Emanuele Coccia - The importance of beauty in the selection of species

Emanuele Coccia, Associate Professor of Historical Anthropology at EHESS, examines nature and beauty.

 

About Emanuele Coccia

"I am Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. I’m working on art, fashion and ecology. I published The Life of Plants four years ago, and this year I published a book called Metamorphoses."

 

How species modify other species

We normally think of nature as a pre-existing set of elements or space. This is because we fail to recognise that every living being has exactly the same agency that we have towards not-living space. Every living being modifies the environment, just as we do. Plants, for example, shape the world through their very existence and every living species modifies other living species – again, just as we do. In this sense, flowers are a very interesting part of the plant.

We often forget that flowers are mainly sexual organs. In a way, that makes our practice of giving flowers to our partner very strange because every time that we do so, we are essentially offering a bunch of penises and vaginas. But flowers are also strange and interesting because they are ephemeral sexual organs. They are sexual organs which are built and rebuilt every spring. Moreover, they are normally hermaphrodites, containing both masculine and feminine parts, but self-fertilisation is impossible.

Therefore, the task of flowers is to attract an individual from not just a different species but an entirely different kingdom to enter the sexual encounter of vegetal individuals and to decide who is mating with whom. In this way, flowers are putting their own biological and genetic destiny into the hands of a different organism, a third organism belonging to a totally different kingdom.

 

Key Points

• Every living being modifies the environment, and every living species modifies other living species.

• Many morphological variations cannot be explained by natural selection; aesthetic criteria also shape the evolution of species.

• If evolution is influenced by arbitrary choices of an aesthetic nature, then we can think of every species as biotic art.