The Aesthetic Radiance of Wondrous Machines

In her recent video installation Boring Billion, the artist Yuyan Wang traces a strange genealogy of machines.¹ Pieced together from found footage of industrial processes, engineering experiments, and scientific laboratories, the short film stages a wordless drama whose protagonists are not humans but uncanny robots and alien-looking machines.

The film begins underground, with close-ups of excavators and other heavy industrial equipment leaking lubricants and motor oil. The images, lush to the point of grotesque, depict technology as it burrows into the earth, digging holes and tunnels through rock and mineral. The camera then follows a narrow passage out of the subterranean depths and into the light, eventually revealing that the first-person perspective emanates from inside the brain of a humanoid robot. The heavy industrial machine begins to mutate and, as it struggles to claw its way to the surface, takes on human-like traits. A montage follows, showing a range of robotic simulations, with people training their artificial doubles to blink, stare, grasp, and walk. Then the robots start to glitch, falling and squirming as they transform into a variety of bizarre, alien, and purposeless forms, ranging from aquatic organisms and microscopic bodies to birds gliding across the sky. The video ends with shots of satellite capsules drifting off into space. The background soundtrack is composed of an immersive, drone-like R&B remix, in which a distorted, looping voice intones a haunting metallic lullaby: “You told me to take this chance and learn the ways of love.”

“Boring Billion,” the title of Wang’s film, is also the geological term for the vast period of evolutionary stagnation that stretched from roughly 1.8 billion to 0.8 billion years ago, after the earth’s land had stabilized into a single solid continent and its oceans were a warm, sulfuric soup with very little biological diversity. During this seemingly uneventful age—between the Great Oxidation Event, when the rise of atmospheric oxygen wiped out much of the planet’s anaerobic microbial life, and a period of rapid evolutionary change—life’s development appeared to stall. Evidence from the fossil record, however, shows that something much more interesting was happening under the surface. The earliest evidence of multicellular eukaryotic life, the seed that would lead to the evolution of all complex organisms, including humans, can be traced back 1.63 billion years, right in the thick of the Boring Billion.²

In borrowing this term, Wang implicitly extends the evolutionary framework to technology. Barely any humans appear in the film; it depicts the evolution of the technosphere as a self-directed and naturalized process, and an autonomous, artificial imitation of life that emerges from deep within the ground and then departs into outer space. Machinic genesis, Wang suggests, mirrors the planet’s geological history, in which a long, “boring” period conceals a phase of microscopic, slow experimentation and failure that sits at the threshold of an unprecedented evolutionary explosion of the weird and varied. The term “boring,” in this context, isn’t a value judgment: It indicates not an uninteresting period to be overcome, but a moment of seeming stagnation that is incubating the rich diversity already germinating.

Despite the dizzying pace of acceleration in AI and robotics, the current era can appear like a strangely “boring” epoch for technology. Much of the industry is organized around a familiar vision of automated assembly lines and labor-saving domestic devices designed to relieve humans of tedious tasks—from replying to emails and scheduling meetings to manufacturing widgets, washing dishes, and folding clothes. Technology has been subjected to a process in which the bizarre and the wacky, and the spooky and the strange have been deliberately edited out. What remain are standardized and agreeable chatbot assistants that churn out generic prose, image models that default to the bland familiarity of anonymous non-places such as airports and waiting rooms, and unimaginative robots engineered primarily for their usefulness in the factory or the home.

Yet even in this landscape, the playful and the eccentric endure, hidden in plain sight while somehow they remain dormant in technology’s grand narratives of progressive efficiency. Today in China, which is at the forefront of the race to embody AI, robots are everywhere: waiting to guide visitors in the reception halls of office buildings and shopping malls, delivering packages in elevators, and clearing plates in restaurants. But in addition to these increasingly familiar fixtures of everyday life, and in keeping with the country’s strategy of maximum AI diffusion, a stranger menagerie is emerging. Beyond diligent appliances is a myriad of seemingly useless companions, curiosities, and toys: robot dogs dressed in panda costumes; googly-eyed creatures for desks; and AI pillows that wag their tail when rubbed, marketed as cushions that “heal your heart.”

Perhaps the strongest association between China and robots are the viral videos of dancing androids, especially the captivating spectacles of synchronized choreography during the Spring Festival Gala. But more popular still is the endlessly entertaining and oddly endearing genre of footage, some compiled in Wang’s film, showing supposedly useful, functional robots glitch, stumble, collapse, and fail.

Technological progress, from industrial machines to contemporary AI, is conventionally understood as a process of increasing efficiency, one that produces ever more purposeful tools designed to automate labor and perform useful tasks. Yet this instrumental narrative, which invariably trends toward hard-working assistants that dutifully follow instructions, overlooks another fundamental driver of technological evolution: the aesthetic impulse, rooted in taste, curiosity, and play. The urbanologist Jane Jacobs made a related point decades ago: The dysfunctional and the impractical have an inherent value in economic life, one that utility alone cannot capture.³

The two of us contend that aesthetics has always been a powerful impetus in the evolution of technology, and yet it remains peripheral in the prevailing discourse. The narrative of efficiency acts as a selective pressure in its own right, keeping aesthetic variation—entertainment, surprise, mystery, wonder, terror, and delight—at the margins. Favoring the practical leads to “boring” technology—“boring” not in the sense of dull, but in the geological sense of the Boring Billion. The current age, paradoxically, seems stagnant even as it is accelerating, homogeneous on the surface while concealing a diversity of strange experiments.

