part of their aesthetic repertoires. Why would any species—let alone many separate species—evolve an entirely new way to sing when the traditional avian vocal songs had been working fine, even gloriously, for over seventy million years? Like eyes, limbs, and feathers, the mechanical sounds of manakins are examples of evolutionary innovations—entirely novel biological features that are not homologous with any ancestral, or antecedent, feature. Evolutionary innovations are intellectually exciting because they require more than simple, incremental, quantitative change—more than mere evolutionary tinkering, if you will. Innovations involve the evolution of genuinely new phenomena and features, or qualitative evolutionary novelties. [image "The male White-bearded Manakin produces the roll-snap wing sound by clapping its wings together rapidly over its back." file=image_rsrc3N4.jpg] The male White-bearded Manakin produces the roll-snap wing sound by clapping its wings together rapidly over its back.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  This interest ultimately led her to a duck farm in the Central Valley of California in 2009. Although a duck farm is not an obvious place to pursue new frontiers of evolutionary science, the farm Brennan went to had some very special ducks. These drakes were trained to ejaculate semen into tiny glass bottles. This was done not to satisfy some perverse interest in duck sex but because the duck farmers wanted to create offspring that are a hybrid of male Muscovy Ducks (Cairina moschata) and female Pekin ducks (a captive breed of Mallard). In captivity, such hybrids show extraordinary vigor and put on weight rapidly—two qualities that are very attractive to duck farmers. But the Muscovy and Pekin ducks do not like each other, and if they are left to their own devices in a common pen, they will not mate at high enough rates to produce a commercially viable number of offspring. Modern agriculture’s answer to this problem is artificial insemination, which requires some way of collecting the sperm. Hence the use of the little glass bottles. All of which explains why one day the Latino workers who collected the sperm and performed the artificial inseminations at this farm were confronted with a lovely, well-educated, wise, and wisecracking Latina toting a high-speed video camera. As the videos showed, male Muscovy ducks will perform on demand—despite the little glass bottles, the scrutiny of the camera, and the glare of the lights. The basic artificial insemination procedure goes like this: Male and female Muscovys are kept in separate pens to increase their sexual motivation. When it’s time for the sperm collection to occur, the pair of ducks is placed in a narrow cage with their rear ends facing out of one open side. The male rapidly mounts the female and begins to tread on her back. The female becomes readily sexually receptive, as indicated by her reclining precopulatory posture: her neck extended forward, head lowered, rear end raised with the cloaca exposed, dilated, and secreting volumes of mucus. Soon, the male begins to lower himself toward the female’s proffered rear. And then it happens. Normally, the erection of the drake would take place into the female reproductive tract. During sperm collection, however, the farmworker prevents the male from actually entering the female and places what looks like a small glass milk bottle over the male’s cloaca at just the right moment. The drake’s penis then erects and ejaculates into the bottle. As in a discreet sperm bank, the sample is then passed through a little window into the hand of another worker who prepares it for the Pekin females who are waiting in the room next door. For Brennan’s research observations, the farmers still prevented the male from entering the female but allowed him to erect and ejaculate into the air, or into the special glass contraptions that Brennan brought along on her next trip to the duck farm (more about those later).

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Patty is nothing if not creative, however, and to test our hypothesis, she came up with the idea of creating four glass tubes that would help us analyze the interplay between the male and the female reproductive equipment. Two of the tubes would be designed not to challenge the progress of the duck penis in the vaginal tract. One would be straight; the other would be coiled counterclockwise to match the spiral of the duck penis itself. The other two tubes would be designed to act like a steeplechase obstacle course for the avian penis, mimicking the shape of the female reproductive tract in breeding season. One would be a tube with a hairpin turn similar to the female cul-de-sacs near the cloaca, and the second a tube with a clockwise coil like the upper reaches of the duck vagina. The diameters of all the tubes were to be the same; they would differ only in the shape of the interior space. We hypothesized that the duck penis would proceed without problems through the straight and counterclockwise spiral tubes. Conversely, we hypothesized that the tubes with the female-like hairpin turn and the clockwise spirals could frustrate erection and prevent complete entry. Although glass tubes are nothing like the real thing, they have the advantage of providing a standard rigidity and uniformly smooth surface that would control for all mechanical factors other than the shape of the tube, which was the critical element of the hypothesis we wanted to test. The glass tubes would be unnatural but objective and fair. Plus, glass is clear, so