It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Baby manta rays hunker down close to coasts before facing the open ocean’s dangers
Coastal areas offer young manta rays shelter and food before they travel open ocean as grown-ups, shows first study tracking manta ray movement in Central America
Giant manta rays can grow up to nine meters long with a disc size of seven meters across and weigh up to 2,000 kg. This size leaves them with very few natural enemies once they reach adulthood at around eight to ten years old. But giant manta ray babies, called pups, cannot rely on their size to protect them from predators that live in the open ocean, including several species of shark and orcas. Instead, the first study to focus on giant manta ray movement in Central America has shown that pups stay in safe coastal areas where food is available until they’ve grown large enough to face the dangers of the high seas.
“We show that manta rays’ lifestyle isn’t a one-size-fits-all behavior. Giant manta rays in Central America undergo a dramatic shift in space use as they mature,” said lead author of the Frontiers in Fish Science study, Jeffry Madrigal-Mesén, a researcher and project leader of Mantas Costa Rica. “Juveniles remained strictly within shallow nearshore waters that serve as coastal refuges, but most of the tracked adults executed long-distance transboundary migrations along the continental shelf break into Central America.”
Coast to sea
The team used a variety of methods for tracking and identifying mantas at five locations between 2018 and 2025. Acoustic telemetry, which uses underwater sound pulses, let them monitor fine-scale movement of 59 individuals across coastal aggregation spots like cleaning stations. Satellite telemetry, where transmitters track movement and behavior from a distance, was used to track large-scale movements of 12 individuals. Photo ID was used to identify individual manta rays.
“If we hadn’t used all three technologies together, we simply wouldn’t have been able to piece this puzzle together,” explained Madrigal-Mesén. “Combining these tools turned fragmented data into a unified, undeniable story.”
The combined dataset of more than 12,000 detections showed that young mantas – those with disc widths of around three meters or less – stick to shallow coastal refuges. These coastal waters provide pups with a safe place that doesn’t overlap with predators’ hunting grounds. There they can also find plenty of food and hiding spots, and rely on essential services provided by reefs, such as cleaning.
“Mature adults can rely on their massive body size and their ability to dive deep to evade threats. But juveniles don't have that luxury,” said Madrigal-Mesén. “What is truly amazing is seeing how strictly young manta rays stick to coastal waters as long-term refuges. We see the same individuals more often than once a year. In fact, just recently, they were sighted again at the exact same tagging location,” continued Madrigal-Mesén. “It is always a joy to see them again – they have truly become a part of the family.”
In contrast to the coast-loving pups, nine mature mantas went on expansive migrations along the continental shelf break. The movement of one manta ray, nicknamed Mickey Mouse because of a spot pattern on his belly, also suggested that mantas continue to display high site-fidelity once grown-up. Unusually approachable, Mickey Mouse allowed scientists to perform tagging multiple times over several years, which provided a continuous dataset. In 2020, he logged 462 acoustic detections at the coastal hub El Secreto. Three years later he returned to the same shelf and stayed there for 38 days.
“Nearshore cleaning stations transcend basic hygienic function; they act as primary social hubs where courtship and reproductive interactions take place,” explained Madrigal-Mesén. “Returning to a predictable coastal depot allows mature rays to prioritize social and cleaning needs before undertaking large-scale regional migrations.”
Protected manta highways
Adults, however, face different dangers when they leave coastal regions — which are often protected marine reserves — for the open ocean.
“As soon as these rays move beyond isolated marine reserves, their legal protection drops to zero. This exposes them to unselective industrial fisheries and vessel strikes as they navigate unprotected international corridors,” said Madrigal-Mesén.
This shows that marine protected areas alone are not enough to protect highly mobile species moving across Central America, the authors say. What is needed are multi-national ‘conservation swimways’ that link domestic juvenile coastal refuges with adult migratory corridors.
“This study opens a new chapter for manta ray research in Central America,” Madrigal-Mesén concluded. “We hope it sparks fresh enthusiasm and encourages future collaborators to join us in executing the new ideas and research projects we have planned for the conservation of this species.”
Bridging coastal aggregation hubs and oceanic sanctuaries: The first multi-scale telemetry baseline for the giant manta ray (Mobula birostris) in Central America
Article Publication Date
22-Oct-2026
Puntitos, one of the immature mantas the scientists followed. Credit: Jeffry Madrigal.
Immature manta ray equipped with satellite tag.
Manta ray in close proximity to a diver.
Credit
Jeffry Madrigal
£3.4M Manchester-led project to tackle growing threat of mosquito-borne epidemics
Manchester researchers will lead a £3.4m international project to tackle the growing threat of mosquito-borne viral epidemics in Eastern Africa.
Funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the UK Government's Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), ‘TACKLING MBU’ will investigate how changes including urbanisation, transport networks and forest loss are influencing mosquitoes, viruses and mosquito-borne viral disease risk.
Researchers will combine data on mosquitoes, viruses, people and the environment to help identify potential disease hotspots and improve outbreak prevention.
The project will assemble an international team with diverse expertise, from across the UK, Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi.
Mosquito-borne diseases such as chikungunya, Zika and dengue are becoming increasingly epidemic in Eastern Africa, raising concerns about their potential to cause future outbreaks both within the region and further afield.
Now, researchers at The University of Manchester will lead an investigation into what is driving that change and how this knowledge could help countries better predict, prevent and control future epidemics.
The £3.4m ‘TACKLING MBU: Tackling the Rise of Mosquito-Borne Viral Epidemics in Eastern Africa’ project will see Manchester assemble researchers from the UK, Tanzania, Kenya and Malawi, combining expertise ranging from mosquito ecology and virology to public health, social science, genetics, mapping and mathematical modelling.
Mosquitoes and the viruses they carry do not exist in isolation.
Dr Catherine Walton, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences explains: “Growing cities, expanding transport networks and the loss or fragmentation of forests can all change the environments in which mosquitoes, animals and people interact. TACKLING MBU will investigate how those changes are influencing disease transmission.
"Rather than studying a virus, mosquito species or outbreak in isolation, we will bring together data on mosquitoes, viruses, people and their environments to understand how these factors interact and influence disease risk.
"TACKLING MBU takes its name from the Kiswahili word for mosquito, reflecting the communities at the heart of the project, and its focus on the importance of mosquito-based interventions to reduce disease risk."
The first phase of the project will gather mosquito, virus, environmental and human data from 50 sites across Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi. Mosquitoes will also be collected from other African countries, including Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, working with partner institutions there, to track the spread of mosquito genes linked to a preference for feeding on people.
Alongside analysing mosquitoes and viruses, the team will work with local communities to understand people's daily routines, travel, interactions with their environment and knowledge of mosquito-borne diseases.
The team plans to produce national-scale disease-risk maps for Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi, alongside more detailed maps identifying potential “hotspots” where viruses circulating in wildlife could spill over into people.
The aim is ultimately practical: giving public-health bodies better evidence to enable them to better target their surveillance and intervention efforts. The work will be carried out in partnership with the Ministries of Health in Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi, with whom the team will co-produce policy briefs on evidence-based, targeted surveillance and control of these diseases.
Catherine Walton will lead the project, alongside Manchester co-leads Charis Enns, Jonathan Huck, Tucker Gilman and Simon Lovell, and three early career researchers including Cianjoka Gichuyia and Ben Broomfield.
The project, starting this November, is one of 18 new research and innovation projects funded by the UK Government and UKRI to tackle biosecurity threats.
-ends-
Notes to editors
TACKLING MBU (UKRI award reference UKRI6702) is led by The University of Manchester (www.manchester.ac.uk) in partnership with Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania (www.sua.ac.tz), the Kenya Institute of Primate Research (www.kipre.go.ke) and Malawi University of Science and Technology (www.must.ac.mw).
Project partners include the Ministry of Health, Tanzania; the Public Health Institute of Malawi; the Zoonotic Disease Unit, Kenya; Jimma University, Ethiopia; Kyambogo University, Uganda; the University of Rwanda; and the University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The project is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and the UK Government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), with the award managed by UKRI’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). It runs from 13 November 2026 to 12 November 2030.
October research news from the Ecological Society of America
The Ecological Society of America (ESA) presents a roundup of four research articles recently published across its esteemed journals. Widely recognized for fostering innovation and advancing ecological knowledge, ESA’s journals consistently feature illuminating and impactful studies. This compilation of papers explores how early-life conditions shape caribou survival and longevity, how changing ocean conditions may influence the habitat use of endangered North Pacific right whales, the risk to Maryland marshes as seas rise and how habitat disturbance can make wild mice stressed and sick.
A caribou’s chances of living a long life may depend on conditions it encounters before it even takes its first steps, according to a new study of two migratory herds in northern Québec and Labrador. Researchers analyzed more than 20 years of data on 396 female calves, finding that harsh snow conditions during pregnancy and limited food availability late in pregnancy and shortly after birth were linked to poorer body condition during the calves’ first year. The study also found that early-life competition for resources was strongly associated with shorter lifespans among caribou that survived to adulthood, suggesting that conditions early in life may shape survival long after the calf stage. The findings offer insight into factors that may affect caribou survival and population dynamics, an important question for two migratory herds that have declined dramatically over the past 25 years. The Rivière-aux-Feuilles herd declined by about 75%, while the Rivière-George herd declined by approximately 98%. Understanding how early-life conditions relate to survival and longevity could help researchers better understand the challenges facing these animals and inform conservation efforts.
