Scientists Hard Up Explaining Why Are Flowers Attractive
By Dr. Michael A. Bengwayan
Baguio
City, Philippines----Three days after
death reared its ugly head on the stormy day tempest Ompong struck
burying more than 50 unsuspecting people in Itogon, Philippines,
Andres Agwilang, miner, 54, father of three, was one the countless
volunteers digging for possible survivors.
He moved towards a grassy loft to rest and bent to touch a wild weed
with yellow bright flowers that survived the storm. "Lord, even
in the midst of our darkest hours, your beauty gives us hope",
he murmured in his dialect.
What is in a flower that attracts humans and exudes beauty and
radiance?
Scientists Try to Explain Why
Several
scientists tried explaining this. Geophysicist Dr. Zbigniew Motyka
who currently works at the Department of Technical Acoustics and
Laser Technique, at Główny
Instytut Górnictwa in Poland says the question has connections to
physics, aesthetics, scienvce and art,
"People
perceive flowers attractive because of immanent
physical properties e.g. symmetry or color composition, which makes
us think of them as beautiful," he said.
He
quotes Aristotle in metaphysics, ''All men by nature desire to know.
An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even
apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above
all others the sense of
sight.”
“For
not only with a view to action, but even when we are not
going to
do anything, we prefer seeing to everything
else. The
reason is that this, most of all the senses, like sight, makes us
know and
brings to light many differences between things.''
French visual scientist Dr. Louis
Brassard agrees but goes further saying "human's perception of
flowers being beautiful is not only due to aesthetic appreciation
but also because of mammalian feeling."
"Humans have a higher level
of aesthetic pleasure where what is pleasurable is what reveals some
fundamental forms of our own perception. ,and appreciation of beauty
is one, " Dr. Brassard said.
"More primitive animals are
attracted by food, water, mate, shelter and are repulsed by predators
and this does not change during their life. Mammals can learn new
mode of actions and their mode of actions can take place over long
period of time like appreciation of beauty (episodic world)."
"They can be attracted by
aspects of the world with high probability to promote certain long
term mode of actions. So they have attractions not to immediate
target of action but to favorable conditions for desired long term
action goals," he wrote to elaborate.
Beauty in the Eye of the
Beholder
But do all humans see flowers as
beautiful?
"Only
a fool can argue against the universal truth that flowers are
beautiful but in order to understand why we find flowers beautiful,
we have to understand visual beauty in general and we have to
understand why the plant/pollinator interactions lead to the
evolution the flower forms and colour and odor that are beautiful for
us, highly reputable Emeritus Professor of Connective Tissue
Medicine Dr. Jonathan Edwards of University College London said.
We
find things beautiful because of reflectance, emission and
transmission spectrum that is relatively narrow (pure colour) and
salient (i.e. not brown or green). We find coloured stones beautiful,
and coloured skies. This spectral specificity and salience in
biological structures function in a symbiotic relationship, as for
flowers for insects and berries for birds and mammals and so for us
this may just be an exaptational effect - we are drawn to structures
that evolved as salient signs for others, he explained.
But
how and why have we evolved a sense that some things are beautiful,
regardless of usefulness? And what makes flowers, in general terms,
more beautiful than berries?
Dr.
Edwards answered his question saying flowers have a complexity and
specificity of shape/structure, each one rather different from
another. For symbiosis this is important as the color and shape of
flowers consistently morphed over a period.
The
beauty of flowers make relate to intricacy, specificity and
consistency in shape. Gardeners revel in the subtle variations in
form of their flowers, the delicacy and symmetry of the white
jasmine, the voluptuousness of the paeony, the precision of a
clematis star, he cited as examples.
Beauty
of Flowers a Form of Communication
Ecologist
Dr. Marcel M. Lambrechts
of the French Centre
d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive
says there is a difference between insects
being attracted towards different types of flowers the way humans are
attracted.
Humans'
attraction to flowers is likely an exaptation - of no usefulness in
itself but a sign of a useful attraction to things that show ordered
complexity he explained but may that we also sense flowers as a sign
- a form of communication.
"There
is a 'picture mode' of perception that our brains can switch on and
off, allowing us to recognise, for instance, caricatures, and more
simply, just flat images as being images. Even within flat images,
like a playbill at a theatre, we unconsciously sort letters and
picture and assign them different 'notional' spaces. Pictorial
communication is so important to us that flowers get caught up in
this different type of perception," he said.
To
this, Dr. Edwards doubts. Humans have
not yet even identified a survival value for liking flowers nor do
people consistently prefer different flowers over a long period or do
their tastes change, he said. A lot of flower preference comes with
sentimental association, he added
Dr.
Lambrechts
says some creatures, including humans,
are attracted to 'super stimuli' in this context, domesticated
flowers that are much bigger/more colourful/etc. more efficiently
attracting humans,
And
if humans are 'instinctively' attracted to flowers, why are women
more attracted than men?
Lambrechts
explains some species/individuals are more plastic in behaviour than
other species/individuals, and their level of phenotypic plasticity
has a genetic basis. meaning attractiveness to many flowers in humans
has in at least some level a genetic/instinctive basis.
Flowers'
Beauty Only A By-Product
Do flowers exude beauty for humans to
behold? Unfortunately no, said Claude de Phamphilis a plant
evolutionary biologist of Penn State University.
Pleasing the human eye is far from the physiological intents, de Pamphilis said, Scent, color, and size all attract a diversity of pollinators, which include thousands of species of bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, and beetles, as well as vertebrates such as birds and bats.
Plants and trees reproduce their kind through the process of pollination where the transfer of pollen from a male part of a plant to a female part of a plant, takes place, enabling later fertilization and the production of seeds.
The scientists’ points of view matter not to Andres Agwilang, a devout born again Christian. To him, where a flower blooms, so does hope.
“When flowers appear on Earth, the season of singing has come”, he quoted the Bible’s Song of Songs at Chapter 2, verse 12
(Note: In the Itogon landslide tragedy, just 2 survivors were rescued, 70 died, and 45 left missing).
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