we could observe and record on video the progress of the erecting duck penis down the tube. To find someone to make the glass tubes, Patty and I went to talk to Daryl Smith at the Yale University Department of Chemistry Scientific Glassblowing Laboratory. The motto over the door read, “If not for glass, science would be blind.” The display cases in the hallway leading up to the shop were filled with complex glass apparatuses with elaborate condensing coils, leading to flasks and bulbs leading to tubes with charcoal filters, and so on. Business was booming. Waiting outside the door was a line of students, each holding drawings of new designs they wanted to be made for their research, proof if any were needed that this classic art form is still a critical part of the science of chemistry. When our turn came to talk to Smith, we gave him a short introduction to the reproductive biology of ducks, to explain why we wanted him to make artificial duck vaginas in various shapes. We discussed the possible designs. Once we had decided on the final specifications, I asked Smith, “So, is this the weirdest request you ever had?” “Well,” he responded, “I’ve been asked to make artificial vaginas before, but never for ducks!” We didn’t inquire further about this previous request.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  I answer that, Since this science is partly speculative and partly practical, it transcends all others speculative and practical. Now one speculative science is said to be nobler than another, either by reason of its greater certitude, or by reason of the higher worth of its subject-matter. In both these respects this science surpasses other speculative sciences; in point of greater certitude, because other sciences derive their certitude from the natural light of human reason, which can err; whereas this derives its certitude from the light of divine knowledge, which cannot be misled: in point of the higher worth of its subject-matter because this science treats chiefly of those things which by their sublimity transcend human reason; while other sciences consider only those things which are within reason’s grasp. Of the practical sciences, that one is nobler which is ordained to a further purpose, as political science is nobler than military science; for the good of the army is directed to the good of the State. But the purpose of this science, in so far as it is practical, is eternal bliss; to which as to an ultimate end the purposes of every practical science are directed. Hence it is clear that from every standpoint, it is nobler than other sciences. Reply to Objection 1: It may well happen that what is in itself the more certain may seem to us the less certain on account of the weakness of our intelligence, “which is dazzled by the clearest objects of nature; as the owl is dazzled by the light of the sun” (Metaph. ii, lect. i). Hence the fact that some happen to doubt about articles of faith is not due to the uncertain nature of the truths, but to the weakness of human intelligence; yet the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things, as is said in de Animalibus xi. Reply to Objection 2: This science can in a sense depend upon the philosophical sciences, not as though it stood in need of them, but only in order to make its teaching clearer. For it accepts its principles not from other sciences, but immediately from God, by revelation. Therefore it does not depend upon other sciences as upon the higher, but makes use of them as of the lesser, and as handmaidens: even so the master sciences make use of the sciences that supply their materials, as political of military science. That it thus uses them is not due to its own defect or insufficiency, but to the defect of our intelligence, which is more easily led by what is known through natural reason (from which proceed the other sciences) to that which is above reason, such as are the teachings of this science.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  REMIGIUS. And it should be known, that the meaning not only of this passage, but of many others also, is supported by this testimony from the Prophet. The words, Behold my servant, may be referred to the place in which the Father had said above, This is my Son. (Mat. 3:17.) The words, I will put my Spirit upon him, is referred to the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Lord at His baptism; He shall declare judgment to the Gentiles, to that which He says below, When the Son of Man shall sit in the seat of his Majesty. (Mat. 25:31) What he adds, He shall not strive nor cry, refers to the Lord how He answered but little to the Chief Priests, and to Pilate, but to Herod nothing at all. He shall not break the bruised reed, refers to His shunning His persecutors that they might not be made worse; and that In his name shall the Gentiles hope, refers to what Himself says below, Go ye, and teach all nations. (Mat. 28:19) 12:22–2422. Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind and dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw. 23. And all the people were amazed, and said, Is not this the Son of David? 