Beauty At Work

The Evolution of Beauty and the Beauty of Innovation with Matt Ridley - S4 E2 (Part 1 of 2)

• Brandon Vaidyanathan

Share episode

In Episode 2 of this season, we explore the evolution of beauty (especially in birds) and the beauty of innovation, with guest Matt Ridley.

Matt Ridley's books have sold over a million copies, been translated into 31 languages and won several awards. His books include The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist and The Evolution of Everything. His book on “How Innovation Works” was published in 2020, and "Viral: the search for the origin of covid-19", co-authored with Alina Chan, was published in 2021.

He served the House of Lords between 2013 and 2021 and served on the science and technology select committee and the artificial intelligence select committee.

He was founding chairman of the International Centre for Life in Newcastle. He created the Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal in 2010 and was a columnist for the Times 2013-2018.

 He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He lives in Northumberland.


In this episode, we talk about:

1. How Ridley’s childhood fascination with birds led him to study evolution

2. The courtship rituals of black grouse and the surprising role of female choice

3. How Ronald Fisher’s “sexy sons” hypothesis changed everything

4. What bowerbirds can teach us about aesthetics and art

5. Sexual selection as a driver of creativity, humor, and the human brain

6. The myth of “disruptive innovation” and the overlooked beauty of incremental progress

7. The real relationship between basic science and technology

8. Why Ridley still calls himself a “rational optimist”

9. Why freedom, not brilliance, is the secret sauce of innovation

10. How universities and industry can collaborate to keep creativity alive


To learn more about Matt’s work, you can find him at: https://www.mattridley.co.uk/ 

Books and resources mentioned:

This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust.

Support the show

(preview)

Matt: The way we've talked about innovation in the past has, in my view, misled people—young people in particular—into thinking that it's a special creativity, a sort of special juice that flows in the veins of these people that makes them into semi-gods—that these guys were so smart. We're actually putting kids off. We're saying, "You can't be one of these. You're not a genius." Actually, in the end, all you need is perseverance, and anyone can do that.

Brandon: Right.

Matt: So one of the things I want to do is democratize and demystify innovation.

(intro)

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work—the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty: what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by Templeton Religion Trust and is focused on the beauty and burdens of innovation.

What makes beauty such a powerful force, both in nature and in human creativity? Why do birds evolve dazzling displays that seem to defy survival? And what can that teach us about the way innovation happens—both its beauty and its burdens? I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome to the show today, Matt Ridley, science writer, journalist, and author of numerous bestselling books, including The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything, and How Innovation Works. His books have sold over a million copies in 31 languages. He served in the UK House of Lords, created the Wall Street Journal's "Mind and Matter" column, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In our interview, we're going to focus on two of Matt's books: his latest book, Birds, Sex and Beauty, and How Innovation Works. We're going to unpack Darwin's theory of sexual selection—why he thought beauty can drive innovation—and from there, we're going to pivot to talking about innovation: why it's mostly incremental and collaborative, how basic science and technology can and should cross-fertilize, and why freedom and openness matter. We're also going to look at why Matt is mostly bullish on innovation despite its burdens. Let's get started.

(interview)

Brandon: All right. Matt, thank you for joining us on the podcast. It's such a delight and honor to have you here.

Matt: Thank you, Brandon, for inviting me.

Brandon: Great. Well, we like to get started with every episode by asking guests to reflect on a moment of beauty from their childhoods that lingers with them until today. Is there anything in particular that comes to your mind?

Matt: Well, from childhood? That's interesting. I think I'm going to say: sitting on the shoulders of my father, I'm opening a bird box, looking in to see a bird's nest inside.

Brandon: Wow.

Matt: There's something very attractive about birds' eggs—the color of them, the brownness of the sort of jewel-like nature of them. But also, the nest, because it most have probably been a great tit or a blue tit nest, which are two birds that nest in nest boxes where I live. They line their nests with feathers. Nests are beautiful things—incredible constructions by birds, very characteristic. Each species does it differently. The eggs are just gorgeous, little, little attractive things. So I have a memory of that's sort of what got me hooked on bird watching, I think. It was my father taking me around to look in nest boxes and see which birds have been laying eggs in them.

Brandon: Wow. Matt, you've had a really rich and varied career, but the study of birds and spending time observing them has been a practice for quite some time. Could you talk us through a little bit of your journey through the world of journalism, economics, and some of the books you've written, how this particular fascination with the beauty of birds has still animated you along the way?

