Last night we were watching a TV nature program on flowers.  Jasmine, sweat pea, bleeding heart.  A fully spread red rose.  The orchids, oh, the orchids!  All the zoomings-in on petal and bract, spathe and spadix; quivering pistils and arrays of prongs, threads, fibrils, tendrils arched or erect, packets and finials powdery or wet with nectar, hidden and cloaked or flaunted.  Petals: textures as leathery as a saddle or as translucent as her peignoir; suggestive, private, sensuous…forbidden.  Beards, ruffles, frills; fractals and fugues, confounding or merry and playful.  Colors deadeningly intense defeating the digital color gamut, or only hinted by the the delicacy of a dream.  Passion flowers and primroses, orchids and daisies; nasturtiums and rhododendron.  Astilbes.  Hollyhock.  Bugbane, bee-wort.   Suddenly the narrator stopped and blurted that old question: “Why are flowers so beautiful?”

 

Funny how flowers do that, make you blurt out, for no reason, except simply because of their beauty.

 

I remember the first time, long ago now, that I brought a bouquet of spring daffodils to my wife, for no particular reason except I thought I was supposed to, and she looked both startled and delighted, to me a new and startling and delightful combination, and she gasped, “Oh!  Flowers!”  Just to hear her say that in that certain way and to see her face blossom into such loveliness, and how that made me feel, are the simple reasons, the best reasons in the world, why I am still bringing her flowers.  But usually there is already a vase of fresh flowers, frequently dusky orange alstromeria that she bought at Kroger, arranged in a vase on the coffee table.  Then it’s my turn to say (at first awkwardly, now it seems so natural): “Wow!  Those – what are they? – whatever they are they're really so beautiful!”   She and the nature narrator say it better.

 

Meanwhile our narrator was answering himself.  “For no reason, none at all for mankind, no reason except for flowers to reproduce themselves by luring insects, only certain insects, luring them and ingeniously loading …”

 

What a letdown.  But we knew it was coming.  We’ve heard this kind of Evo locution all our life (long before TV nature programs).  It’s sad.  We’re old now, and the sadness is getting to us – how sad it is, the void, the hollow feeling that must come to an award-winning expert-in-his-field Evoean forcing himself to clamp his eyes shut against beauty, simple astounding beauty, and having to mumble, “For no reason…”

 

To Evoeans beauty is a gosh-awful stumbling block, more embarrassing and appalling than any fossil gap, any mere scientific or philosophical challenge.  Evo has enough trouble just explaining how a couple of quarks collided and aggregated and crawled out of a black hole as microtubules and eventually, as a fish, sprouted legs and crawled out of the swamp onto dry land, and from then on wildly sprouted anatomy all over the place, much less how the perception of beauty sprouted.  That’s when Evo’s troubles really begin, to the embarrassment of our TV nature narrator who, caught of guard, ejaculates, “Why is a flower so beautiful?”

 

For no reason, Evo answers, none at all for mankind.  To bee-kind, yes.  To mankind, nada.  But why then, please tell us, why is mankind so excited by beauty?  There’s no Evo sense to beauty as beauty.

 

Evolectuals tend their unsustainable weed patch and throw together, at random, a corsage for you, “aesthetics” – that’s Evo’s plastic substitute for what you feel when you see an orchid.  That’s all you get, aesthetics, dry, wilted, rattling around inside a fatuously beribboned presentation box, sans even the baby’s breath.  Like a bee lured to an impotent daisy and leaving cross-eyed and unsatisfied, we’ve buzzed the blighted Evo hothouse, not a pretty sight, storms of mutant pollen, we’re allergic – ca-ca-CA…CHOO!

 

We don’t know any professional Evolectuals personally.  But we wouldn’t be surprised if a good many of these academicians, especially the ladies, after a hard day at the glassed-in Evo office escape and rush outside and, of a summer evening, smell the real roses, maybe tend their own in their own high-rise urban rose gardens.  We hope so.  Or nurse their prize rare orchid collection.  Or arrange ikebanas, thus to exercise, and enjoy, the full powers of intelligent oriental artistic design.  We really hope so.

 

Explaining the existence of beauty, the human craving and appreciation of beauty, comes naturally to a Creationist, in our case joyfully,  because it’s so basic to Creationism.  A Creationist sees the beauty of a flower as even more irreducible than the complexity of DNA, which itself is exquisite just to behold, if we could.  A Creator (skip the theology) would be expected not only to be in command of every molecular intricacy of what He created, and how to get insects involved, but also to really enjoy creating, like you would, and enjoy what He had created, (“And he saw that it was good” Genesis 1:12), and enjoy passing it on to us to enjoy too, just as a good mother offers her breast to her newborn or a Popsicle to her 3-year-old, or a grandfather a pretty birdhouse he'd built himself to his grandchild.

 

When not denying the existence of beauty altogether as just another Eurocentricity, or otherwise ripping its petals off,* Evolectuals say the perception of beauty is only an odd confluence of molecules that register certain vibrations, nothing personal.  That beauty is a perception in the eye of the beholder, we have never denied.  What we’re saying is, the Creator created that too.  Beauty is an attribute of God Himself (skip the theology), which He has shared with us, after His own image.

 

Again thanks to the Creator’s intent, flowers can be hybridized with each other to create even more beauty, but not Evo with Creationism.  Stretching the days of Genesis into eons; letting God toss a few seeds into the air and then sending Him or him or Her or her or it off to play somewhere else, or just letting Him insert a soul into a promising hominid like a bee inseminating a waiting petunia, or weeding Him out altogether – yields only something uglier and thornier.

 

Meanwhile, back to watching TV nature programs.  For well over a half a century we’ve especially enjoyed nature films, and now it’s our favorite, almost exclusive, media entertainment.  The quality of the photography has improved so incredibly, but the sound, alas, has become increasingly degraded by noise and static -- irrelevant Eco and Evo propaganda -- as annoying as commercials, actually are commercials.  The zapper solves our problem.  But what about the narrator’s?  Our advice to Evoean documentarians is to stick to waltzing with wolves and sharks.  At least you won’t be blurting out that 64-million-year question, why so beautiful?  And on your way home don’t forget the O flowers.

 

 

 

 * The academic term for that is "deconstructionism."  Enough right there for a PhD thesis.