24. But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils. GLOSS. (non occ.) The Lord had refuted the Pharisees above, when they brought false charges against the miracles of Christ, as if He had broken the sabbath in doing them. But inasmuch as with a yet greater wickedness they perversely attributed the miracles of Christ done by divine power to an unclean spirit, therefore the Evangelist places first the miracle from which they had taken occasion to blaspheme, saying, Then was brought to him one that had a dæmon, blind and dumb. REMIGIUS. The word Then refers to that above, where having healed the man who had the withered hand, He went out of the synagogue. Or it may be taken of a more extended time; Then, namely, when these things were being done or said. CHRYSOSTOM. We may wonder at the wickedness of the dæmon; he had obstructed both inlets by which he could believe, namely, hearing and sight. But Christ opened both, whence it follows, And he healed him., insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw. JEROME. Three miracles were wrought in one and the same person at the same time; the blind sees, the dumb speaks, the possessed is delivered from the dæmon. This was at that time done in the flesh, but is now daily being fulfilled in the conversion of them that believe; the dæmon is cast out when they first behold the light of the faith, and then their mouths which had before been stopped are opened to utter the praises of God.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  But how is it, then, that the mate the female chooses can manage to overcome the twists and whorls of her defensive anatomy? How does voluntary sex differ from forced? We do not have any direct observations of the inner workings—again, MRI technology would need to take a huge leap forward and arrive in the barnyard to deliver such data. But, as mentioned above, Patty’s duck-farm observations revealed that when female Muscovys were actively soliciting copulations, they assumed the conspicuously horizontal precopulatory display posture, dilated the cloacal muscles, and released copious amounts of lubricating mucus. It seems clear that females can make the reproductive tract a fully functioning and welcoming place when they want to. To return once again to McCracken’s question—what are the ridiculously long penises of these ducks doing inside the female’s body? The answer turns out to be, “It depends.” If the copulation is solicited, then clearly the female is in for the full ride. These penile structures can easily penetrate to the upper reaches of her reproductive tract if only momentarily. However, if the copulation is resisted by the female, then the penis’s length and surface features are designed, evolutionarily speaking, to try to overcome the barriers imposed by female vaginal complexity. In the text above, I didn’t use the metaphor of the forbidding cliff face lightly. It’s clear that the ridges and hooks on the penis have evolved precisely for the purpose of helping it to claw its way through the various structures within the duck’s vagina that are designed to keep it out. However, by being overwhelmingly successful at bottling up the penis during forced intromission, and preventing the vast majority of attempts at forced fertilizations, female ducks have managed to maintain the advantage in this sexual arms race. Even in the face of persistent sexual violence, female ducks have been able to assert and advance their sexual autonomy—their individual freedom to control paternity through their own mate choices. This is a dark evolutionary tale with an amazing and profoundly redemptive outcome. What we learn from our investigations into duck sex is that despite the ubiquity of sexual violence in these breeding systems, female mate choice continues to predominate. Consequently, male plumages, songs, and displays continue to evolve. Beauty continues to thrive, even in the face of pervasive, violent attempts to subvert the freedom of mate choice that creates it. However, female sexual autonomy is not a form of female power over males. It is merely a mechanism for the assurance of freedom of mate choice. Female ducks do not exert sexual control over males, and they can always be turned down by the mates they prefer. Females do not, indeed cannot, evolve to assert power over others in response to sexual violence. Rather, females can only evolve to assert their own freedom of choice.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Manakins are just one small piece of a vast tapestry of avian beauty. There are over ten thousand species of birds in the world, ranging from the plainest of sparrows to the most exquisite of manakins. Because every single bird species exhibits some specific sexual ornaments that are employed in courtship communication and mate choice, it is clear that the capacity for mate choice in birds originated in an ancestor common to all birds, perhaps even in a lineage of feathered theropod dinosaurs dating all the way back to the Jurassic. From this single common ancestor, the repertoire of aesthetic traits and mating preferences has continued to coevolve and radiate into the many thousands of distinct forms of avian beauty that exist today. On different phylogenetic branches at different times, the pace of coevolutionary change has slowed or increased as new ecologies have contributed to variations in breeding systems and parental care arrangements, which in turn have given rise to tremendous variation in the nature and strength of sexual selection by mate choice. Along the way, mate preferences have continued to evolve in various avian lineages, sometimes occurring in both sexes, sometimes in females only, or, much less often, in males only, and the aesthetic repertoires of the sexes have coevolved accordingly. Each lineage and species has evolved along its own distinctive and unpredictable aesthetic trajectory. The result has been the flowering of more than ten thousand distinctive aesthetic worlds comprising over ten thousand coevolved