Listening for clues to the fate of endangered right whales Author contact: Dana L. Wright (danawr4@uw.edu)
With fewer than 50 individuals remaining, the eastern population of the North Pacific right whale faces an uncertain future. New research suggests that changes in the Bering Sea’s cold bottom waters may be linked to where these whales are detected, offering clues to how a warming ocean could affect their habitat. Researchers analyzed underwater recordings from seven locations in the eastern Bering Sea between 2012 and 2019. During years when the area of cold bottom water shrank, whale calling activity expanded northward. But in 2018 and 2019, when the cold pool reached record-low levels, whale calls were detected far less often across most monitored locations. The contrasting patterns suggest that the relationship between ocean conditions and whale activity may not be straightforward. The cold pool helps shape the distribution of the whales’ prey, so changes in this underwater habitat could affect where the whales find food. Researchers found no clear link between the timing of whale arrivals and departures and seasonal sea ice timing, suggesting that the ocean conditions created by sea ice may matter more than the timing of ice formation and retreat itself. The findings highlight the importance of understanding how a changing Bering Sea could reshape habitat for a population already at risk of extinction.
Rising seas could turn a Maryland marsh into open water by the 2060s Author contact: James R. Holmquist (holmquistj@si.edu)
A low-lying marsh along Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay has a greater than 50% chance of converting to open water by the 2060s, according to a new study. The loss could reduce the wetland’s ability to store carbon, as well as threaten habitat and other benefits coastal wetlands provide. But predicting the future of a marsh is inherently uncertain: scientists must account for everything from measurement errors and gaps in ecological knowledge to the future pace of sea-level rise. To tackle that challenge, researchers developed an approach that accounts for these different sources of uncertainty, revealing not only what is likely to happen, but how confident scientists can be in the forecast and which unknowns matter most. Their analysis found that the growth of marsh plants and the preservation of organic matter in the soil play especially important roles in determining whether the wetland can maintain its elevation as seas rise. It also showed that different sources of uncertainty become important at different times, with uncertainty about future sea-level rise playing a larger role later in the century. The findings highlight that marsh survival depends not only on how quickly sea levels rise, but also on how the wetland’s plants and soils respond. The forecasting approach could help coastal managers assess which wetlands are most vulnerable, prioritize restoration efforts and identify where better data could improve predictions of wetland survival and long-term carbon storage.
Habitat damage may leave wild mice stressed and less able to fight infection Author contact: Laurie Dizney (dizney@up.edu)
Wildlife can sometimes survive in damaged habitats, but staying alive may come at a cost. A four-year study of western deer mice in Oregon found that mice in the most disturbed habitats showed signs of greater long-term stress and weaker immune defenses. But there was also encouraging news: mice at sites where habitat restoration had been underway for 8 to 12 years had stress-hormone levels and immune-cell counts that did not differ significantly from those in intact habitat. Researchers measured stress hormones preserved in the mice’s hair and counted immune cells in their blood. Mice in the most disturbed areas had higher stress-hormone levels and fewer immune cells, potentially leaving them less able to fight infection. The researchers suspect that changes in vegetation, including fewer trees and shrubs and warmer soil, may help explain these differences. The findings suggest that habitat damage may affect wildlife health even when animals continue to inhabit disturbed areas, and that restoration may help improve some physiological measures of health. Measuring stress hormones and immune cells could give conservationists another way to evaluate restoration progress and investigate how habitat changes may influence wildlife susceptibility to disease.
The Ecological Society of America, founded in 1915, is the world’s largest community of professional ecologists and a trusted source of ecological knowledge, committed to advancing the understanding of life on Earth. The 8,000 member Society publishessix journals and a membership bulletinand broadly shares ecological information through policy, media outreach and education initiatives. The Society’sAnnual Meetingattracts 4,000 attendees and features the most recent advances in ecological science. Visit the ESA website athttps://www.esa.org
Hardcover ISBN: 9780262056588 Pub date: October 6, 2026 224 pp., 5 x 8 in., 54 b&w illus. $29.95
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CAMBRIDGE, MA — A fascinating inquiry into why beauty matters and how it has played an evolutionary role in our understanding of the world, from a pioneering neuropsychologist.
