The Pleasure of Spandrels

I'm taking a break today from work, as always on a Friday, so that I can do some house chores and maybe later today, catch up with friends. I haven't given much thought about the topic that I'm going to blog today but let's just play as we go along.

I was writing about 'meaning' last week and I explored the possibility that the need for meaning is a kind of an 'unintended' consequence of having intelligence. Biologists and philosopher's call that spandrel - a term which originated from architecture referring to the triangular space between the top of an arch and the rectangular structure that frames it. 

If you design a door with an arch--which is the real intent of the architect--you will end up with some space just above the pair of archs where it meets the horizontal structure above. Usually this space, the spandrel, is filled with ornamentations. This is simply a side-effect of having an arch for the architect did not start off designing these decorative spaces purely as works of art, and then later thought maybe they should have an arch as the doorway.

The term spandrel was borrowed as an analogy in evolutionary biology by Stephen Jay Gould when he speculated that perhaps there were some biological features that were the by-product of evolution. The human chin for instance, has no specific function, but because our jaws have evolved over aeons to adapt to the kind of food we eat, the shape of its bones produced something which we call a chin, which had no particular evolutionary use. But the 'useless' chin was somehow adapted later, as it often happens in evolution, for sexual selection. People with 'sexier' chins,  produce more offsprings.

The brain is evolved as an information processing centre for an organism to make logical decisions about whether an environment is safe. It decides how to response to external stimuli--is the object in front of me my lunch or am I lunch. As the brain evolves in complexity, certain spandrel properties arise. The act of dreaming while we are asleep, which seems to serve no purpose, could be one of them. Perhaps all the fruits of human civilisation, like art and music, are 'useless' spandrels?

 If the river has a brain, perhaps it will ask the question: why do I seek the sea? 

Perhaps, like its architectural equivalent, it is the spandrels that make life beautiful. What would life be without speculative philosophising, dreaming and creating great works of art? Perhaps spandrels are what make us human, as we know it.

This blog itself is like a spandrel, sprouting up in the interstices of cyberspace, the pseudo-scholarly graffiti of an idle mind. But what great pleasure it is to be able to fill up these space-time spandrels. Life will be so much less meaningful without them.