repertoires of displays and desires. Something comparable has occurred on myriad different branches across the entire Tree of Life. From poison dart frogs and chameleons to peacock spiders and balloon flies, whenever the social opportunity and sensory/cognitive capacity for mate choice has arisen, an aesthetic evolutionary process has taken hold. This aesthetic evolutionary process has arisen hundreds or thousands of times during the history of life, even in plants that have evolved ornamental flowers of distinct shapes, sizes, colors, and fragrances to seduce animal pollinators into dispersing their gametes (in the form of pollen) to other flowers waiting to be fertilized. Throughout the living world whenever the opportunity has arisen, the subjective experiences and cognitive choices of animals have aesthetically shaped the evolution of biodiversity. The history of beauty in nature is a vast and never-ending story.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Again. If Christ atoned sufficiently for the sins of mankind, there would be no need to seek further forgiveness of one’s sins. And yet all who have their salvation at heart seek forgiveness. Therefore Christ did not take away the sins of mankind sufficiently. These and like arguments might appeal to some as indicating that the doctrine of the Catholic Faith about the Incarnation is inconsistent with the majesty and wisdom of God. CHAPTER LIV THAT IT WAS FITTING FOR GOD TO BE INCARNATENEVERTHELESS, if we consider the mystery of the Incarnation carefully and reverently, we shall discover such a depth of divine wisdom, as will surpass all human knowledge; according to the saying of the Apostle (1 Cor. 1:25), The foolishness of God is wiser than men. Hence it is that those who study this mystery with reverence discover more and more its marvellous secrets.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  She never strays from the balance between warmth and strength, which is evident when she gently suggests, “You should really do the talking.” Early in the call she introduces me to the White House staff and I follow her lead, finally at ease, picking up the tone of her can-do stoicism. I’m in awe as the folks in Washington defer to her, because it’s understood to everyone in her presence that even without a hint of condescension, Geraldine Ferraro knows more than you do. For the twenty minutes I’m questioned on the roles of the black, South Asian Indian, and Middle Eastern leaders in New York, Gerry offers assuring nods—at one point, even a wink. After the call, she rests her arms on the chair she’s sitting in across from me. “Regina,” she ponders, “I think I could use your help on something.” I perk up, pretending I’m not completely spent. “I’m working on a book about my mother. She was the daughter of an Italian immigrant who made a lot of sacrifices to provide my brother and me a chance to mainstream as Americans.” Mainstream?! I want tell her. I’d say you’ve done more than mainstreamed! Instead, I politely lean forward with my hands in my lap. “Yes, Ms. Ferraro?” “Please,” she says. “Call me Gerry.” Gerry speaks about her mother, Antonetta—dropping phrases like widow after my father’s death and worked as a bead maker in the South Bronx . . . but in my head I’m watching a movie reel of Gerry’s many extraordinary achievements: She built a strong family with her husband, John; she rose to become Queens Assistant District Attorney heading up the Sex Crimes Unit. She became a U.S. congresswoman, and in 1984 became the first woman to be nominated as a vice presidential candidate for a major party. I tune back in when she says, “This is where I need you, Regina: I plan to dedicate the last chapter to present-day female immigrants by highlighting the sacrifices they’re making to give their children a chance at opportunities that wouldn’t be available outside of America. You’re so well-versed speaking about present-day immigration. Can you help?” I nod slowly, in disbelief that Geraldine Ferraro is asking me to assist her in a book —any book!—not to mention, it’s about her mother. I float out of her office and, too dazed to hail a cab, I walk the near-mile back to City Hall in my heels. Surely, by the time I arrive there, she’ll have called and said, “Never mind, Regina! I’ve found a bright young scholar to take this on; someone with a sane mother and a normal upbringing!” When Alan meets me at the office door, indeed he says Gerry has called. “Nice work,” he tells me. “Sounds like you made quite an impression.” Instantly the work is a comfort, the familiar feeling of being busy giving me a sense of structure and security.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  These stories of Christian girls who escaped from the brothel are minor but revealing marks of a closely shared imaginative space, and they point to the central place of sex in the fictional economy of both traditions. The writings known, somewhat unhappily, under the moniker of the apocryphal Acts of the apostles, bear a telling family resemblance to contemporary Greek novelistic writing. The apocryphal Acts are the primary vehicle of early Christian romance. The apostles, the wandering heroes of early Christianity, were an endlessly fertile source of Christian legend. Close to the divine presence, the aura of the miraculous clung to them. The institutional church claimed descent from them. The canonical scriptures testified to their historicity but left ample room to the imagination. An enormous body of Christian legend, continuously reshaped, came to attach to the heroic