Many years ago, evolutionary psychologist Nick Humphrey met a family in Turkey with eight children who were unable to walk upright. Due to a genetic disease, they could only get around on all fours. He and his colleagues had traveled to Turkey to study the family and to film them, as an extraordinary example of human development.
The children were young adults by the time Humphrey met them and had difficult lives. The other villagers scorned them, and would throw stones at them and tease them. But they seemed to love each other deeply and to enjoy their daily routines. The parents had been told by the local imam that the kids’ disabilities were, in fact, a gift from Allah, a test.
Read more: “The Harrowing and the Beautiful”
The family lived 30 miles from the seaside in the southwest part of Turkey, but had never been to the beach. So Humphrey and his colleagues took them on an excursion. The kids took a kind of delight in their first experience with the ocean that Humphrey says is difficult to describe. Their mother sat on the sand in her long dress, watching her children running on all fours into the water. She gazed at the waves breaking and the sky and the distant horizon, and she said, “I never knew Allah had made such a beautiful world.”
This is where Humphrey’s new book, Why is the World so Beautiful: Our Minds in Search of Nature’s Rhymes, begins. The book is a fascinating exploration of the role that beauty plays in human psychology and evolution. “We can’t but help see beauty when we find it, no matter how poor our circumstances,” he told me when we spoke this week. “We will then start asking questions about who made it for us.”
I spoke with Humphrey about where we find beauty in the world, what rhyme has to do with it, and why the Japanese language sounds so beautiful. We also talked about monkey aesthetics and how the rise of AI might influence how we understand beauty.
You write in the introduction that you had wanted to read a book called Why Is the World So Beautiful for many years. Why?
We all share it. The fact of beauty is such an important part of our lives—the beauty of nature as well as the beauty of paintings and music. And yet we have very little explanation of it from an evolutionary point of view.
By trade, I’m an evolutionary psychologist. I want to understand why our minds have evolved to have the needs and the characters that they do. I started working on this a long time ago. Some 50 years ago, just having finished my PhD, I thought I’d move on to do something rather different. I’d been working on the brains of monkeys and their visual systems, and I thought, “I’ll give that a rest and try and do some research on what monkeys would like to do if they had the choice rather than being submitted to my experiments.”
I set out to work on monkey aesthetics. I thought that would unlock the key to why humans like beauty. It wasn’t a huge success. I put monkeys in a situation where they could switch between pictures on a screen or between different sounds, for example. And then, I started giving them the obvious things. I played Bach and showed them paintings by Matisse. And it was a complete failure. The monkeys didn’t give a toss for these examples of human art. The things that they did mind about very strongly were colors, just plain fields of colored light, for example, got them quite worked up.
They would love blue light. Red got them very obsessed and they would do anything to escape it. I found the monkeys showed preferences. They looked at pictures of other monkeys. They enjoyed that. They liked Mickey Mouse films, provided they were played in the right direction, interestingly enough. They didn’t like them going backwards. But I didn’t find much evidence of what we might call an aesthetic sense in monkeys.
This was back in 1970. I wrote a long essay about the origins of beauty, and then I moved on to some other things. But it’s always been at the back of my mind. And I’ve been working on the nature of consciousness and, and intelligence since then, really nonstop.
I thought, if I don’t write this book now about beauty, I never will.
The argument you make in the book is that what we call beauty is based in rhyme, which is an idea you take from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Can you tell me more about this idea?
It’s not obvious that a book about beauty would be a book about rhyme. Way back when I first started working on this topic, I was researching what had been written on it. And I came across this astonishing piece of work by Hopkins, the poet. He’d written an essay for his tutor at Oxford when he was a student there at the age of 20. It ran to 40,000 words and it was called “On the Origins of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue.” And it just bowled me over. It’s an extraordinary piece of work. I think everybody should read it. I quote from it quite widely in the book.
And Hopkins sets this essay in the context of a discussion between a professor and a student in a college garden. He takes examples from the garden. He reaches for a bunch of chestnut leaves, for example. And he says, “Well, look at this. What’s going on here? Why do we find this beautiful? It’s because we’re exposed to intriguing, teasing examples of things which are alike but different.” Things, he says, which rhyme, which belong to the same category, but are different examples of it. He starts with flowers and then he goes on to poetry. He says that ideas rhyme. People can rhyme with each other and the way they behave and so on. He’s very persuasive.
I was taken aback by this idea. I suddenly began to realize that things I’d noticed and thought of as beautiful out there in the world, rainbows cutting across the sky and ideas I’d come across in books: They all showed the same characteristic. There was always rhyme at the bottom of them.
