Although Rothenberg is not a biologist, he introduces his book, Survival of the Beautiful, with a clear exposition of evolution and its two main drivers: natural selection (‘survival of the fittest’) and sexual selection (‘survival of the most attractive’). The concept of sexual selection, usually in the guise of a female selecting a specific male as a mating partner, was a core element of Charles Darwin’s great synthetic theory of evolution. Rothenberg has no issue with this concept, nor with the considerable biological research demonstrating its validity. Nevertheless, he raises what he considers to be a deeper question: why should traits that clearly act as sexual selectors, such as the quality of a male bird’s song, be just the way they are? In other words, why does a blackbird sound like a blackbird and a nightingale like a nightingale? Many evolutionary biologists who pursue the adaptionist program would say that these characteristics have evolved from effectively random variations in a more simple starting base. Over time and multiple rounds of sexual selection, these small variations come to signal something about the ‘fitness’ or otherwise of the singer of the song. Rothenberg accepts this argument in principle, but he clearly finds it distasteful. Instead, he suggests that animals, or at least a subset of them, have some kind of aesthetic sense, and that their activities constitute a form of art.

At this point, one might be tempted to dismiss the book as a naïve exercise in New Age Romanticism. However, in the chapters that follow, Rothenberg engages the reader with an eclectic series of discussions on diverse expressions of beauty in nature, twentieth-century abstract art and science. He starts with bowerbirds. The males of these remarkable birds, mostly endemic to Australia, construct bowers of sticks and foliage to attract females. They enhance the attractiveness of their constructions with collections of objects, the characteristics of which vary with species, just like their bowers. Satin bowerbirds collect blue objects, these days usually small pieces of blue plastic. A female bowerbird makes her choice to mate with a particular male on the basis of his bower, his collection of objects, and the song and dance routine he performs within his bower. Rothenberg says outright: ‘Look at the process as an example of aesthetic selection and you can find the roots of the history of art beginning millions of years before humanity with these remarkable birds.’

In the next two chapters, Rothenberg comes at his argument from multiple angles: further discussion of sexual selection; the contrasting ways influential biologists Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948) identified and documented form and function in animals; and more on birdsong. Rothenberg also introduces the idea, further developed in Chapter 4 ‘Pollock in the Forest’, that the formalisms of abstract twentieth-century visual art and atonal music allow us to perceive a wider range of elements in the natural world as objects of beauty. He writes: ‘If we find similar fractal patterns in [Jackson] Pollock’s drips and supposedly chaotic natural scenes of trees in the forests, rivulets in the sand, or snow melting in the grass, then this might help us explain why such abstraction on the wall lures us in, makes us feel like we are inside the whole environment.’

I suspect he has a good point there, certainly worthy of serious debate, but what have cuttlefish and battleships got to do with it? Well, it’s all in the art of camouflage. Taking his cue from the father-and-son team of Abbott and Gerald Thayer, Rothenberg investigates camouflage in birds and its application to battleships during World War I and more recent military equipment. Although a fascinating story, the link to aesthetics seems forced. An equally arresting discussion of the amazing camouflage patterns displayed by giant cuttlefish doesn’t really help his argument. As much as he would like to reveal a cuttlefish camouflage aesthetic, Rothenberg ultimately (and graciously) admits: ‘Sure, it’s easy to get carried away. Of course we really know nothing about them.’

Can animals ever actually ‘make art’, something non-utilitarian, with aesthetic value, imbued with emotional expression? After a brief, yet insightful, discussion of conceptual art (here, art that does not produce a lasting object), Rothenberg turns to elephants. In the early 1980s, David Gucwa trained Siri, an elephant at Syracuse Zoo, to use a pencil or paintbrush to make marks on paper. After the twentieth century’s grand experiment in abstraction, Rothenberg (and, indeed, thousands of others) finds ‘something undeniably beautiful about them’. Since then, other elephants and their trainers have produced objects that continue to find a market. Rothenberg struggles to place ‘elephant art’ in an explicit aesthetic framework. Nevertheless, he concludes that ‘Art does not belong to us. It abounds everywhere.’

The book finishes with chapters on prehistoric cave art and the possibility of closer ties between art and science. Rothenberg’s key observation here is that the oldest known surviving art still has the power to resonate with us, though we do not know the cultural significance of such ancient images. Over thousands of years of cultural change, art practice has changed in parallel. Yet such changes tend to be inclusive, so that the total range of ‘what art is’ widens, without invalidating earlier practice. In contrast, science progresses and evolves in a way that supplants earlier ideas, interpretations, modes of practice. ‘So art,’ concludes Rothenberg, ‘can be seen to outlast science.’

Survival of the Beautiful covers enormous ground, and is well researched, with numerous provocative proposals. Rothenberg’s writing has a familiar conversational tone, which can be distracting. On the last page he disarmingly confesses: ‘In the end I am a bad explainer, a mediocre story-teller, but an enthusiastic reveler ...’ True, some sections stutter and stall, but it is usually easy to roll on until the following section drops back into gear. Harder to accept is that Rothenberg nowhere actually defines what he means by ‘beauty’ or what an aesthetic sense could possibly mean to a non-human being. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps merely getting the discussion started is his primary aim. If so, this book is a unique and accessible catalyst.