generation. The Acts are adventure stories, but unlike the pagan novels the Acts are historical romances, set against a backdrop recognizable as the Roman Empire of the first century. As in the pagan romance, travel and serial endangerments hold together the structure, which is episodic, sensational. The apostles are miracle workers, endowed above all with the wondrous ability to resurrect the dead. They are also preachers who come to be arrested by the Roman authorities. The apocryphal Acts, like the romances but to an even greater degree, are forensic dramas. The gathering tension between apostolic missionizing and the Roman order inevitably resolves into a judicial conflict. The apostle, in the end, is martyred, so that death substitutes for marriage as the common ending of the apostle’s story. Between the travel, miracle working, and martyrdom of the apostles, sex continually juts into the foreground of the stories. Sex functions as a primary symbolic code in the world of Christian legend, but in a radically reformulated sense. Christian romances not only preach a new model of proper sexual conduct, they also discovered a way of expressing a strikingly original romance of the eternal soul, in which this world of flux and regeneration is a façade and the reunion with God, through purity and death, is the ultimate consummation. “Nothing of yours endures, but all things, right down to human conventions, are transient.”31

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Comparing the radically different display repertoires of just these two manakin species introduces the central dilemma of their aesthetic evolution. How did they evolve to be so different from each other? The true magnitude of this mystery emerges when we realize that every one of the approximately fifty-four species of manakins has evolved its own distinct repertoire of plumage ornaments, display behaviors, and acoustic signals; that is fifty-four distinctive “ideals” of beauty. Because nearly all species of the family are lekking, we can be confident that all manakins evolved from a single lekking common ancestor, which, we can infer from time-calibrated molecular phylogenies, lived about fifteen million years ago. So, why did the females of each manakin species evolve such highly diverse mating preferences—their own Darwinian standards of beauty? And how did this aesthetic radiation occur? Learning the answer requires that we explore the history of beauty through the Tree of Life. [image "A male White-bearded Manakin landing on a sapling on his display court with his throat feathers erected." file=image_rsrc3MW.jpg] A male White-bearded Manakin landing on a sapling on his display court with his throat feathers erected. — There is a reason manakins are such a good example of the evolution of beauty, and it has to do with family life. Over 95 percent of the world’s more than ten thousand bird species are raised by two attentive, hardworking parents. But not manakins. The British ornithologist and pioneering manakin man David Snow first proposed an evolutionary explanation for their distinctive breeding system in his enchanting 1976 book, The Web of Adaptation. The book is an evocative account of his and his wife’s adventures studying lekking manakins and cotingas in Trinidad, Guyana, and Costa Rica. (I read the book with great excitement when I was in high school, and my still vivid memory of it was one reason why I responded so positively to Kurt Fristrup’s suggestion to go study manakins in Suriname.) Snow hypothesized that eating a diet consisting largely of fruits, as manakins do, can rearrange an animal’s family life and unleash a cascade of effects on its social evolution. Imagine that you eat insects for a living. You are probably thinking that this would not be an easy life, and you would be right. Insects make themselves difficult to find, prickly, hard to handle, distasteful, and sometimes even toxic. Living on a diet of insects is hard work quite simply because insects do not want to be eaten. That’s why raising a family on insects is almost always a two-bird job.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  But over animals he had singular powers. I have watched his grizzled head approaching cautiously, though in friendly wise, toward a nest of adders, and before a lizard have seen his gnarled fingers execute a kind of dance. On summer nights he took me with him to study the sky from the top of a barren hill. I used to fall asleep in a furrow, tired out from counting meteors. He would stay sitting, gazing upward and turning imperceptibly with the stars. He must have known the systems of Philolaus and of Hipparchus, and that of Aristarchus of Samos which was my choice in later years, but these speculations had ceased to interest him. For him the stars were fiery points in the heavens, objects akin to the stones and slow-moving insects from which he also drew portents, constituent parts of a magic universe in which were combined the will of the gods, the influence of demons, and the lot apportioned to men. He had cast my horoscope. One night (I was eleven years old at the time) he came and shook me from my sleep and announced, with the same grumbling laconism that he would have employed to predict a good harvest to his tenants, that I should rule the world. Then, seized with mistrust, he went to fetch a brand from the small fire of root ends kept going to warm us through the colder hours, held it over my hand, and read in my solid, childish palm I know not what confirmation of lines written in the sky. The world for him was all