The Puffer Fish, Manakin Birds and Palm
Cockatoos: Nature’s
Artists and Aesthetic Animals
[Unfortunately the images that accompany this essay
cannot be reproduced on the Blog]
Puffer Fish Nesting Construction:
A Work of Art
The puffer fish seems to have some sort of aesthetic
sense (the experience a non-practical measure of pleasurable sensations) that
is not easily and simplistically equated with genetics or hard-wiring of its
little fish brain but rather some more playful expression and response to its
environment, its desire for a mate—and a female who must swim about the home
grounds of the species observing and judging the creative efforts of the males;
he thus requires and acquires a sensitive and appreciative audience. But
it is not enough to say that the creating of the circles is a mating ritual to
arouse and entice the female puffer fish to accept the male’s desire to
copulate; nor to reduce the carefully constructed circles, made of refined
sand, constantly cleaned grooves, and general guardianship of the area in which
eggs will be laid and fertilized by the pair. There seems to be something more
than show-off gestures and sexual attraction.
Whereas Darwin distinguished between the survival features that enhanced
the likelihood of individual members of the species to achieve maturity and
pass on its germ plasma to subsequent generations and the sexual features that
aroused, attracted and ensured copulatory acts, as well as those
characteristics that ensured protection, care and nurturing of offspring, so we
must insert the idea—whatever we may choose to call it, pleasure principle,
risk aversion, sensory pleasures—that for some creatures at least there is also
an appreciation of form, design, completeness of design, satisfaction with the
attraction and admiration of others. But
does this involve consciousness or self-consciousness, let alone forethought or
any thought at all?
Not all the one hundred and twenty
members of the puffer fish within the tetraodontidae family do this elaborate performance,
let alone all deep sea creatures, just as not all spiders spin elaborate webs
with formal patterns. Some birds, perhaps a very few, like the manakin
bird, exhibit complex and lengthy dances in ways that can only be observed by
the use of high-speed cameras—and by appreciative female judges. These creatures seem to turn themselves and
portions of their environment into works of art. Yet is this conceptualization of design,
form, and performance only in the eyes of the modern human observer or does it
have some real presence or correlate in the physiognomy or psychology of the
creatures engaged in the making of these shaped experiences, with or without
relatively permanent changes to the physical environment?
What these puffer fish, manakin bird,
Palm Cockatoos and other creatures fashion goes beyond tool-use and tool-making
as a defining quality of the human species as homo faber. They may also be included in a category of homo ludens, man the game-playing
animal. With the notion that mankind
uniquely engages in symbolic thought and hence able to create a language based
on spoken words that does more than name names or signal distress, fear or joy,
and hence fills an evolutionary place as homo
sapiens, there is another displacement by the behaviours and the feelings
and thoughts that lie behind them with this example of the puffer fish. This displacement, we suggest—and it is a
very speculative suggestion—means there is a place in nature that lies beneath
or around the human species where animals play, and out of which or upon which
human consciousness, language and art are built. The distinction between human consciousness,
language and art and animal consciousness, language and art is not absolute:
some fish, some birds, and some other creatures approach in refinement, if not
in reflexive self-awareness and the ability to articulate their feelings in
ways they can recall, what early human species—Neanderthal and
Cro-Magnon—gradually began to perfect as their defining quality as thoughtful
and pleasure-enjoying beings.
For a week or ten days the male puffer fish
works night and day to clear an area on the seafloor in its home territory,
swimming back and forth on the surface with his fins and especially dorsal fin
shaping ridges, trenches and curved lines to form something that looks like a
flower as a mating and nesting place. In
addition to the symmetrical design and the carefully-measured depth of the
grooves, the male also decorates the mating grounds with small shells, objects
chosen for their colour and size. Some
scientists believe the females watch and judge these final stages of the construction
more than others during the week-long ritual.
