the answer is that all of these use harness disorder to generate a new form of [Music] order well I'm a biologist and I think that for the idea of beauty to be meaningful in biology it has to support the idea of meaning in life and to do that it must be able to explain the most significant characteristics of living organisms and that is the solving of life's problems as the philosopher Carl poer famously said all life is problem solving so Beauty to be related to biology must be able to explain why one bacteria evolve rapidly
within days to avoid Annihilation by antibiotics two cancerous tumors evolve rapidly to resist and recover from their destruction by painful chemo and radiotherapy and three multicellular life like you and me has evolved highly evolving immune systems that can within days again not Generations produce new DNA sequences that can be used to build new antibiotic to neutralize bacteria or viruses and so I propose that the standard view of Beauty in nature cannot achieve these properties um of living systems because a perfectly symmetric object our natural view of Beauty for example in architecture a greek temple or
radially symmetric Rose flow or a completely regular Crystal cannot be the basis of genuine evolution of problem solving living systems that is also clear when we consider the limitations of our computers when they follow perfectly determinate algorithms they produce perfectly regular outcomes that is why people who wish to succeed in longer term predictions for example in our weather systems resort to adding noise to their computations a recent book by the Oxford physicist Tim Palmer the Primacy of Doubt explains this initially counterintuitive idea beautifully well but isn't noise chaotic Randomness the very opposite of the greek
temple concept of beauty well yes you don't build a greek temple by just randomly throwing stones together so the dilemma here is that perfect symmetry seems to be the very antithesis of creativity it's static it's unchanging does that mean that we have to change our concept of symmetry as a model of beauty well here I come to a story just before the pandemic I collaborated with the philosopher and writer Benedict rattigan who approached me in 2019 to see whether a problem in symmetry that he was working on could relate to and be strengthened by my
work on multiscale causation in biology a concept that I refer to as biological relativity he told me about the ancient GRE philosopher heraclitus he also pointed out to me the creative artists Architects painters musicians they all avoid complete regularity and some East Asian artists seem to do that very deliberately at Temple may not have complete symmetry so could it be that there is a deeper concept of symmetry than the concept of pure symmetry I could hardly believe my ears I listen to his Exposition because that is precisely what I have been working on recently return
finally to a moment the bacteria seeking to avoid Annihilation by antibiotics the cancerous tumors recovering aggressively from radio or chemotherapy or our immune systems going into overdrive to produce new DNA sequences during a pandemic the answer is that all of these use harness disorder to generate a new form of order so my proposal is the deepest form of beauty of symmetry if you wish is precisely the symmetry between order and disorder that in my view is the yin and the Yang of the universe most relevant to this session is that ratan and I explored this
idea of symmetry between order and disorder with other Oxford people from art music mathematics logic philosophy physics biology in the books as just been published called appropriately the language of symmetry sorry for the advertisement but there is my contribution to the concept of beauty and how it relates to the meaning of life thank you very much okay so now I'd like to open up the discussion and I'll start off with a very simple question is beauty objective so throw to you first George okay simple so now can you measure Beauty by a scientific experiment can
you get a me and you point it and it says this is two M Rembrant okay and the answer is no it's not objective in that kind of sense well it it makes me think what is actually objective what is objectivity is it something you can measure or exactly so what is objective what is truth that's where you've got to start off actually yeah um the the question is can you obtain consensus on Beauty by intellig people and I think to a large degree the answer is yes but assessment of beauty is indeed culturally dependent
and that is where the problem arises that for instance I find it difficult to relate to Japanese music and absolutely beautiful to Japanese people but I find it difficult to relate to so the problem is cultural dependence but let me give you two proofs that beauty is real and the first proof is it exists is that people of all cultures will pay for it and if you pay for something it must be real and i' we've just been looking for a house in a little town called Fisher on the sea and there are some wonderful
houses where you look down on the sea and the waves and the surface and all that and they cost twice as much this house is further along where the sea is over there in the distance so Beauty has real man value and that proves it exists and people pay large sums of money to go on cruises to Norway to to to Taiwan and all to all sorts of places so so I I think that is a an economic proof of the existence of Beauty and the second is the one which I've already mentioned in evolutionary
sense uh beauty is certainly real uh because otherwise you cannot explain why flowers are beautiful why uh hummingbirds are beautiful and all the rest of them it has as Dennis says it has to serve a purpose the purpose is sexual selection and that's a key feature the underlying purpose is to have a a bigger gene pool of variation from which you can select and there so there's a mechanism there by which Beauty actually is a causal agent of importance in biology and that proves it exists in that context I have a question why we find
flowers beautiful what's it evolutionary Advantage for us to find uh for us it's a secondary thing for for th what's important is that the the male the female bird finds the male bird for pollination yeah yeah okay and and and and in the case of the bee and the flour it's not clear if it's beauty or just um but but in the case of the of of of the male and the female Birds there's no question about it the peacock tail is there yeah I think the beauty there is the smell of the flower odor
