What Makes Life Beautiful?

The magic of rhyme and the search for a creator

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Many years ago, evolutionary psychologist Nick Humphrey met a family in Turkey with eight children who were unable to walk upright. Due to a genetic disease, they could only get around on all fours. He and his colleagues had traveled to Turkey to study the family and to film them, as an extraordinary example of human development.

The children were young adults by the time Humphrey met them and had difficult lives. The other villagers scorned them, and would throw stones at them and tease them. But they seemed to love each other deeply and to enjoy their daily routines. The parents had been told by the local imam that the kids’ disabilities were, in fact, a gift from Allah, a test.

The family lived 30 miles from the seaside in the southwest part of Turkey, but had never been to the beach. So Humphrey and his colleagues took them on an excursion. The kids took a kind of delight in their first experience with the ocean that Humphrey says is difficult to describe. Their mother sat on the sand in her long dress, watching her children running on all fours into the water. She gazed at the waves breaking and the sky and the distant horizon, and she said, “I never knew Allah had made such a beautiful world.”

This is where Humphrey’s new book, Why is the World so Beautiful: Our Minds in Search of Nature’s Rhymes, begins. The book is a fascinating exploration of the role that beauty plays in human psychology and evolution. “We can’t but help see beauty when we find it, no matter how poor our circumstances,” he told me when we spoke this week. “We will then start asking questions about who made it for us.”

I spoke with Humphrey about where we find beauty in the world, what rhyme has to do with it, and why the Japanese language sounds so beautiful. We also talked about monkey aesthetics and how the rise of AI might influence how we understand beauty.

You write in the introduction that you had wanted to read a book called Why Is the World So Beautiful for many years. Why?

We all share it. The fact of beauty is such an important part of our lives—the beauty of nature as well as the beauty of paintings and music. And yet we have very little explanation of it from an evolutionary point of view.

By trade, I’m an evolutionary psychologist. I want to understand why our minds have evolved to have the needs and the characters that they do. I started working on this a long time ago. Some 50 years ago, just having finished my PhD, I thought I’d move on to do something rather different. I’d been working on the brains of monkeys and their visual systems, and I thought, “I’ll give that a rest and try and do some research on what monkeys would like to do if they had the choice rather than being submitted to my experiments.”

I set out to work on monkey aesthetics. I thought that would unlock the key to why humans like beauty. It wasn’t a huge success. I put monkeys in a situation where they could switch between pictures on a screen or between different sounds, for example. And then, I started giving them the obvious things. I played Bach and showed them paintings by Matisse. And it was a complete failure. The monkeys didn’t give a toss for these examples of human art. The things that they did mind about very strongly were colors, just plain fields of colored light, for example, got them quite worked up.

They would love blue light. Red got them very obsessed and they would do anything to escape it. I found the monkeys showed preferences. They looked at pictures of other monkeys. They enjoyed that. They liked Mickey Mouse films, provided they were played in the right direction, interestingly enough. They didn’t like them going backwards. But I didn’t find much evidence of what we might call an aesthetic sense in monkeys.

This was back in 1970. I wrote a long essay about the origins of beauty, and then I moved on to some other things. But it’s always been at the back of my mind. And I’ve been working on the nature of consciousness and, and intelligence since then, really nonstop.

I thought, if I don’t write this book now about beauty, I never will.

The argument you make in the book is that what we call beauty is based in rhyme, which is an idea you take from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Can you tell me more about this idea?

It’s not obvious that a book about beauty would be a book about rhyme. Way back when I first started working on this topic, I was researching what had been written on it. And I came across this astonishing piece of work by Hopkins, the poet. He’d written an essay for his tutor at Oxford when he was a student there at the age of 20. It ran to 40,000 words and it was called “On the Origins of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue.” And it just bowled me over. It’s an extraordinary piece of work. I think everybody should read it. I quote from it quite widely in the book.

And Hopkins sets this essay in the context of a discussion between a professor and a student in a college garden. He takes examples from the garden. He reaches for a bunch of chestnut leaves, for example. And he says, “Well, look at this. What’s going on here? Why do we find this beautiful? It’s because we’re exposed to intriguing, teasing examples of things which are alike but different.” Things, he says, which rhyme, which belong to the same category, but are different examples of it. He starts with flowers and then he goes on to poetry. He says that ideas rhyme. People can rhyme with each other and the way they behave and so on. He’s very persuasive.

I was taken aback by this idea. I suddenly began to realize that things I’d noticed and thought of as beautiful out there in the world, rainbows cutting across the sky and ideas I’d come across in books: They all showed the same characteristic. There was always rhyme at the bottom of them.

And in the book I run through a gallery of rhyme, because I want to show just how widespread this is, how things which you wouldn’t have thought of being in the same category actually do show the characteristic of balanced symmetry, ranging from rap by Eminem, to theories in physics and paintings by great artists and even football, the beautiful game as it has been called in this country.

And then, I sit there and say, “Well, what’s going on here? Why should we like these? Why should we like rhyme?” Here’s a simple example: The cat sat on the mat. We all know that it kind of works for us. “The cat sat on the sofa,” doesn’t work for us. Why? It’s certainly not obvious, and no one has written about it. When I looked into the scientific philosophical literature, nobody talks about rhyme or at least why we should like it.

One argument that you make in the book is that we are drawn to rhyme and order in nature because they suggest a benevolent creator, a good divine force. But rhyme has also been associated with evil or dark forces, sin, and entrapment. For example, in early Islam, certain oracles known as kahins would deliver their prophecies in rhyme, which were associated with evil spirits. And in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, rhyme is associated with Satan, sin, and the fall. Milton himself considered rhyme deceitful, restrictive, even barbarous. How do you square this history with your argument?

It’s true that rhyme is associated with magic. Partly because we don’t have an explanation of rhyme, it catches our attention. It alerts us. We think something’s going on there and we don’t really understand it. One thing people have said or imagined is that, of course, where there’s rhyme, there is some kind of elemental force, demonic or divine.

But somebody’s trying to tell us something. The same idea is taken up when people have written about coincidences, which are a kind of rhyme, two things that belong together because they share some property, although otherwise we wouldn’t see what can connect them. We tend to think they can indicate the work of the devil, or the work of God, or the fact that there are truths out there in nature which we haven’t noticed before.

They set us to work thinking. Whenever we come across rhyme, we don’t just take it for granted. We want to know why things rhyme. And the answer I give is because that’s how we find out about the world we live in.

How does rhyme help us learn about the world we live in?

The world we live in is full of rhymes. Rhyme is in nature’s DNA. We live in a world that contains such a variety of objects that fall into particular categories, which contrast to other categories. When things out there in nature rhyme, it’s because they belong to different kinds of objects.

Now, why does the world contain so many kinds of objects? It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? We live in a very extraordinary place on Earth, because life evolved here. And because life evolved here, organisms, plants, animals and so on, developed into species, all of which gave rise to subspecies and individuals. And then along came humans, and humans started making a world which rhymes at a whole different level because we create artifacts, tables, chairs, castles, motor cars, bicycles.

Imagine that you’re a little human baby entering this world. It’s an awful lot of work to discover what’s out there. How do you begin? The first stage of an infant’s cognitive development is in fact learning the names of things. Learning what belongs together and what doesn’t.

Here’s the beginning of a structure in this world. It’s a simple heuristic principle, if I can use that term, a rule of thumb. It just works awfully well. Now, my point is that it’s not just that it works well, but because it works well, we’ve evolved to take pleasure in seeing rhymes of that kind.

You write that rhyme in language can force creativity because it leads to unexpected pairings of words and therefore ideas. And that this can explain why so many of us think in sentences rather than ideas or pictures. Can you tell me more about this hypothesis?

It’s a sort of a sideline in the book, but I draw attention to the fact that it’s rather peculiar that we think in words all the time. Linguists have assumed that the way the mind and language work with each other is that we turn thoughts into words. And then words that we speak or write down, the reader or the listener reads the words and turns them back into thoughts. That’s the way we communicate through language. But why, when we’re thinking to ourselves, when we’re talking to ourselves, do we not go directly from one thought to another? Why do we think in actual words? We don’t actually all do it. There’s quite a lot of individual differences, but most of us do employ language to think things through.

What I suggest is that it’s because it produces accidental outcomes, which we’d never have expected. Once you put things into words, they begin to have acoustic rhymes, and they have these rhymes even when we hear them in our heads. And so language is intrinsically poetical.

And what poetry does is continually to tease us with possible relationships which we may or may not follow through. Poets are very well aware of their skill in exploiting that. But every time we use language, we’re in the realm of poetry and, therefore, thinking in language and words is actually hugely creative. It opens up possibilities, alerts us to things which we otherwise just wouldn’t have noticed.

I also, probably controversially, draw attention to the fact that different human languages have different propensities in that direction. Some languages have much more rhyme than others.

The most rhyming languages of all are languages like Japanese. It’s been said it’s almost impossible to say anything in Japanese without having rhymes present. Romance languages like French or Italian, for example, and Spanish do the same. English is peculiar. English has rather fewer rhymes than those other languages because we have more syllables in English than any other language does. That means that when rhymes do