Having examined 1,141 species of birds, researchers at the Australian National University have disproved yet another Darwinian mantra.
They’ve discovered that, contrary to what Darwin and Darwinists have always maintained, it’s not just male birds who sing their beautiful songs, but also female ones. And neither of them sing to attract sexual mates.
Yet again, when faced with the sheer beauty of the world, Darwinists are found out.
Left out of their cold-blooded ratiocinations is something that has to be obvious to any unbiased observer: the world is organised according not only to rational principles, but also to aesthetic ones.
In many instances aesthetics comes before practicality, or even cancels it out. Not only, as Dostoyevsky suggested, can beauty save the world – beauty is the world.
Look at the peacock’s tail for example. At first sight, this is a hindrance: after all, the oversized protuberance reduces the bird’s mobility, thus making it less able to flee from predators. Darwinists explain this and many other examples of seemingly useless aesthetic characteristics, especially in males, as a factor of sexual selection.
The more striking the male’s appearance, the more likely it would be to appeal to the aesthetic sense of a female and thereby pass its own genes on to the next generation. However, this raises a question that’s rather awkward for Darwinism: whence do animals acquire their aesthetic sense in the first place?
In the case of the peacock this comes packaged with characteristics that actively hamper the survival of the species. Clearly, metaphysical aesthetics overrides physical functionality – yet again metaphysics takes the lead.
This applies to birdsong as well, which, as we’ve found out, isn’t there to chat up the opposite sex. It does, however, betray the bird’s location to predators, again jeopardising physical survival for the sake of beauty.
Or look at the geometric perfection of physical bodies. Particularly telling here is the golden section, obtained by dividing a length into two unequal portions, of which the shorter one relates to the longer one as the latter relates to the overall length.
Any length can be divided into an infinite number of portions, but only one division will produce this geometrically perfect ratio.
Modern scientists discover the proportion of golden section in the morphological makeup of birds and man, plants and animals, in the structure of the eye (which so baffled Darwin that he admitted evolution couldn’t explain it – yet), in the location of heavenly bodies, in brain biorhythms and cardiograms.
Scientists are united in their conclusion: because this phenomenon goes across all levels of material organisation, it conveys a deep ontological meaning. But science is unable to explain it, and the best that honest researchers have done so far is admit their inability to account for the aesthetic aspect of the world.
After all, aesthetically perfect shapes add nothing to the organism’s survivability and may well endanger it.
Why, for example, do cereal plants need stalks with joints arranged according to the golden section? This does nothing to make the stalk stronger.
Why do the bodies of dragonflies relate to the length of their separate parts according to the principles of the golden section? This doesn’t enable them to fly any faster.
Why do our fingers relate to the length of their joints the same way? This doesn’t make gripping objects any easier.
Indeed, if Darwin was right, and organisms evolve in the direction of greater survivability, then why do they have so many seemingly useless, and often potentially dangerous, features that nonetheless adhere to rigid aesthetic principles?
The aesthetic arrangement of nature points at a metaphysical, rather than physical, purpose. And that’s exactly what’s revealed in birdsong.
The human ear can perceive no more than 10 modulations per second. Birdsong, however, often delivers 100-400 such modulations, making much of it imperceptible to us.
The only way to hear all of it is by recording the song on a specially designed tape recorder that can slow it down when playing it back. The listeners can then be exposed to an aural canvas compared to which the nightingale, our established vocal star, doesn’t appear all that virtuosic.
In fact, many scientists regard the nightingale’s songs as rather primitive compared to, say, the musicality of the hermit thrush (Hylocichla guttata). Played at a slower speed, his singing shows characteristics amazing in the animal world.
He often repeats the passages of his music, each time in a slightly altered version. In fact, his singing has been compared to the ‘theme with variations’ of classical composers.
The bird follows two- or even four-beat bars, and even composes harmonic accompaniment to the main subjects, singing two voices at the same time.
Actually, some of the world’s leading experts in musical folklore were fooled by a clever researcher who played the slowed-down bird’s music to them, having first identified it as the chant of an African shaman.
The musicologists were perplexed. Understandably, none of them could identify the ethnic provenance of the music. But they all refused to believe that it came from an African shaman, insisting that it could only have originated in a higher musical culture.
The current debunking of Darwin, published in the journal Nature Communications, says, “Our findings… call for a re-evaluation of the pervasive view of birdsong as evolved through sexual selection.”
The authors, of course, stopped short of even hinting at the gross inadequacy of Darwin’s theory in general. Modern science at best accepts natural selection as only one – and far from the most significant – factor in ‘the origin of species’, and surely the authors of the study know this.
But they’ve got mortgages to pay and families to feed, something that would be in jeopardy for any Darwin denier. Modernity encourages free scientific enquiry – but only if the results agree with its founding principles.
Intellectual freedom? It’s strictly for the birds.