Matt: Well, it's a sort of not a straight line, but it's a sort of line. It starts with getting interested in bird watching through my dad as a small boy that got me interested in biology. Biology got me interested in evolution in particular. Evolution became a topic of study for me. And from there, I moved into science writing, but I was always very intrigued by the parallels between sort of evolution of biological systems and evolution of society, which you might call economics, if you like. After a while, I became science editor of The Economist, but then I moved to do political reporting for The Economist and became American editor based in Washington.

Then I decided I wanted to write some books. The first book I wrote was about evolution, about the subject that I'd really done my prelim, which is the evolution of sex and sexual reproduction generally. But that got me into book writing, which then got me into other evolutionary books, that led to books about genetics and genomics. I wrote several books about that subject that then got me intrigued in the parallels between genetic mutation in biological systems and innovation in economic systems. So I then kind of switched to writing about innovation, which I did in two or three books. I've sort of written three books on genomics and three books on innovation. It's like, I write three books at a time.

Then just recently, I've gone right back to what I did my PhD work on, which is the topic of sexual selection—the evolution of brightly-colored plumage in male birds in particular, and how puzzling it is, but also how fascinating and how different from other forms of evolution. And so that's kind of the trajectory of my career and my interests. I've done other much less relevant things along the way, but that's the thread, if you like.

Brandon: Yeah, that's remarkable. Your books have been tremendously influential. Well, let's start with maybe your most recent one, on Birds, Sex and Beauty. I was just struck by the remarkable amount of effort it takes to go and watch these lekking birds. Could you talk a little bit about the black grouse, and what a 'lek' is? Just give us a description of, like, what does it take to go and see this ritual happening?

Matt: Yes. Well, the black grouse is one of these birds that does this rare and spectacular thing called 'lekking,' where the males all gather in the same spot every day at dawn, both fight and dance for the benefit of females, which visit for a few days. The males do it for months on end, but the key moment is in the middle of spring when the females are likely to visit and it reaches an intense crescendo. Unlike almost every other wildlife experience, you know exactly where to be and when to be there. Normally, you're lucky to see a lion killing a zebra, or whatever, by chance. But in this case, you know exactly which couple of weeks, which time of day, and which spot to be in. It's the same spot every year and every day. So that's really wonderful.

But the action happens an hour before sunrise for an hour after sunrise. Mating is usually pretty well around the time of sunrise. I don't know why. It just is. And this is late April in northern England, when we're already well past the equinox. So sunrise can be 5:00 in the morning, or 5:30, or something like that. So you have to get up at almost 4 or at 4:00 even and get out of bed. It's usually pretty cold. That time of the year. It can be frosty. It can be snowy even, quite often rainy or windy. So you've got to put on a lot of clothes because you're not going to be moving around. You're going to be sitting still for a couple of hours. But we've habituated a couple of these leks so that the birds are used to our presence. They wouldn't like it if we were just standing there. But if we're in a vehicle or we're in a hide, a little tent, then they're completely relaxed and we can move around, not loudly or conspicuously. But If we just sit there with the windows open—we have this special vehicle where you can lift the windscreen open so that you're looking forward—then you can almost as close as I am to the screen that's in front of me here, and you can see everything that's going on, up to 20 male birds displaying extraordinary plumage, indulging in bizarre dances and making strange noises, and then getting terribly excited when females come and females wandering around looking nonchalant—how do we know what's really going on inside their heads—and then deciding which one of the males they want to mate with. I think it's as spectacular a wildlife experience as I know. It happens not very far from where I live, so I can make a habit of being there many, many days of the year. It wrecks your sleep and your social life a bit for a few weeks, but it's worth it.

Brandon: Yeah, and it's just extraordinary, the descriptions you've provided of this. It's striking that the scientists have been doing this for quite a while now, more than a century, with Silas and the others who've been — unfortunately Darwin didn't see any leks. But I'm curious about—

Matt: Yes, I was fascinated by that because he knew the species quite well. He used to shoot them occasionally and eat them when he was a young man. It's a very rare bird now, whereas it was quite common in his day and lived all over England. Now it's just confined to a small part of northern England.

Yeah, I have this curious criticism of the Victorian naturalists who saw what they wanted to see. They saw a jousting tournament in which one male is left victorious, and the others leave the field. Then that's how it's decided who's going to mate. Well, that's just not true. There are still are. Each has his own little patch. Every fight is a kind of stalemate. The decision as to who gets to do the mating is not the male's decision at all. It's the female's decision. That's something the Victorian naturalists didn't want to see, and therefore didn't see.

Brandon: Yeah, this example really, I think, remarkably paints this tension between the reigning account of natural selection and then the account of sexual selection that Darwin was trying to develop and then couldn't quite succeed in convincing people. Could you talk a bit about the difference between those two mechanisms and, perhaps, how they run counter to each other, and why it was that Darwin struggled to convince people about this?

Matt: Yes. Well, just last week, I was having a conversation with an evolution biologist who took exception to my saying that sexual selection is very different from natural selection. No, no, no, it's not. You can't say things like that. The creationists will latch on to it, he said. I don't think that's true, by the way. But Wallace, Alfred Russell Wallace, Darwin's co-discoverer of natural selection, took the view that sexual selection is nothing special. It's just a branch of natural selection. Because what's happening is that the female is choosing the healthiest males. And so just the colorful nature of the males is just a way of the females getting healthy genes for their offspring. That's the view that prevailed even during Darwin's lifetime and throughout most of the 20th century.

Darwin did not think that, and he had a big disagreement with Wallace over this. I think it was quite painful for him that he wasn't able to persuade Wallace. In the year 1868, in particular, when he's building up to writing The Descent of Man, which is his book almost entirely about sexual selection, he spent a lot of time trying to persuade Wallace of his view and failed. Essentially, what Darwin is saying is: I can explain the evolution of complex organs like the eye through natural selection—very small, incremental steps leading to improvements in the technology of something like an eye, step by step, over millions of years. But I can't explain a peacock's tail because it serves no practical function. If anything, it's a laborious burden for the animal to carry around. It makes it more vulnerable to predators. It's beautiful. And that seems to be a big part of its importance, because the male fans it out and displays to the female with it. So, clearly, there's something going on here that can't be explained in terms of helping the animals survive. It's not survival of the fittest.

He wrote this letter to Asa Gray in 1860, where he said, "The sight of a peacock's tail, when I gaze upon it, makes me feel sick." And that's what he meant, I think. Because he was worried that he didn't have a good explanation for this. Because his critics had a very good explanation, which is that peacock's tails were put on earth to please human beings. And so it's a real form of beauty. That was quite good enough for them and for most Victorians and most people who are theological about these things. He says, "I think what's going on is that females have an inherent esthetic sense. They just like beautiful things a bit the way we did. I don't really know why they do, but they do. And so the male has to grow beautiful plumage if he's to succeed in mating. Now, that wasn't a terribly convincing theory, as you can see, because it kind of says, well, why? And you never had a good answer to that.

The good answer came long after his death, with the work of a man named Ronald Fisher, in my view. And what Fisher said was: "If you think about it, if the females are indeed preferring gaudy, colorful males, then they've got to be quite careful not to mate with the wrong male, or they'll have sons who can't get laid, basically."

Brandon: Right, yeah.

Matt: So this is certainly the cheap version.

Brandon: The sexy son. Yeah, the sexy son hypothesis, you call it.

Matt: Exactly. So you can see that, in contrast to what Wallace is arguing, it's not the health of the offspring that is the prize. It is the sexiness of the offspring. That changes everything. Because it means we're not talking about survival of the fittest. We're talking about seduction of the hottest, which can be a very self-fulfilling prophecy. It doesn't really matter what you consider hot. It can be anything. It can go in any direction. And that makes sexual selection, in my view, into a much more creative force than natural selection. It can generate eccentric and diverse outcomes in a way that natural selection doesn't. The way I put this in a rather cheap shot in the book is I say, mammals are basically brown and boring. They don't have a lot of this sexual selection going on. Birds are brightly colored. They're red and blue and green and yellow and orange. They have beautiful feathers, and they do beautiful displays. I mean, they must think we are terribly boring creatures. We grunt. Human beings sing, but most mammals don't sing. Birds do. Think of all the sort of beauty that birds devote so much effort to the song, the display, and the pallor and everything that most models just don't do. And that's because of sexual selection, a choice, and that off I go into saying I wish I was a bird. Maybe I sort of am in an honorary way.

Brandon: Right. So do you get an objection that, how do we really know what these females are observing in these males? Because we can't really see all the things they see, et cetera. And to what extent are we aware that their discernment is based on aesthetic criteria rather than something we're not able to observe by virtue of being human, for instance?

Matt: Yes, my view is still a minority one. Most people think that if we look hard enough, we're going to find that the male the females prefer to choose on the lek is the one with the least mutations or the least parasites, or something like that. There is actually some good new evidence that that might be the case in black grouse. I might be wrong. But that can be true at the same time that what the female is after is pure aesthetic appreciation because that will enable her to have sexy sons. Both could be true. They don't have to be opposites.