of a piece; a hand served to confirm the stars. His news affected me less than one might think; a child is ready for anything. Later, I imagine, he forgot his own prophecy in that indifference to both present and future which is characteristic of advanced age. They found him one morning in the chestnut woods on the far edge of his domain, dead and already cold, and torn by birds of prey. Before his death he had tried to teach me his art, but with no success; my natural curiosity tended to jump at once to conclusions without burdening itself under the complicated and somewhat repellent details of his science. But the taste for certain dangerous experiments has remained with me, indeed only too much so. My father, Aelius Hadrianus Afer, was a man weighed down by his very virtues. His life was passed in the thankless duties of civil administration; his voice hardly counted in the Senate. Contrary to usual practice, his governorship of the province of Africa had not made him richer. At home, in our Spanish township of Italica, he exhausted himself in the settlement of local disputes.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Chrysostom adds a fifth miracle (Hom. lxxxviii in Matth.), saying that “the darkness in this case lasted for three hours, whereas an eclipse of the sun lasts but a short time, for it is soon over, as those know who have seen one.” Hence we are given to understand that the moon was stationary below the sun, except we prefer to say that the duration of the darkness was measured from the first moment of occultation of the sun to the moment when the sun had completely emerged from the eclipse. But, as Origen says (on Mat. 27:45), “against this the children of this world object: How is it such a phenomenal occurrence is not related by any writer, whether Greek or barbarian?” And he says that someone of the name of Phlegon “relates in his chronicles that this took place during the reign of Tiberius Caesar, but he does not say that it occurred at the full moon.” It may be, therefore, that because it was not the time for an eclipse, the various astronomers living then throughout the world were not on the look-out for one, and that they ascribed this darkness to some disturbance of the atmosphere. But in Egypt, where clouds are few on account of the tranquillity of the air, Dionysius and his companions were considerably astonished so as to make the aforesaid observations about this darkness. Reply to Objection 3: Then, above all, was there need for miraculous proof of Christ’s Godhead, when the weakness of human nature was most apparent in Him. Hence it was that at His birth a new star appeared in the heavens. Wherefore Maximus says (Serm. de Nativ. viii): “If thou disdain the manger, raise thine eyes a little and gaze on the new star in the heavens, proclaiming to the world the birth of our Lord.” But in His Passion yet greater weakness appeared in His manhood. Therefore there was need for yet greater miracles in the greater lights of the world. And, as Chrysostom says (Hom. lxxxviii in Matth.): “This is the sign which He promised to them who sought for one saying: ‘An evil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign; and a sign shall not be given it, but the sign of Jonas the prophet,’ referring to His Cross . . . and Resurrection . . . For it was much more wonderful that this should happen when He was crucified than when He was walking on earth.”

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  She sub- jects the protagonists to fearsome travails, but she rescues them too. Th is uncanny mixture of whim and providence, of fl ux and order, is within the mainstream of religious currents in the high empire. Th e Fortune of the novels is no mere literary ornamentation. She is the same awesome divinity who was worshipped, in cult, across the Mediterranean, like never before in the Roman Empire— a syncretistic, cosmological goddess in a syncretistic, cosmological age. Th e romances were, like the temples where Fortune was worshipped, monuments built in awe of her supervenient power over hu- man aff airs.  Th e Fortune who presides over the romances is a literary spirit. Over and over again, Fortune is said to be a dramatist. One character tells Chareas, “Fortune loves invention, and you have been cast in an unhappy drama.” Not just the authors of romance, but also the characters are aware that their lives have the shape of literature. Clitophon launches on his story with the refl ection, “I was nineteen years of age when Fortune began her drama.” Later he laments yet another bad turn. “Fortune as usual has set upon me and contrived a new drama.” In Th e Ethiopian Tale the characters experience the “ceaseless turning of the human lot, full of twists.” In despair Th eagenes wonders if he and Charicleia should not just submit to the “destiny that everywhere chased” them by surrendering. Th e gods’ vendetta was “making us into playthings, as though our aff airs were a drama on a stage.” Chari- cleia, by contrast, counsels re sis tance. In the fi nal scenes, the king and his people alike marvel at the “theatrics of Fortune.” Th e literary pretensions of Fortune are part of the high- pitched aesthetic self- awareness of the ro- mances. But given the real place of Fortune in the imperial pantheon, it would be misleading to dismiss these comparisons as empty authorial self- aggrandizement.  