It also indicates that the females of the species are more than sexually
attracted by the finished product as an indication of the male’s prowess,
persistence and determination. While
they are not observed to be constantly swimming nearby and judging the efforts
of the male puffer fish, the females often survey a larger area to compare and contrast
the shaped space of other would-be fathers to her fry.
After the eggs are laid out in the hollowed out grooves of the
playground, the male fertilizes them externally, with the pair hovering over
the area for six to seven days to protect the brood.
Not only the week-long expenditure of
energy by persistent motions performed by the male, shaping and keeping clear
of debris or random shells from the love nest, but the completed structure
itself is created as a signifying object, something that at once stands out
from the surrounding territory as an unnatural feature and, at the same time,
something which distinguishes this particular
physical conceit from those produced by other males in her immediate experience,
memory or creative conceptualization.
Though scientific discourse seems to preclude any consideration of
intentional creation of a place which gives pleasure to the builder and his
potential mate, the evidence seems to suggest that this is precisely what lies
behind the phenomena associated with reproduction.
The Male
Puffer Fish at Work and Play
There is something here that puts in
question all easy solutions. It could throw out of the window all our preconceptions
about the nature of instinctive play or ritual or even hysterical, obsessive
repetition compulsion; as well as the idea of found art in nature, inherited
animal consciousness and constructed social and domestic relationships. This uncanny phenomenon also brings up, by
extension into the human sphere, the question of whether or not all children
grow up, no matter in what time or place, no matter superficially distinct
their cultures are, so that they learn to see with the same rule-based logical
apparatus of the mind as Noam Chomsky argues lies behind the development of
language as a basic and defining human
quality, something “hard-wired” into the anatomy of the brain or encoded into
the genetic structures of the mind.
Since all humans share the same basic genetic make-up, and since also as
humans we all share a very large proportion of our genetic code with other
living things throughout the animal kingdom, then it might not be too far a
stretch to see in the puffer fish’s architectural achievement or the manakin
bird’s dance routines something that may tell us important things about our own
mind and its aesthetic development.
However, there are significant faults with this argument. But first let
us look at the similarities between what the puffer fish builds for its
love-making and what has been postulated as the “ripple effect” in human
perception.
Ripples and Rule-Based Logic in Vision as well
as Language
Donald Hoffmann…has created an example of our
ability to use simplified physics to re-create what we see in a work of
art. He calls this paradigm the
“ripple”.. The ripple is a drawing on a flat, two-dimensional surface, but it
appears to be undulating in space like waves in a pond.
There is a
remarkable similarity between the lines and flowery ridges drawn in the sand by
the puffer fish and the illustration by Donald Hoffman to show how all children
come to see the same way, no matter how differently various cultures interpret
the significance of those perceptions. Eric Kandel cites Hoffman and makes his
own more eloquent argument to relate the neuro-anatomical findings relevant to
the history of art, especially German Expressionism in Vienna 1900.
Donald Hoffman’s Model of a “Ripple”.
Here's where I need
to hold back and think through what Hoffman is doing, however—if he comes out
with this approval of Noam Chomsky's rules of universal grammar: an idealism
right out of a Jansenist mentality with Port-Royal thinking, and thus against
the dynamics and creative chaos of the real Darwinian world. This is
determinism, rule-based logic (the error I think Eric Kandel makes with his
over-emphasis on Gestalt psychology) and the epistemological error of
teleological, Lamarckian biology—that there are already innate logical
paradigms towards which all evolution aims. We have to resist the urge to
read back into the animal behaviour a rule-based and goal-orientated
programme. At the same time, we need to
avoid an easy slide towards anthropomorphism—to
see Nature as theatre of Walt Disney sentimentality or a bourgeois allegory of
individual expression as a way of possessing and transforming the environment.
