EXPRESSIONS OF BEAUTY IN EVOLUTION

2009/01/11

RECALLING DARWIN

In England this year will be celebrated the bicentenary of the death of Charles Robert Darwin, the scientist who was described as "one of the most prominent figures of the English national history".
We point out that there was a controversy with supporters of Alfred Russel Wallace, evolutionary author, with the suspicion that Darwin has copied Wallace's theory of evolution.
In the U.S., the Wall Street Journal and then the Sunday Times announced this accusation.
The Wallace Foundation of Indonesia argues that "The silence about Wallace is the result of the mess from Darwin."
In fact, we find that Darwin had more commitment than imagination, in fact in his book "Origins of Man" (original title: "The Descent of Man"), describing the "inferior savages" he says: "judging by the horrendous ornaments and the equally horrendous music, admired by the most between savages, it might be argued that their aesthetic power is not so much developed as in some animals, for example, in birds".
Let us remember that customs and art of the peoples of these small primitive civilizations have given great inspiration to artists such as Paul Gaughin, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and others, and that their works of art are known in the museums of ethnologic art of every modern nation for their beauty.

2009/01/08

REVIEW BY PROF. ALFRED DE GRAZIA

A wonderful treatise! Un vero capolavoro!

The concept: Correlating the evolution of the world with the evolution of beauty! And the marriage of functionalism and beauty. And then fitting mankind into the world as the copier and extensor of all that beauty and function.

And beautifully done! I began to read it immediately. I will continue until I have finished it. But a book like this is never merely read once. It is read, then it becomes a book of reference and inspiration, a source of many hypotheses about the origins and multiplication of art media and forms.

You suggest a magnificent competition: the competition between man and nature in producing beauty. Man devours as many of the million forms and colors that nature has produced as he can; then he reproduces them. Then he can even go beyond them, and as homo sapiens schizotypus he can vary all the characteristics of all the species. He might vary the myriad artistic product of nature infinitely and rapidly if it were not for the fact that he is also at the same time restrained by the compulsive, obsessive, habit-making components of his character. Who will win the eternal game of artistry, nature or man? There seems to be no end to the variety that both man and nature can manufacture.

And you know, it is not only the marvellous beauties of nature, for you could write another volume on the mechanics of nature and those of man, where the same principles of the competition hold. Actually you do, I notice, pay attention to the ingenious pragmatism that accompanies the beauty. You could hypothesize that all the machines of the world are premeditated by nature.

The fact that you adopt the oldest possible ages of conventional science for teling your story does not bother me much. I simply take my short chronology of a few million years and translate your big numbers into little numbers. It works well. Your Nature works slowly to invent its beauties; my Nature works fast. So, too, with mankind.

Prof.Alfred de Grazia

Political scientist, author, consultant, and editor.

He has been professor of Social Theory at the University of Chicago, Minnesota, Brown University,

Stanford University, New York University and Università degli Studi di Bergamo (Italy).

He wrote Books in Political and Social Science.

2009/01/06

DISTINCTION BETWEEN ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION

A living being or a manmade, when evolves, before extinction gives rise to another living being, or to a new manmade.
The processing time may be long or short.
Origin and evolution are closely linked, since one could not exist without other.
When we look at a living being or a manmade, we cannot see origin or evolution.
Only through scientific research can be established or assumed origin and evolution.
It is always the mind of living beings, and the human mind for his products, to generate transit from origin to evolution.

2009/01/02

EVOLUTION EXPRESSIONS OF BEAUTY

Phylogenesis of Beauty by Pietro Gaietto is a very important book on the science of Evolution. For the first time the WAYS of evolution of the living beings are described through a wide photographic documentation. It's interesting to notice that the great evoluzionist authors of the ninenteenth century, Lamarck and Darwin, have delved exclusively with the CAUSES of evolution, which now are part of our scientific heritage. The book presents an analysis of the beauty of forms, with a scientific, and not an aesthetic, approach. The artifacts of animals and manmade objects are covered, including art, and the shapes of the inorganic world which preceded living beings and then evolved in parallel with them.