And in the book I run through a gallery of rhyme, because I want to show just how widespread this is, how things which you wouldn’t have thought of being in the same category actually do show the characteristic of balanced symmetry, ranging from rap by Eminem, to theories in physics and paintings by great artists and even football, the beautiful game as it has been called in this country.
And then, I sit there and say, “Well, what’s going on here? Why should we like these? Why should we like rhyme?” Here’s a simple example: The cat sat on the mat. We all know that it kind of works for us. “The cat sat on the sofa,” doesn’t work for us. Why? It’s certainly not obvious, and no one has written about it. When I looked into the scientific philosophical literature, nobody talks about rhyme or at least why we should like it.
One argument that you make in the book is that we are drawn to rhyme and order in nature because they suggest a benevolent creator, a good divine force. But rhyme has also been associated with evil or dark forces, sin, and entrapment. For example, in early Islam, certain oracles known as kahins would deliver their prophecies in rhyme, which were associated with evil spirits. And in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, rhyme is associated with Satan, sin, and the fall. Milton himself considered rhyme deceitful, restrictive, even barbarous. How do you square this history with your argument?
It’s true that rhyme is associated with magic. Partly because we don’t have an explanation of rhyme, it catches our attention. It alerts us. We think something’s going on there and we don’t really understand it. One thing people have said or imagined is that, of course, where there’s rhyme, there is some kind of elemental force, demonic or divine.
But somebody’s trying to tell us something. The same idea is taken up when people have written about coincidences, which are a kind of rhyme, two things that belong together because they share some property, although otherwise we wouldn’t see what can connect them. We tend to think they can indicate the work of the devil, or the work of God, or the fact that there are truths out there in nature which we haven’t noticed before.
They set us to work thinking. Whenever we come across rhyme, we don’t just take it for granted. We want to know why things rhyme. And the answer I give is because that’s how we find out about the world we live in.
How does rhyme help us learn about the world we live in?
The world we live in is full of rhymes. Rhyme is in nature’s DNA. We live in a world that contains such a variety of objects that fall into particular categories, which contrast to other categories. When things out there in nature rhyme, it’s because they belong to different kinds of objects.
Now, why does the world contain so many kinds of objects? It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? We live in a very extraordinary place on Earth, because life evolved here. And because life evolved here, organisms, plants, animals and so on, developed into species, all of which gave rise to subspecies and individuals. And then along came humans, and humans started making a world which rhymes at a whole different level because we create artifacts, tables, chairs, castles, motor cars, bicycles.
Imagine that you’re a little human baby entering this world. It’s an awful lot of work to discover what’s out there. How do you begin? The first stage of an infant’s cognitive development is in fact learning the names of things. Learning what belongs together and what doesn’t.
Here’s the beginning of a structure in this world. It’s a simple heuristic principle, if I can use that term, a rule of thumb. It just works awfully well. Now, my point is that it’s not just that it works well, but because it works well, we’ve evolved to take pleasure in seeing rhymes of that kind.
You write that rhyme in language can force creativity because it leads to unexpected pairings of words and therefore ideas. And that this can explain why so many of us think in sentences rather than ideas or pictures. Can you tell me more about this hypothesis?
It’s a sort of a sideline in the book, but I draw attention to the fact that it’s rather peculiar that we think in words all the time. Linguists have assumed that the way the mind and language work with each other is that we turn thoughts into words. And then words that we speak or write down, the reader or the listener reads the words and turns them back into thoughts. That’s the way we communicate through language. But why, when we’re thinking to ourselves, when we’re talking to ourselves, do we not go directly from one thought to another? Why do we think in actual words? We don’t actually all do it. There’s quite a lot of individual differences, but most of us do employ language to think things through.
What I suggest is that it’s because it produces accidental outcomes, which we’d never have expected. Once you put things into words, they begin to have acoustic rhymes, and they have these rhymes even when we hear them in our heads. And so language is intrinsically poetical.
And what poetry does is continually to tease us with possible relationships which we may or may not follow through. Poets are very well aware of their skill in exploiting that. But every time we use language, we’re in the realm of poetry and, therefore, thinking in language and words is actually hugely creative. It opens up possibilities, alerts us to things which we otherwise just wouldn’t have noticed.
I also, probably controversially, draw attention to the fact that different human languages have different propensities in that direction. Some languages have much more rhyme than others.
The most rhyming languages of all are languages like Japanese. It’s been said it’s almost impossible to say anything in Japanese without having rhymes present. Romance languages like French or Italian, for example, and Spanish do the same. English is peculiar. English has rather fewer rhymes than those other languages because we have more syllables in English than any other language does. That means that when rhymes do happen in English, they’re more surprising. That’s why English has proved such an astonishingly creative language for writing poetry. I don’t want to be a chauvinist about English though.