Why do we love beauty? And why is the world so full of it? From rainbows and mountain landscapes to piano sonatas and Cézanne paintings, much of what we find beautiful seems to serve no practical purpose, despite our instinctive attraction to it. In Why Is the World So Beautiful?, psychologist Nicholas Humphrey offers a bold new explanation: the benefits of being drawn to beauty are primarily cognitive—we’re training our minds.
Inspired by a line from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, that “all beauty may be called rhyme,” Humphrey argues that by actively searching for rhyming connections between things, we establish the “mental models” that guide our understanding of the world. These rhymes extend beyond sounds to shapes, colors, objects, and even abstract ideas. Just as we need food to nourish our bodies, we need rhymes to nourish our minds.
Our attraction to rhymes and patterns culminates in a uniquely human form of aesthetic emotion, one that recognizes that all artistry must issue from an artist. This leads Humphrey to his boldest claim: when we encounter beauty in the natural world, we are responding as if to a hidden artist’s—or Creator’s—hand. The result is a daring and illuminating argument for why beauty moves us—and why our hunger for it is as fundamental as our need for meaning itself.
About the Author: Nicholas Humphrey is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics and a theoretical psychologist based in Cambridge who studies the evolution of intelligence and consciousness. He was the first to demonstrate the existence of “blindsight” in monkeys and has studied mountain gorillas with Dian Fossey in Rwanda. He has proposed the celebrated theory of the “social function of intellect” and investigated the evolutionary background of religion, art, healing, death awareness, and suicide. In 2026, Humphrey was awarded the Dennett Prize by the International Center for Consciousness Studies. His additional honors include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the Pufendorf Medal, and the International Mind and Brain Prize. His most recent book is Sentience (MIT Press).
REVIEWS
“An edifying rumination on why beauty abounds.” —Publishers Weekly
"In this roving study, neuropsychologist Humphrey interrogates why the human mind perceives beauty." —The Millions
"The book is a fascinating exploration of the role that beauty plays in human psychology and evolution." —Nautilus
"This is an exhilarating book. Nicholas Humphrey has always dared to extend neuroscience into other areas, such as philosophy and even poetry. Here he explores his core idea of rhyme as the key not just to our experience of beauty but to our whole understanding of the world. He writes clearly and beautifully, with an infectious optimism which sees humans and the earth as two notes in tune, rather than as despoiler and despoiled. He even suggests (I think) that since we are universally moved to see a designer behind every design, there’s sense in doing so about the world. Philosophers haven’t agreed, but Humphrey is as happy to challenge philosophers as scientists. What larks! – He quotes Dickens too, and many other writers and artists. This is science as we don’t often see it." —Carole Angier, award-winning biographer of Jean Rhys, Primo Levi and W G Sebald
Early Advance Praise:
“Humphrey has made major contributions to our understanding of topics that range across psychology, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and theory of mind. Now we can add Why Is the World So Beautiful? He tackles a topic that has been central to philosophizing since Plato but has never before been subjected to this particular intense combination of rigorous empirical examination and sharp philosophical analysis. A splendid book: provocative, passionate, and to a remarkable degree persuasive.”
— Sir Geoffrey Lloyd, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge
“Humphrey’s skills as an expositor on the science/philosophy interface shine through here. He doesn’t definitively answer the question in the title—nobody could! But he offers insights that will deepen any reader’s understanding of the issues.”
— Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal; Member of the UK’s House of Lords; former President of the Royal Society
“In answer to the question ‘What is the essence of beauty?’ Humphrey offers a bold and compelling answer: our aesthetic instincts are shaped by an innate sensitivity to rhyme—not just in poetry, but in the echoes, patterns, and symmetries that pervade the visual, auditory, and even conceptual realms. This is an illuminating and deeply thought-provoking exploration—one that will reshape how we understand aesthetics, evolution, and the very nature of human experience.”
— Paul Broks, neuropsychologist; author of The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars
“Nicholas Humphrey’s enquiry into the nature of beauty is full of fresh insights. His emphasis on rhyme has primed me to look at flowers and trees anew and hear Bach’s music better. I am grateful for this sparklingly original book.”
— Rupert Sheldrake, biologist; author of Science Set Free
Read a Q&A with Humphrey and Nautilus
What Makes Life Beautiful?
The magic of rhyme and the search for a creator
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.
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 theirpropheciesin rhyme, which were associated with evil spirits. And in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, rhyme isassociatedwith 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 Byrnealso recently wrote a book about this subject. He offers numerous examples, includingMoby 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.