ROMANCE IN THE LATE CLASSICAL WORLD  Th e canny allusions to life as literature manifest themselves in a reveal- ing meta phor that recurs across the romances. When Anthia is enslaved in the brothel, she laments her fate, but she steels her resolve and decides to fi nd “some contrivance” for protecting her chastity: the feigned fi t of epi- lepsy. After she survives and is re united with her lover, she attributes her chastity to the fact that she contrived “every device” for the protection of virtue. Similarly, in Th e Ethiopian Tale, the protagonist can rely, in the most hopeless of circumstances, on “some contrivance” that will allow escape.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  In other words, in Origin, Darwin saw sexual selection as simply the handmaiden of natural selection, another means of guaranteeing the perpetuation of the most vigorous and best-adapted mates. This view still prevails today. By the time he wrote Descent, however, Darwin had embraced a much broader concept of sexual selection that may have nothing to do with a potential mate’s being more vigorous or better adapted per se, but only with being aesthetically appealing, as he stated clearly for the mesmerizing example of the Argus Pheasant: “The case of the male Argus pheasant is eminently interesting, because it affords good evidence that the most refined beauty may serve as a sexual charm, and for no other purpose [emphasis added].” Moreover, in Descent, Darwin viewed sexual selection and natural selection as two distinct and frequently independent evolutionary mechanisms. Thus, the concept of two distinct but potentially interacting and even conflicting sources of selection is a fundamental and vital component of an authentically Darwinian vision of evolutionary biology. As we will see, however, this view has been rejected by most modern evolutionary biologists in favor of Darwin’s earlier view of sexual selection as just another variant on natural selection. Another distinctive feature of Darwin’s theory of mate choice was that it was coevolutionary. Darwin hypothesized that the specific display traits and the “standards of beauty” used to select a mate evolved together, mutually influencing and reinforcing each other—as demonstrated again by the Argus Pheasant: The male Argus Pheasant acquired his beauty gradually through the preference of the females during many generations for the more highly ornamented males; the aesthetic capacity of females advanced through exercise or habit just as our own taste is gradually improved. Here, Darwin envisions an evolutionary process in which each species coevolves its own, unique, cognitive “standards of beauty” in concert with the elaboration of the display traits that meet those standards. According to this hypothesis, behind every biological ornament is an equally elaborate, coevolved cognitive preference that has driven, shaped, and been shaped by that ornament’s evolution. By modern scientific criteria, Darwin’s description of the coevolutionary process in the Argus Pheasant is rather hazy, but it is no less substantive than his explanations of the mechanism of natural selection, which are viewed today as being brilliantly prescient, despite his ignorance of genetics. — Within Darwin’s argument for mate choice in Descent was another revolutionary idea: that animals are not merely subject to the extrinsic forces of ecological competition, predation, climate, geography, and so on that create natural selection. Rather, animals can play a distinct and vital role in their own evolution through their sexual and social choices. Whenever the opportunity evolves to enact sexual preferences through mate choice, a new and distinctively aesthetic evolutionary phenomenon occurs. Whether it occurs within a shrimp or a swan, a moth or a human, individual organisms wield the potential to evolve arbitrary and useless beauty completely independent of (and sometimes in opposition to) the forces of natural selection.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  How could this have happened? Apparently, in selecting on male wing song production capacity through mate choice, female Club-winged Manakins have evolutionarily transformed both the male’s wing morphology and their own. Again, we do not yet have physiological evidence that these morphological changes affect the female’s flight capacity or energetics. However, the best explanation of why these wing bones are so invariant across all of the rest of birds is that natural selection has maintained their highly functional, tubular, columnar design to achieve optimal flight function and capacity. In other words, the morphological consistency in wing bone design among birds is strong evidence that other variations in wing bone shape are functionally inferior and costly to survival and fecundity. Although female Club-wings will never use their wings to sing a song, they appear to incur at least some of the functional costs of the extraordinary wing bone changes necessary for males to make these attractive songs. By not completely ossifying these bones, as males do, and maintaining a hollow space in the center, female Club-wings appear to avoid at least some of the costs of growing extreme ulnas that males incur. The observation that male Club-wings are likely made worse by the action of female mate choice—less functional, capable, and efficient—could still be rationalized as providing honest information about mate quality. But the observation that female Club-wings have also likely made themselves less functional, capable, and efficient at flight as a consequence of their mating preferences for exotic male wing songs can only be described as decadent. Interestingly, females will not be harming their own survival and fecundity by preferring