Now, there have been quite a lot of experiments where they've done things like add extra length to the tails of long-tailed birds. That was a brilliant experiment that Malti Anderson did in the 1980s, with a bird called the widow bird in Kenya. He found very clearly that if he made these long tails even longer by cutting bits off another bird's tail and sticking it on the end, then he could increase that male's mating success. So it does seem to be true that the females are seduced by good versions of the display, as it were. There's various evidence of manipulation experiments, et cetera. There were even attempts to sort of put a video camera on the head of a peahen and film what it was she was looking at when she was looking at a male displaying. They were fairly inconclusive of those experiments. But you get the idea that this kind of thing is going on.

Funnily enough, the experiment that comes closest to proving Fisher's hypothesis right was done with flies, flies that had a particular — I think they're called stalk-eyed flies. Their eyes are out on stalks on either side of their head. The wider the stalks, the more attractive the flies are to the females. By deliberately breeding from the unfancied males for generation after generation, the scientists were able to test: do these unfancied males have unhealthy offspring, or do they have unattractive offspring? Mostly, they had just unattractive offspring. Less and less attractive to females, but they didn't get less and less healthy.

Brandon: Another thought, perhaps, is if they are selecting on just these esthetic qualities, wouldn't over time you see a weeding out of some of the unattractive features, and you would get more of a clustering around a very similar set of esthetic qualities that have been selected for over time? But we do still see a lot of diversity. A lot of these birds on these leks are not getting laid, for instance, right? I wonder if you have thoughts on what might be at work there.

Matt: Well, you say that. But actually, to the human eye—if I take the black grouse, the one that I watch most closely—it's very hard to distinguish the models. You look at these guys occasionally. I mean, there was one who I write about in the book. In fact, I dedicated the book to him. He was called Wonky Tail. He had some spinal deformity. That meant that his tail was at that angle rather than that angle. We saw him come back year after year for about four years. Then the last year, he was really not at his best, and he disappeared after a while. I saw him get one mating, but he never got the jackpot. He never got to be the top male. There were lots of matings.

But apart from that, and the odd missing feather or the odd blemish that enables you to distinguish individuals, I got to know individuals because I got to know exactly which little territory they occupied on the lek. But I couldn't really say that one is better looking than that one. So the differences were pretty subtle. That's often the case if you look at birds of paradise and things. On the whole, they look pretty similar. What is very striking, which I think you were possibly also getting at, is that it can be any part of the plumage that gets exaggerated in different species. Oh, sorry. But all of the bird is sort of exaggerated in some way. No bit of the bird is left boring and brown in these sexually-selective species. But in some birds, the tail is long. In some birds, it's funny shaped. In some birds, the main color is red. In some, it's black. In some, it's blue, you know, et cetera, et cetera. The song can be one kind of song or a different kind of song.

So if it was about illustrating health, then I think it would all converge on, look, the best way of illustrating health is always to try and grow red feathers and always to try and grow long feathers. That's the best way, et cetera. It doesn't seem to be like that. It seems to be capable of going off in any direction. Actually, the way you put it, which is that there is variation still despite all this highly-selective nature. It leads to another point, which is sometimes known as the "lek paradox." These birds are very selective. That is to say, on the lek that I watch, one male will get 18 matings. Another male will get through, and the rest will get nothing. So that's narrowing the gene pool in every generation. On all the males and females in the area the next year — well, not the females because they tend to move away. But all the males in the area the next year will be half-brothers. Or a lot of them will. What's the point of being so selective? These species are way more selective than most birds, where they pair up and they say, oh, good enough. Yeah, I'll settle down and bring up a family with you. These guys say, "No, no, no, I want that guy."

Brandon: Yeah, and everyone. Like, this seems very mimetic around the females all opting for this one.

Matt: Well, that's the other thing. Are the females copying each other?

Brandon: Right.

Matt: There seems to be some evidence that they are. They kind of watch each other, and they say, "Oh, he's the one we're choosing this year."

Brandon: Right.

Matt: So there's a paradox here. Why are they so choosy when there's so little genetic variation among the males?

Brandon: Yeah, the idea that there is some kind of sense that they're selecting on the offspring that would be more attractive, and the sense this is why should a female prefer the most elaborate bower or bluest horde, right? It's not about some kind of health signal, but fear perhaps—I don't know how much we're anthropomorphizing here—that their sons will be without mates.

Matt: Exactly. That seems to be the key. You mentioned Bowerbirds. I was thrilled to get a chance to go to Australia and watch these extraordinary birds, which really have taken it to another extreme, and which absolutely vindicate Darwin's insistence that this is about esthetics—and that, actually, to understand bird display, you need to understand the esthetics. His critics said, "They're ridiculous. These are birds. Their brains are the size of peanuts. They can't appreciate beauty." He said, "I think they do. I think they really do." The Bowerbirds, what they've done is they've invented art. I mean, the display is not what their own plumage. It's the decorations they bring to their bower. They literally have to decorate a bower with colored objects, and that's going to impress the female. So it's literally saying, "Come and see my etchings."