But if rhyme is the underlying principle in all things that are beautiful, where does surprise come in? Wouldn’t a language like Japanese that simply has more potential for rhyme then by default be more beautiful?
I think it is in a sense. It’s pretty to hear it spoken. Even when we don’t understand it, we can like hearing Japanese or Italian spoken, less so German or English. But for the speakers themselves, when the rhymes occur, they actually are much more interesting. Hopkins says that all beauty may be called rhyme. It actually doesn’t mean that every rhyme is in itself beautiful, but things which are beautiful almost always involve rhymes. And it’s the beautiful rhymes that alert us and introduce us to new ways of seeing things.
I liked your definition of rhyme: “likeness tempered with difference.” It struck me intuitively as a true statement about what is beautiful in some way. But on the other hand, it also casts a really wide net. That phrase, “likeness tempered with difference,” could be used to describe almost anything. How do we know it’s not just a linguistic move, a rebranding, but is actually something more solid?
We can do experimental work where we see what kinds of things interest humans or, for that matter, animals. If we present them with rhyming examples, do they take an interest in them, and if we present them with things that don’t rhyme, can they be bothered? I give some examples of some of my own later work with monkeys. I could get monkeys to begin to recognize rhymes that they hadn’t noticed before.
People can become so obsessed with particular corners of the world, where they look for rhyming examples, that it can take over their lives. They spend all their time collecting new postage stamps or butterflies or spotting airplanes or whatever it may be and then they neglect the things which really matter.
That aspect of human behavior, collecting, is very surprising and interesting. Humans can collect almost anything. Sigmund Freud was an absolute avid collector of little statuettes, and he lined them all up on his desk and compared them and loved just looking at them, gazing at them.
What he’s doing there is very much in a way what we do when we listen to music or rap or whatever it may be. It’s an example of a kind of super stimulus. We’re presented with the possibility of finding connections now and appreciating them, but it can take over and become something that isn’t adaptive in the evolutionary sense. But those are side issues in a way. What I want to try and do in this book is to just establish the general principle and ask how it connects to the way our minds are designed.
But all of this is kind of at a cognitive level, meaning how we understand and connect and make decisions and so on. Beauty is more than just a cognitive event in our minds. Beauty moves us in ways which seem to imply there’s something more to it.
Interestingly, in the essay in which Hopkins has this conversation between this professor and the student, the student objects at some point and he says, “Yeah, professor, I get that. I see you’re obviously right about all this. But isn’t there something more to it? It seems awfully mathematical, your explanation.” He was right. Beauty means more than that.
The second part of the book is about where a different level of emotion creeps in here. For that, I go back to an old idea, which is that the beauty of manmade art has to do with feeling a connection to the creator, to the artist. Again and again, this has been stressed by art critics: It’s only when we can channel the emotion of the painter or the musician or the sculptor, or whoever it may be, that we can feel what they were feeling when they created it, that we really get to understand and to appreciate and to be moved by beauty. It’s a snobbish approach to beauty because it means that only when we have that kind of insight, we really know what we’re talking about. It’s too sophisticated.
Can you tell me what you mean when you say it’s too sophisticated?
The idea that we have to understand and have some direct knowledge of who made the work of art in order to find it beautiful. Someone like Clive Bell, a very important art critic, insisted that only when there’s what he called “significant form” in a work of art, in a painting, when we can read what emotion the artist was trying to communicate, do we really find it beautiful. And that forces him to a rather surprising conclusion. He says, rhetorically, “Well, who has ever felt the same kind of emotion for a forest canopy or for a sunset that I feel for a beautiful painting or for a cathedral.” Well, the answer is, “I have,” and I think an awful lot of people have.
But also how would he know, and how would he measure that?
Yes, but also we know as a matter of fact that we can be very moved by beauty in nature. The problem for Bell is that there isn’t an artist there. If feeling a sense of beauty requires channeling the emotion of the artist, what’s going on when we look at a rainbow? Well, there is an answer, which is that actually there is an artist, or at least in our imagination, there is always an artist present wherever we find beauty or rhyming beauty or these kinds of designs in nature. We can’t help but read into it some kind of artistic creator, somebody who made it for us. They’ve done it in a way which is meant to communicate and to get it right.
Can animals appreciate beauty?
They can appreciate rhyme for sure, and they can be attracted to it. But I don’t think animals have an aesthetic emotion of the kind which we’re talking about. I just don’t believe my dog cares for sunsets.
Isn’t that putting a human frame on it? Maybe there’s a different kind of beauty animals can appreciate.
He doesn’t go into raptures looking at a mountain range. My dog doesn’t go for walks in order to be exposed to the kinds of patterns which seem to be central to human appreciation of nature. Lots of things lead my dog to enjoy being in nature, but I don’t think he feels aesthetic emotion. And I think that’s because dogs or monkeys or bumblebees for that matter don’t think about who made it. The bee must know about the patterns and which flowers belong together and which ones are likely to have the pollen, but the bee never asks, “Why is it there? Who made this for me? Aren’t I lucky?” I think that’s a unique human emotion.
