From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Sep 28 1999 - 17:22:48 MDT
Eric Watt Forste wrote:
>
> Most of the selection pressure on the shapes of the flowers humans
> tend to select as beautiful results from the need to attract
> insects for pollination. In some cases, flowers go so far as to
> mimic insects in mating postures and release bee sex pheromones
> so as to more effectively exchange pollen with insects. Maybe
> we just happen to have more tastes in common with bees than we
> thought; what the bee sees as sexy, we see as pretty.
I love it! So bees evolve aesthetic preferences to mate with other
bees, and then flowers evolve to conform to bees' aesthetic preferences
to increase pollination, and then humans evolve to find flowers
aesthetic so as to select good foraging grounds. Thus transmitting a
set of aesthetic preferences *from* bees *to* humans *across an
intervening species*.
My sensawunda for the day. Thanks, EWF!
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:05:19 MST