Brandon: Right. Yeah, I know you didn't write this book in order to make some implications for human beings, but you do end up saying that sexual attractiveness could be a sufficient explanation for pretty much any human mental trait—or even the evolution of the brain, perhaps, or the evolution of art, right? I think you argued that it should be the null hypothesis. Could you say more about that? What are the implications of this work, then, for how we understand our brains and even art, the evolution of art?

Matt: Yes, we devote a lot of time to art, one kind or another—whether it's singing, painting, or just verbal gymnastics, if you like. We devote a lot of brainpower and time to humor. We're constantly trying to impress people, particularly of the other sex, with how funny we are. It does seem to matter. People value sense of humor very highly in a potential mate. We use a lot of our brain power to do things that aren't directly related to survival in any practical sense, but they are related to seduction. That's the observation that I think is worth thinking about.

Now, Jeffrey Miller wrote a book called The Mating Mind about 25 years ago, which made a very powerful and very eloquent argument for the idea that we've always assumed that the reason the human brain got suddenly very big—it was quite sudden. It seems to have accelerated in its expansion around a couple of million years ago—was because it solved a practical problem of how to live on the savannah, how to find food, survive difficult seasons, and that kind of thing. Well, baboons and gazelles live on the savannah, and they don't seem to need an enormous brain. So that's not a terribly convincing explanation, really.

Well, yes, but maybe it's social. Maybe we need it to solve the social problems we present ourselves. Why is he gossiping about him with respect to his relationship with her who is being beastly about me? That kind of complex social problem, which we again do spend an awful lot of time thinking about. It's the main theme of most soap operas and things like that. Yeah, sure, we use our big brains for that.

But the third possibility is that the reason that brain just suddenly swelled up the way it did—at enormous cost, remember—is because not only does it use a lot of energy—the brain, the human brain—it also kills a lot of women. I mean, to this day, there is a real struggle to get a big, big head out through a small pelvis. The female pelvis has expanded in order to allow that over the years. The only way that happened was by killing a lot of women. Remember, we made it hard for our species to survive childbirth, both the mother and the child. There must have been a real reward for having that bigger brain. That reward might have been a purely sexual selection one, rather than a natural selection one, which was that people with larger brains were more likely to get attractive or successful mates. Not more mates, because we're not highly polygamous species. We have some degree of polygamy, a lot of infidelity, and things like that. But we're much more like normal birds in that respect. We've got pair bonds and dependent young and that kind of thing. So I think it's a mistake. People look at the lek or read my descriptions of the lek and say, "It sounds just like a nightclub." Well it's not. Because in the nightclub, people are trying to pair off. Whereas in a lek, they're trying to all decide that they're all going to mate with the same bloke in the middle of the dance floor, which is not on the whole what happened. I gather. I mean, 40 years.

Brandon: Right. Yeah, I know. No, I don't think — that's too much. The sort of object of this attraction could be anything, as you say, from humor, to art, to some quality, dancing or whatever sign of prowess. But that judgment about what that is seems to vary tremendously. Yeah, I mean, it's really an intriguing hypothesis.

One of the things that I think you mentioned is that sexual selection is also perhaps a force for evolutionary innovation. So I'd love to pivot a little bit to your book on innovation to try to understand what is innovation, and are humans unique in our capacity for innovation?

Matt: Yes. Well, I sometimes put it simply. I said, what is this thing called innovation? Why does it happen to us and not to rabbits or rocks? On the whole, we are pretty unique in the degree of innovation we have. You can find examples of crows, or apes, or dolphins sort of developing new habits, new tactics, new tools. But they're pretty few and far between. Whereas, for you and me, we've lived through — well, I've lived longer than you. I've lived through the most extraordinary changes in the world that I live in. I expect a constant stream of innovation, such that I have to update my smartphone every five years or whatever it might be. I mean, not quite as often as I used to have to when it was new. But you get the point.

It is innovation that is the main event of human history in the last 200 years, I would argue. Forget the wars and the depressions and the religions. The main event is the invention of the railway, 200 years ago this weekend, by chance, invention of electricity, the invention of the computer, the invention of the airplane. These are the things that have really, really changed the world. There's a million of them. Somehow, we've got ourselves into a situation where we are good at doing this as a specie, as a society. It has raised our living standards. That's the reason why, in my lifetime, the number of people living in extreme poverty has gone down from more than 50% to less than 10% of the world. That's an amazing thing that nobody has ever lived through before.


(end of part 1)