If the foundation of beauty is rhyme, why is the sense of a creator required?
That is a different question. We are attracted to particular patterns because it does us good to be in their presence. That’s how we learn about how the world is put together. And it’s a crucial thing in the development of our minds and our knowledge, what we call our world model. We’re attracted to patterns for the same kind of reasons as we’re attracted to food. We need rhyme to nourish our minds in the same way we need food to nourish our bodies. But we don’t find food beautiful in the same way. And we wouldn’t find rhyme beautiful in the same way if that was all there was to it.
I think beauty strikes us because we can’t help but think, why is this here? Who made it? And it brings me straight back to the argument I began the book with, which is the idea of God as the divine artist lying behind the beauties of nature. I think this lies underneath almost everybody’s reaction to the world they live in. They don’t necessarily need to call it God. I’m a complete atheist. But nonetheless, I still think, “Gosh, somebody got that right.”
Are you familiar with the evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner, who writes about how beautiful ideas and works in art and science, even species, can remain kind of dormant? He calls them “sleeping beauties,” and they only emerge or catch on when their time is right. David Byrne also recently wrote a book about this subject. He offers numerous examples, including Moby Dick, continental drift, all these different ideas or works that only begin to thrive or enter collective memory long after they’re created. What do you make of this idea?
I think that’s right. We have to wait for new discoveries because we need to scaffold them. We need to have other ideas preceding them, other examples, whether it’s in science or in art. And that’s why art continually evolves, because it builds on what went before. When new forms of art are introduced, they’re often rather scary because we can’t easily make sense of them. We can’t see what we’re meant to be looking for. We don’t understand what the artist was trying to say. It’s notorious that new forms of modern art have been met with outrage by critics and audiences.
Even a great critic like Gertrude Stein describes what happened when she first went to galleries exhibiting cubist art. She says, I looked and I looked again and I still couldn’t make it out. Of course, she went on to become a great modernist herself. She had learned a new way of seeing and a new way of categorizing the things that she was looking at. And so the world began to open up and that’s continually happening. We reeducate our minds so that we ask new questions and we find new levels of rhyme. That’s the reason to be optimistic, not only about of finding new forms of beauty in manmade, human forms of art, but also finding more beauty in the physical world because we learn more and more about it.
It may sound odd to say it, but I think there’s much more beauty in our world than there is in the world of classical Greece, for example, because we know so much more about it. We know what questions to ask. We begin to ask about things which Aristotle and Plato just wouldn’t have noticed. We’re so lucky to have those opportunities.
So the rhyming we appreciate is not intrinsic to an object or a phenomenon or a work of art, it’s contingent and localized or specific to a particular culture.
Yeah, I think it’s specific to a culture. We can learn to see. We come to understand music, for example, which we didn’t appreciate first hearing. This can also happen in the appreciation of natural phenomena. The more we know, the more questions we ask, the more we find.
Interestingly enough, this idea that the world is continually opening up in that way to us is there in the writings of a wonderful Scottish philosopher called Thomas Reid. He thought that beauty had been created by God. He didn’t have this understanding of natural selection and even evolution. But he says that among other things, God has designed us so that we continually increase our understanding. And through that, we can find rhymes that he put out there for us to discover, but that we may need to be educated in order to see how they work. The world is becoming every day a more extraordinary place for us to explore.
Do you think the rise of AI will change the way we experience beauty?
I think AI can, in principle, create works of art. It can find new patterns and new designs, which we haven’t even imagined in the past. The danger, of course, is that if it can do that so well, that the role of the human artist may, in a sense, be diminished. And that’s something we do have to take seriously. But we may have to come back to what I think is actually an old and ancient part of human understanding and appreciation of beauty. It’s the creation of beauty that really matters to us. It’s the work of creation. It’s watching an artist in that moment, which matters as much as anything. The more we are involved in creation, the more aesthetic pleasure we will have.
It’s an old idea because I think archeologists have found evidence of it, but they haven’t quite known what they were finding. If you go back to the paleolithic caves in Europe, what surprised archeologists is that they’re full of works of art on the floor: shell beads, collections of things that have been very finely worked, hand axes of the most extraordinary beauty, symmetry and balance, sometimes so large, they couldn’t possibly have been used. They were made as demonstrations. They were made because somebody enjoyed making them and other people enjoyed seeing them being made. And then apparently, they were abandoned. Nobody put them on a table. In the future perhaps, what we value most and what we should be training people to do, is to appreciate the process of creation. 
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