Darwin’s octopus gazes back at me from its jar, eyes deep and intelligent and sentient – at least they would be if this mollusc were not a long-dead specimen preserved in chemicals. This is no distinct species, but the actual pet octopus Charles Darwin kept on board HMS Beagle. The eyes into which I peep once peeped into his.
In fact, there is an eerie sense of reciprocity throughout the Natural History Museum’s mind-expanding Colour and Vision show. It makes you aware of your own eyes as you explore this exhibition about seeing in the natural world. There are few visual experiences quite as fascinating and challenging as looking at fossils, those stony images of ancient life, as intricate and subtle as any work of art – and sometimes just as abstract. It is hard to make sense of the oldest fossils here: can the blobby shape of Dickinsonia really be life as we know it?
One of the reasons such remotely early life forms (Dickinsonia flourished 600m years ago) appear so alien to us is their lack of eyes. These boneless, almost shapeless creatures lived in a dark, tactile ocean. Then suddenly life turned visual. In the “Cambrian explosion” that started about 542m years ago, animal bodies – though still invertebrate, and still in the sea – suddenly got a lot more complex and diverse. Strange, scary, armour-plated predators chased other scuttling creatures across the floors of silent seas. To survive you needed an advantage: you needed to be able to see.
This exhibition has early examples of “seeing” animals from Canada’s famous Burgess Shale, but its most amazing fossils are trilobites. These segmented creatures had a huge variety of eyes that bulged out or perched on enormous towers. Their beautiful fossils are wondrous monuments to the evolution of the eye. What did the world look like to them? We’ll never know, but some living animals related to the ancient creatures of the Cambrian seas have extremely good vision. The mantis shrimp, an arthropod that flourishes today and draws up its massive claws inside a spirit jar in this show, has the best vision in the natural world – better than us.
And yet it sees utterly differently. Arthropods have compound eyes with an array of light-catching organs. We mammals have camera-like eyes that focus light into a single image. The reason Darwin’s octopus looks at us in such a human fashion is that many molluscs have camera eyes similar to ours. You don’t even need a face – clams have eyes peeping out of their colourful flesh; scallops have excellent vision too. Even some jellyfish have efficient eyes while lacking the brain power to process the optical information.
Humans see the world in colour, unlike many species that see in black and white, or earthworms who barely distinguish night and day. A minimalist light installation by Liz West at the start of the exhibition delights in this human visionary spectrum, from red to violet. Yet some birds can see infrared and ultraviolet, inhabiting a richer electromagnetic realm. They can also create stupendous colour displays with their bodies.
From the iridescent blue and green feathers of birds of paradise to the colourful genitals of male mandrills, the museum’s stuffed specimens are artfully displayed to illuminate the complex ways the animal world exploits colour to warn of danger, create camouflage and attract mates.
All this beauty is desperate stuff, of course. Eyes and the colours they see are not there to glorify God’s creation, as the Victorian art critic John Ruskin piously believed. It was his contemporary Darwin who saw – using his own eyes – that animals evolve their fabulous colour and vision to gain advantage in the struggle for existence. This exhibition takes a ruthlessly clear view of nature. Based on up-to-the-minute research by Natural History Museum scientists, it is a lucid revelation about the evolutionary tree of life.
Last summer, in the overgrown garden my family like to think of as an ecological meadow, we watched dozens of black and yellow caterpillars crawling up tall stems of ragwort. Here are the same species in this show – together with the bright red moths they become. The red is a danger signal: by eating ragwort the cinnabar moth and its caterpillar become poisonous to predators. Famed cinnabar ... the name of this flame-coloured British insect refers to a favourite substance of medieval alchemists.
Only humans appreciate the colours of the world as “beautiful” and try to capture them in art. Our evolution into a conscious, art-making animal changed our relationship with vision and colour. Red does not just mean danger to us. It can mean lots of things, or nothing at all. We can name it, paint with it. Ice-age artists were already using red ochre to contrast with black charcoal in their cave drawings.
Yet humans are not a fixed pinnacle of evolution, enthroned forever in some godly perfection. One day we may see the world in a way as remote from our current perceptions as the compound vision of a crab. Artist Neil Harbisson, who was born completely colourblind, shares his technology-enabled aural vision at the end of the exhibition. Using a specially designed device, he is able to “hear” colours and suggests that one day we may all evolve this ability. The stars will sing their colours to our unrecognisable progeny.
- Colour and Vision is at the Natural History Museum, London,15 July to 6 September.
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