Nor can we accept
that anyone, let alone any kind of living beast or bird or insect or fish, is
driven by selfish genes out to reproduce themselves at any cost, even of their
own lives. The biological processes and
organs may indeed function as Kandel and his sources claim, but the molecules
and tissues were not destined to have that configuration in the human
mind. They are not qualities hard-wired
into our brains from the very beginning, as though the metaphor of the computer
had anything more than temporary heuristic value, no more than DNA encodes
thoughts and feelings, reactions to environmental factors only very recently
encountered in the world. Evolution
occurs at times very much quicker and in more quirky ways than
nineteenth-century biologists could image, as well as sporadically in
“punctuated” periods of crisis. In fact,
just as what counts is less the particular genes one inherits, than the way the
internal and external environment triggers the expression of those
factors. The paradigm of evolutionary
development, progressive improvements and useful adaptations now seems too
old-fashioned to work with, perhaps a mere secularized version of intelligent
design or the clock-work universe.
We are all born in a
neotenic state of incomplete development, having to journey into the real world
of our experiences under various, often hostile conditions. In fact, as individuals and as a species, we
do much better precisely because we are not firmly fixed (“hard-wired”) into
our final state of being but rather fluid, flexible and alive to the
possibilities of change. We thrive—when
we are not stricken by disaster, disease, or political catastrophes--by
creative chaos, not by rule-based logic, language or image recognition. Yet some cultures and periods are more
dysfunctional than others, more susceptible to negative and nefarious ways of
relating to one another and the world around us. This means more than that there are cultures
and ways of living quite distinct from our own but which at certain points of
contact between them and us disgust us physically and morally by their
disregard for the very principles of sanitation and sanity, as well as making
it impossible for us to sustain our philosophical, ethical and aesthetic ideals
by which we structure out lives. They
are not merely or only to be seen as our inferiors or necessary others in our
conceptualization of who we are, and thus fit in some mythical fantasy we have
created through our history; but they can actually be hostile to us and
actively threaten our very well-being, security and existence: and in fact,
they regard our sense of justice, love and beauty as incompatible with their
own.
Manakan Bird Performing
The male manakan
birds do strange line dances, zipping back and forth on long twigs, showing off
their colours and tricks to an audience of females. Sometimes one or more of
the hens gather to observe the performances. In some instances, it is one cock struts his
stuff before the jury of females, and in others there is a whole line-up of
males each doing their own thing in front of the critical assembly of
hens. After the performance, several
minutes pass by while the females of the species make up their minds. In another variation of the mating dance,
among manakans in Costa Rica, “males employ a wingman to help them find a
mate. To attract females, the pair of
rivals perform an elaborate song-and-dance-routine, even though only the more
dominant male ever gets to mate. In due course, the assistant bird grows up
and takes on the role of dominant performer, the intervening five years
providing opportunity for him to learn the choreography and make his own
variations. The whole production cannot
be explained by saying that it is a way for males to prove their virility and
virtuosity and for females to judge the potentialities of the cocks as vigorous
breeding stock to father and subsequently protect her chicks. It is doubtful that any creatures gear their
lives towards genetic proliferation and survival into future generations. A more immediate purpose for the vigorous
dance routine would surely be to self-arouse the mating instinct among the most
acrobatic of the males and then to awaken a sexual arousal among the females, both
gaining a physiological pleasure in the expenditure of energy and the flow of
hormones.
When we look at the
example of the palm cockatoo (Probosciger
aterrimus) of northern Australia, the performing cock, after breaking off
and shaping a proper drumstick or seedpod (of approx. 20 cms.), begins to bang
on the branch where he stands, with an interested hen joining him, not only watching
the way he manufactures the instrument and then listening to his solo drumming,
but approving of his rhythm and nodding her
head in time to the beat. Some fieldworkers have registered more than
130 separate rhythmic patterns, ranging from twenty-seven to ninety-two beats
long. It has been suggested that the birds, the
female of which lays only one egg every two years, so that mates must
ensure they are strongly attracted to one another and willing to commit to
long-term care of their offspring, the drumming performance being, as it were,
the final test of compatibility following the “normal” screeching and whistling
that mark the announcement of readiness to copulate and constituting physical
foreplay. These half-hour-long drumming sessions go
beyond normal dance riffs and feather-ruffling to provide carefully articulated
activities and mutual interaction concerned with the performance itself. No other male palm cockatoos were present to
observe the performance and only one female at a time attends to the drumming,
thus leaving open the question of whether or not young birds learn from their
elders in this matter, one thing is clear:
something more than other than the blind passion of selfish genes getting
together.
Palm Cockatoo Pair
How do we account
for the pleasure in performance and observation of the skilled performer in
these relatively rare instances of animal display? Without trying to impose a self-conscious
artistic urge on to our colourfully-feathered or agile finny friends, we do
need to consider that non-human animals take some sort of delight in what they
do during these lengthy bouts of foreplay
and not only in the copulatory act itself, which seems brief enough to
have a minimal raison d’être. As
Heinsohn and his associates put it in regard to the palm cockatoo drumming,
In particular drumming rates do not appear to be determined by
mechanical constraints, such as the limb acting as a pendulum. The swing and
thump on the tree trunk is not a suspension from above. Instead, the drumming is more like the action
in a human drummer where the trunk is hit from above or the side. This makes a purely mechanical action
unlikely because the bird has to lift and release the stick regularly.
Similarly, contrary
to mechanical operations or instinctive expectations. the puffer fish can spend
a week or more preparing his love-nest arena, clearing and cleansing the
grounds, but hardly a moment in the actual consummation of his amatory
climax. The female puffer inspects the
construction and either approves or rejects his efforts, appreciating in some
way his planning and execution as pleasurable in themselves, in some way
enjoying vicariously the many hours and days expended on her behalf. She must know what she likes, not only whom
she can trust to inseminate her eggs. Or
in the other example we are referring to, the manakan chorus line of male dancers
not only seek to grab the attention of a probable female partner from the loge
in which the hens observe and judge, this testing of one another’s skills of
dancing but also take pleasure in their own activity. In addition, the very act of discernment by
performers and audience lifts the occasion above the instinctual display in
analogous species.
What is it that the
creatures rehearse and induces their young comrades occasionally to witness and,
in some instances, help control the situation on the playground? In
other words, what is it that the gathering of the females are comparing between
the enthusiastic performers they observe?
If not blind instinct or socially-directed constructs, what are these
creatures playing at? Something is being
learned, perfected and enjoyed for its own sake, enough so, it would seem, to
replace a general orgiastic flutter of sexual energy. Few of the fish and birds within the general
mating zone of each of these species takes part in the actual copulation, so
that the non-participants must receive something else to compensate for not
having their own individual genes passed on.
Since they know as little of their genetic constitutions as they do of
their evolutionary functions within the great scheme of things, something is
created which satisfies both participants and observers alike.
Play is More and
Other than a Children’s Game or Adult Recreation
Concepts such
as symbolic language, volitional consciousness, storage patterns of memory,
performative actions and gestures in ritual art and varieties of game-making
and play have to be discussed, each of them having various cultural meanings at
different times and places, and certainly not fixed in western modern bourgeois
societies. Above all, we need to think
of the brain-mind as part of an organic bodily whole—a growing, developing and
self-correcting neuronal system, a hormonal process of stimulating emotional
and intellectual activities, a dynamic response to the external and internal
environment that triggers the expression of genetic potentialities in shorter
and long term periods, expressions that are reversible and multi-valent.
Rather than seeing play as the antithesis of work, meaning productive
labour, or as distinct from serious and deliberate activities, and thus
relegated to children’s games which exercise their minds and bodies in
preparation for adult roles, we now understand the term in a much wider and
deeper series of ways, so much so that one Dutch historian concluded that
game-playing was the very essence of what differentiated mankind from all other
creatures, Johann Huizinga thus renamed
our species Homo Ludens, man the game-playing animal. For Huizinga, play is at the
heart of religion, civilization, culture, art and industry. As well as
formalized human relationships at all levels, from child-parent bonding through
all aspects of domestic politics, social structures, as well as religious and
intellectual thoughts and institutions.
With the further discussions of French philosopher, Roger Caillois in
his Man, Play and Games, the sub-categories could be set forth as variations on free-flowing and
even vertiginous activities that lie outside of formal structures and rules
through precisely those modes which not only require definite rules and
regulations, measured space and time, and which yet may form patterns around
the play of chance, fate or fortune; and further just as we watch carefully
scripted and rehearsed plays in the theatre concluding in unrepeatable tragic
acts or self-effacing comic reductions of apparent tensions and
misunderstandings or we may listen to well-regulated expressions of organized
emotions in musical concerts when a symphony is played by expert professional
performers who at once follow the strict directions of a conductor and express
their own artistic insights, we also can
enjoy hyper-structured activities in marching bands, circus acrobats and synchronized
swimmers. In other words, as the Wikipedia
entry sets forth these four categories of play:
1.
Agon, or competition. It’s
the form of play in which a specific set of skills is put to the test among
players (strength, intelligence, memory). The winner is who proves to have
mastery of said skill through the game, for example a quiz game is a
competition of intelligence, the winner proves that it’s more intelligent than
the other players. E.g. chess
2.
Alea, or chance, the
opposite of Agon, Caillois describes Alea as “the resignation of will, An
abandonment to destiny”. If Agon used the skills of players to determinate a
victor Alea leaves that to luck, an external agent decides who the victor is.
E.g. playing a slot machine
3.
Mimicry, or mimesis, or role
playing Caillois defines it as “When the individual plays to believe, to make
himself or others believe that he is different from himself”. E.g. playing an
online role-playing game
4.
Ilinx (Greek for “whirlpool”),
or vertigo, in the sense of altering perception by experiencing a strong
emotion (panic, fear, ecstasy) the stronger the emotion is, the stronger the
sense of excitement and fun becomes. E.g. taking hallucinogens, riding roller
coasters, children spinning until they fall down.
Put another
way, the game-playing creatures, as well as humans, require at some periods of
their lives to engage in various form of play, and therefore to find or
construct a play-ground and to gather during a play-time; and sometimes to
prepare in advance instruments or tools to play with. The play may move from a point of stasis
through more or less elaborate activity and then back to stasis or pass on to a
newly defined relationship between the players—from neutral actor to favoured
mate, for example. The play may begin,
however, with disorderly or even hostile relations and actions and then achieve
a configuration of order, harmony and establishment of future long-term
(seasonal or life-time) relationships.
Thus the male puffer fish begins a set of actions that separate him
normal non-play time and organizes an area as a play-ground into which the
female will join him in copulation, insemination and nesting. The manakin birds gather to perform at a set
time and to be seen in a fixed space, their activities, including observation
and approval or rejection, re-organize the virtually random relations that
first obtain into a nesting pairs and non-reproducing outsiders. Seemingly self-absorbed with his own skilful
performance of trimming and using his sticks to drum in a solo performance for
his own delight, the male palm cockatoo establishes both time and space for the
display—an activity that emerges from the more natural and instinctive gestures
and sounds of foreplay and which then slides back into the ruffled and noisy
encounter which is mating itself. The
female bird may be first drawn to the same time and place by recognition of the
preparatory signs of the drumming to follow or, if they have already mated and
set up a relationship, now turns her attention to the performance she knows
from past experience she will enjoy, an enjoyment, however, that is in addition
to if not separate from the copulatory discharge of sexual energy.
Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens: Proeve Ener Bepaling Van Het Spelelement Der Cultuur. Groningen,
Wolters-Noordhoff cop. 1985; original Dutch edition, 1938. English translation: Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949.
