[Fis] Fwd: What is Art? The Missing Link
Pedro C. Marijuán
pedroc.marijuan at gmail.com
Tue Jan 27 21:33:59 CET 2026
Dear All,
It is a pity that we have not provided sufficient discussion yet on the
link between biological capabilities (at least, in advanced mammals) and
the emergence of human aesthetic/artistic impulses.
I will make some crazy comments or bold speculations, as you prefer.
As was pointed weeks ago, in quite different animal species there
appears a clear preference for shapes, colors, movements, compositions,
etc. that show aesthetic value for the human observer. Almost
universally it is related to mating, courtship and also to the rearing
of the offspring. Mammalian parenting, for instance, includes hormonal,
neurological, and social mechanisms with ad hoc forms of sound & visual
communication, lullabies, songs, etc. I referred days ago to Manfred
Clynes' sentic forms--quite easy to find in the way mammals (and humans)
produce their sounds and making "adorable" to their creatures. It is a
common trait of mammalian placental clades (quite probably).
Well, that stock of frequently (neotenic) preferences for forms and
sounds, and related emotions, gets expanded along human evolution.
Again, courtship, man-female bonding, and child rearing are in the
center. A term almost absent from any discussions appears: "love". It is
at the very nucleus of our species survival. Yes. It creates a
transcendent attachment to your pair, to your children--and beyond.
Falling in love is something that in my opinion is not far from the
complex that generates the extreme forms of art, those of the very, very
few that have civilization consequences. Actually, that capability would
be distributed along a continuum, with most people unable to feel or
sense real or extreme artworks. But of course, the need for the "extra
trophic" keeps being almost universal on the human sociotype, as I was
arguing days ago regarding entertainment industries, mass music,
tourism, etc. --and this generates a continuous stream of demi or pseudo
arts. Well, they are needed for social well being, presumably,
certainly. They are arts too.
And that was all!
With love--Pedro
, El 21/01/2026 a las 1:16, Csáji László Koppány escribió:
> Dear John, Marcus, Louis, Eric, Mark, and all FiS colleagues,
> We have witnessed excellent argumentations that were both inspiring
> and thought provking. I am grateful to participate.
> I circulate around an easy question after all these considerations:
> how the cellars' cognitive functions, self-cognition, and
> consciousness relate to each other, and how "emotion" as a factor
> links to them. Theoretically, all living creatures differ from
> crystals, stones, fluid, or aeriform materials by having a kind of
> "decision-making"--an ability of "willing" that gives them a "plus".
> Nevertheless, this ability is not an art form; it is just a
> differentia specifica between living ones and those that exist without
> a decision-making gift (capability). Art seems to be a step further,
> which elevates the material environment to a level that could be
> called "super-consciousness", or something like that.
> Super-consciousness empowers us not only to shape the world but to
> imagine it in another way, and create "new realities"--in a way that
> would not be possible physically.
> This kind of imagination--that exceeds the animals' "rationality"
> (causability?), creativity, and communicative acts...
> Can we specify--and how can we?--such a "plus" (I called it a "human
> spark" in my initial paper), or is this evolutionary thesis just a
> delusion?
> Cheers,
> László
>
> Mark Johnson <johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com> ezt írta (időpont: 2026. jan.
> 19., H, 10:05):
>
> Yes! Thank you Joe!
>
> On Mon, 19 Jan 2026 at 08:33, <joe.brenner at bluewin.ch> wrote:
>
> Dear John,
> We have not talked to each other recently, but I follow your
> work with interest and wanted to applaud the last three lines
> of your 19.1 note: ... "the 'logic' of the Cosmos.
> Symbiogenesis is the mechanism by which life has acquired the
> logic of the Cosmos. In other words there is a continuum from
> the foundations of the Cosmos to life that is expressed in art."
> The image it evoked was that of my sculptor father, Michael
> Brenner, making a bust of me at age 10 in his studio in New
> York. He danced around his easel in a frenzy /(frénésie) /,
> chopping away at the emerging marble head, sweating and
> grunting. Art comes more easily to many, but I suggest that
> its becoming is always partly unconscious, an expression of
> the energetic foundations of existence.
> Cheers,
> Joe
>> ------but ---- Message d'origine ----------
>> De : JOHN TORDAY <jtorday at ucla.edu>
>> À : fis <fis at listas.unizar.es>
>> Date : 17.01.2026 22:58 CET
>> Sujet : [Fis] What is Art?
>> Dear FIS, I am of the opinion that art is an expression of
>> consciousness, raising the question Art as to what
>> consciousness is? I fell down this 'rabbit hole' twenty years
>> ago, having performed a series of experiments to understand
>> how and why Parathyroid Hormone-related Protein (PTHrP) is
>> necessary for the formation of alveoli in the lung (Rubin LP,
>> Kovacs CS, De Paepe ME, Tsai SW, Torday JS, Kronenberg HM.
>> Arrested pulmonary alveolar cytodifferentiation and defective
>> surfactant synthesis in mice missing the gene for parathyroid
>> hormone-related protein. Dev Dyn. 2004 Jun;230(2):278-89)?
>> The duplication of the PTHrP Receptor gene during the
>> water-land transition amplified all of the vertebrate
>> physiologic adaptations to land- lungs, kidneys, skeleton,
>> skin- and since PTHrP is a stretch-sensitive gene, I tested
>> the hypothesis that PTHrP mediated the vertebrate adaptation
>> to the force of gravity. If cells are exposed to zero gravity
>> they lose their differentiated phenotypes (i.e. they
>> devolve), and when yeast are exposed to zero gravity they
>> cannot conduct a calcium flux, meaning that they are
>> unconscious. Moreover, human consciousness has been driven by
>> bipedalism (Torday JS. A central theory of biology. Med
>> Hypotheses. 2015 Jul;85(1):49-57), freeing our forelimbs for
>> tool making, including language as a tool, and locomotion.
>> Importantly, both language and locomotion are under control
>> by the FoxP2 gene, so that positive selection pressure for
>> FoxP2 would have coordinately stimulated language and
>> locomotion, expressed through our hands and minds as art of
>> all kinds- literature, painting, sculpture, music- in other
>> words, art is a manifestation of our need to communicate with
>> our environment and with other humans.
>> Furthermore, all of the above is due to the evolution of
>> homeostatic control of energy due to Symbiogenesis (Sagan,
>> 1967), or the assimilation of factors in the environment that
>> threaten homeostasis, including the elements in the Cosmos,
>> the latter being an exaptation (Gould and Vrba, 1982) of
>> Stellar Nucleosynthesis (Hoyle, 1946), or the serial chemical
>> reaction of hydrogen and helium to form the stars, the
>> elements being their byproducts in the exact order of their
>> atomic masses as thec
>> Your comments and criticisms are welcomed.
>> Best, John
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> --
> Dr. Mark William Johnson
> Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health
> University of Manchester
>
> Department of Science Education
> University of Copenhagen
>
> Department of Eye and Vision Science (honorary)
> University of Liverpool
> Phone: 07786 064505
> Email: johnsonmwj1 at gmail.com
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