yes it's beautiful but aesthetically I find I was driving past just a hedro today and I was like that's beautiful and was wondering why I found it beautiful so so the question is what about the different cultural aspects and I'm very aware of different cultures and I think one can go to the theory of relativity here which is my field of expertise and the space time it's a central feature of Einstein's theory can be expressed in different coordinate systems and it looks different in the different coordinates change coordinates it looks completely different and I think
that might be an analogy that Beauty has got a kind of a deeper level and different cultures are able to extract from it different kinds of aspects of the beauty which is really beautiful like to yeah um yes so uh no I don't think beauty is about monetizing something and I think the intrinsic reason I disagree with this I think is because this is really seeing us as the Arbiters of what is beautiful and it's a point of view which places us as somehow determining what equation works because we find it beautiful or objectively what
is beautiful because we determine it to be so and I take the point of view where there's an infinite unknown we have not yet encountered and I take the point of view that we approach things with an attitude of Wonder of encountering something Beyond us that we're transported to something Beyond us that is what I find truly beautiful yes that things we might find aesthetic um I don't think that you know only Japanese people would appreciate Japanese theater um but that's neither here or there I think that's the level of aesthetically what have we determined
that we would term that well collectively we like this I think that's a preference of we like something we would pay for it we don't like something I think that places Us in the position of arbiter where we're making decisions I think Beauty nature infinite wonder is vastly beyond us and is not something to be monetized or ascertained by what we determine or cultures defer about or what we put a price on I'll be very quick no please carry on the Symmetry between order and disorder which I agree is a strange symmetry but it's fundamental
can easily be measured I can measure the speed at which back bacteria hypermutate their genomes in other words harness stochasticity in order to escape the problem of antibiotics I can easily measure the way in which a cancerous tumor does the same kind of thing uses disorder in order to find a new form of order which is its own Survival and we can do the same for immune systems in our bodies so I I think it's easily measurable by my definition but I think only by my definition very good so I'd like to move on to
another question I have which is does the centrality of beauty to our scientific theories tell us something about the very character of the nature of reality in the universe I'll throw to you first Su um sure so um so firstly I think that mathematical equations are important one can seek Beauty in them and we had it talk about String Theory earlier and one can seek Elegance in it that's great but it's also self-contained um and I'm sure George knows much more about Witkin than I do but the idea that an equation can be selected for
its self-consistency for its beauty that's incredible but does it tell us anything outside of the equation itself and that's where I would say reality or M or what I'm talking about of these emergent phenomena that we have not yet encountered that are not captured within the equation those can only be sought by looking by encountering by experimenting by knowing there's a world outside the equation and not for the ultimate Pursuit being finding an elegant equation that somehow is meant to capture everything in this neat package but recognizing that's beautiful and important but there's a world
outside reality what we're encountering um matter the universe is not contained within that beautiful elegant equation but I I would um ask that it seems that the beauty seems to be a a tool that we've used to guide us in developing scientific theories so how would you think that plays into sure that's what I mean so I think that um there obviously is a role for equations and models and Mathematics clearly this is useful and interesting but I don't think it's the entirety I think it's it's like a it's like a line drawing but it
doesn't you know have the richness of phenomena that are Beyond what's captured by that George do you have anything to add to this um yeah uh so beauty of scientific theor is the standard model of particle physics is not a beautiful Theory it's an incredibly complicated mess okay um but Maxwell's equations is beautiful and it gives you electromagnetic waves in a very clear and beautiful way so that's a contrast what I think is beautiful in a sense is what underlies it and this relates to Dennis and I'm not quite sure if you understand this in
deta that underlying all of physics is the idea of symmetry symmetry groups underly all of physics and then in real outcomes like broken symmetries underly particle physics and so those ideas of there are actually emerging forms of matter that are not underlied by Broken symmetries they go beyond broken symmetries there's ways in which certain emerging forms of matter are defined that are not just in terms of a broken symmetry there can be local aspects of it so topological aspect absolutely right right so I would say that goes beyond just symmetry right for that applies to
yeah some Physics does emerge out of broken Symmetry and some the standard model of particle physics arises out of broken symmetry so some does but there's also ones that don't but with the breaking of symmetry I think you're close to what I'm referring to as the strange symmetry between order and disorder because that seems to me to be fundamental but but I think where the real beauty of physics comes is is what it allows and it allows those things you're talking about but much more it allows biology to come into existence exactly it allows the
genes to come in existence the proteins the folding nature of the proteins and I think it is absolutely beautiful the way that happens and then allows developmental biology to take place it allows each of us to grow out of a single fertilized cell in a process which is extraordinary reliable to continue watching this video click the link in the top left or in the description below or visit I.V for more debates and talks from the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas
