ART & ORGANISM
EVOLUTION NOTES
BRICOLAGE
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“evolution is all about making a virtue of necessity”
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“everything comes from something”*
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Traits are adaptive to the extent that they help organisms maximize their fitness relative to real or potential competitors. This always occurs in a specific environments where the challenges can range from climate and geology to the availability of prey or the pressures of predators. Within a species or population, there is also direct or indirect competition between individuals to insure access to resources ranging from sources of energy to potential reproductive partners.
Variations in traits that meet these needs more or less effectively are preserved in subsequent generations. Often these preserved variations are so transformed that it is almost impossible to determine their ancestral form.
Almost any trait can be the “raw material” for an adaptive variation — “bricolage” is the term for “using whatever is available” to “solve the problem.” In the spirit of the television drama character, McGyver, the ways in which common materials can be used is often surprising.
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BRICOLAGE bricolage (brê´ko-läzh´, brîk´o-) noun. Something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available [French, from bricole, trifle, from Old French, catapult, from Italian briccola, of Germanic origin.] (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition); in French, the bricoleur is a handyman who does his chores with materials at hand.
Claude Levi-Strauss used this term (in The Savage Mind, 1962) to characterize mythical thought as opposed to scientific thought. (Where mythical thought relies upon materials and tools at hand and deals mainly in signs, scientific thought seeks to go beyond the immediate constraints of the situation and deals in concepts; L-S implies that signs are discovered while the open possibilities of concepts leads to invention.) Francois Jacob uses this term to characterize his perception of evolution: assembling, constructing what is needed out of whatever elements are available. Patricia Churchland agrees: nature works with what’s available ______________________________________________ Can exploring the genetic basis of language can help us understand human evolution? “Broca’s Area, a region of the brain that has long been thought to play an essential role in language, may have evolved from neural areas in ancestral species that were used for temporal sequencing or motor control.” [more]
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. *“everything comes from something” — really shorthand for “everything we can understand (=about which we are competent to have confident beliefs )” comes from “something we can understand .” As organisms with an umwelt — limited, species-typical competencies for detecting phenomena in the world or for making sense of what we can detect, there are some phenomena about which we are necessarily / constitutionally unable to understand. Such phenomena beyond our understanding is traditionally relegated to the status of what Augustine would term, “miracles.” . |
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BACK TO IMPROVOSATION IN EVOLUTION
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NOW READ BRICOLAGE in ART
NEXUS
BRICOLAGE in ART (collage, assemblage)
BRICOLAGE in EVOLUTION (spandrels, kluge)