males that make attractive songs with extreme wing bones. Rather, females with preferences for males with maladaptive wing bones will only pay an indirect, genetic cost for their preferences, because their daughters may inherit more awkward wing bones, which will interfere with their daughters’ survival and fecundity. However, this indirect genetic cost to mate choice can be outweighed by a simultaneous indirect, genetic benefit of having sexually attractive male offspring. Because the maladaptive costs of aesthetically extreme mate choices are deferred by each generation of choosers, the whole population can ease further and further into decadence and dysfunction generation by generation. The population will not be saved from decadence by natural selection, because the maladaptive functional costs are indirect and will be more than balanced by the advantages of having beautiful, sexually attractive offspring. Nevertheless, the entire population becomes increasingly maladapted because the fit between the organisms and the environment gets worse and worse over time. The survival and fecundity of all individuals—both males and females—suffers.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  It could be proved, if need were, that these four men had plotted my death; it was to their interest, in any case, to do so. Every transition from one reign to another involved its operations of mopping up; he had taken this task upon himself in order to leave my hands clean. If public opinion demanded a victim, nothing was simpler than to deprive him of his post of Praetorian prefect. He had envisaged such a measure; he was advising me to take it. And if more were needed to conciliate the Senate, he would approve my going as far as relegation to the provinces, or exile. Attianus had been the guardian from whom money could be wheedled, the counselor of my difficult days, the faithful agent; but this was the first time that I had ever looked attentively at that face with its carefully shaven jowls, at those crippled hands tranquilly clasped over the handle of his ebony cane. I knew well enough the different elements of his life as a prosperous citizen: his wife, whom he loved, and whose health was frail; his married daughters and their children, for whom he was modest but tenacious in his ambitions, as he had been for himself; his love of choice dishes; his decided taste for Greek cameos and for young dancing girls. He had given me precedence over all these things: for thirty years his first care had been to protect me, and next to serve me. To me, who had not yet given first place to anything except to ideas or projects, or at the most to a future image of myself, this simple devotion of man to man seemed prodigious and unfathomable. No one is worthy of it, and I am still unable to account for it. I followed his counsel: he lost his post. His faint smile showed me that he expected to be taken at his word. He knew well that no untimely solicitude toward an old friend would ever keep me from adopting the more prudent course; this subtle politician would not have wished me otherwise. Let us not exaggerate the extent of his disgrace: after some months of eclipse, I succeeded in having him admitted to the Senate. It was the greatest honor that I could offer to this man of equestrian rank. He lived to enjoy the easy old age of a wealthy Roman knight, much sought after for his perfect knowledge of families and public affairs; I have often been his guest at his villa in the Alban Hills.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  HILARY. Or; By the lilies are to be understood the eminences of the heavenly Angels, to whom a surpassing radiance of whiteness is communicated by God. They toil not, neither do they spin, because the angelic powers received in the very first allotment of their existence such a nature, that as they were made so they should ever continue to be; and when in the resurrection men shall be like unto Angels, He would have them look for a covering of angelic glory by this example of angelic excellence. PSEUDO-CHRYSOSTOM. If God then thus provides for the flowers of the earth which only spring up, that they may be seen and die, shall He overlook men whom He has created not to be seen for a time, but that they should be for ever? JEROME. To-morrow in Scripture is put for time future in general. Jacob says, So shall my righteousness answer for me to-morrow. (Gen. 30:33.) And in the phantasm of Samuel, the Pythoness says to Saul, To-morrow shalt thou be with me. 1 Sam. 28:19.) GLOSS. Some copies have into the fire, or, into an heap, which has the appearance of an oven. CHRYSOSTOM. He calls them no more lilies, but the grass of the field, to shew their small worth; and adds moreover another cause of their small value; which to-day is. And He said not, and to-morrow is not, but what is yet greater fall, is cast into the oven. In that He says How much more you, is implicitly conveyed the dignity of the human race, as though He had said, You to whom He has given a soul, for whom He has contrived a body, to whom He has sent Prophets and gave His Only-begotten Son. GLOSS. He says, of little faith, for that faith is little which is not sure of even the least things. HILARY. Or, under the signification of grass the Gentiles are pointed to. If then an eternal existence is only therefore granted to the Gentiles, that they may soon be handed over to the judgment fires; how impious it is that the saints should doubt of attaining to eternal glory, when the wicked have eternity bestowed on them for their punishment.