In evolutionary biology, lineages that rapidly diversify into many forms are said to undergo a “radiation.” Diversification driven by taste rather than utility is described by some as “aesthetic radiation.” What might it take to cultivate such an aesthetic radiation in machines? To encourage a proliferation of technological forms and materials, a Cambrian explosion of robots? If the multiplicity that already exists latently were allowed to come to the fore, it would offer an escape from the monoculture of perfect utility. Such variation is the true tendency of technological evolution, the principle Darwin articulated in the famous last line of On the Origin of Species: “… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”⁴

The Cult of Efficiency

Technology’s history is marked by an enduring tension between machines as objects of play, wonder, and delight, and machines as efficient, dehumanized instruments of industrial production. From the Jacquard loom to the steam engine, industrial machines have been imagined and designed to replace physical work and automate manual labor. The word “robot” itself carries in its etymology the trace of this utilitarian assumption: First used by Karel Čapek in his wildly successful 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots),it means forced labor and drudgery in the author’s native Czech.⁵ The genealogical connection between automated machinery and productivity is frequently accepted as a given, with the most orthodox view of this relationship holding that machines are constructed to reflect, imitate, and ultimately assimilate human labor.

Not all machines, however, are designed as labor-saving devices. Automata move by themselves, imitating life or capturing the forces that animate it. The project of simulating life places automata, which were built and admired as marvelous toys and spectacular wonders, in a continuous lineage with industrial machinery, as they were designed to reproduce and improve upon human movements. Today, that lineage extends to robotics and AI. The drive to maximize utility, then, is not the essence of machines, but simply one of the stories told about them, a discursive structure that reveals how humans have come to think about machines, rather than what a machine is.

Historians of technology have long argued that the emergence of the modern understanding of machinery coincides with the Industrial Revolution and the widespread rise of steam power. In his 1990 book The Human Motor, Anson Rabinbach shows that the transition from the playful automata of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the efficient engines of the Industrial Revolution marked a profound cultural and epistemic shift. According to him, the automata makers of previous centuries worked from the idea that nature was spontaneously animated and that matter itself possessed an “innate force” capable of self-sustaining motion. By comparison, the engines of the Industrial Revolution were unprecedented: They embodied a new understanding of nature, according to which motion was obtained not gratuitously, but by converting fuel into motion.⁶

The concepts of “work” and “labor power,” understood as productive forces equally applicable to living bodies and technical systems, can themselves be understood as the relatively recent product of this technological transition. “Work” was first introduced as a measurable physical quantity in the nineteenth century by the engineers of steam engines, defined as the portion of thermal energy produced by burning fuel that could be effectively harnessed. Thus, the invention of work—a single, undifferentiated power that ruled organic and technical bodies alike—changed the purpose of automata: from simulating nature’s manifold forms of motion to relentlessly optimizing production, rendering the organic body, with its inefficiency and idleness, increasingly obsolete in return.⁷

It was Marx who most famously linked the machinery of technocapital to work and labor. In his “fragment on machines” in the Grundrisse (written in 1857 and 1858 but not published until 1939), Marx considered the increasingly powerful role of automated machinery in industrial production. He understood the emergence of autonomous industrial technology as the culmination of labor’s transformation under the influence of capital.⁸ Machines are, in Marx’s terms, “objectified labor”: They are the living force of workers trapped in and crystallized into inorganic, unfeeling anatomies of coal and steel. Machinery is removed from an individual worker’s means of labor, because it does not merely transmit human work to its object like a preindustrial tool. Instead, the machine cannibalizes a worker’s skill and power entirely. Human beings are no longer necessary for its functioning, other than to supervise its continued operation.

In Marx’s view, the worker and the machine appear bound up in an almost parasitic entanglement: Capital absorbs labor into itself, Marx writes, borrowing an erotic line from Goethe’s Faust, “as though its body were by love possessed.” Just as the machine increasingly absorbs the worker’s labor power, the machine can only exist as a historical consequence of the division of labor, “which gradually transforms the workers’ operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their places.” As the cultural theorist Mark Fisher noted, this bleak view of machinery holds disquieting, if not positively horrific, undertones: For Marx, capital “is indeed a Gothic world haunted by specters.”⁹ In this world of the undead, machinery is not a simulation of the richness and diversity of life; it is the site where living energies are turned inorganic, into a homogenizing power, and serve as teeth for capital’s ultimately vampiric nature. “The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness,” Marx writes, “but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.”

Understanding machines as relentlessly productive forces of capital is a self-fulfilling narrative; the more machines are believed to be instruments of labor, the more they are designed and perfected to fit that single purpose. In this self-reinforcing loop, the cultural idea of functionality is a powerful discursive device. The notion of “efficiency” emerged in nineteenth-century engineering as the ratio between the energy an engine produces and the energy it consumes, and the ambition to maximize it rapidly became a widely applied universal organizing principle, from a measure of industrial performance to a social and political virtue. “The ratio of efficiency thus measured the degree of perfection of its object; the lower the efficiency of a machine or process, the less perfect and more wasteful it was,” the historian Jennifer Karns Alexander explains in The Mantra of Efficiency. “Efficiency thus served as a measure of engineering progress. It created a hierarchy of perfection.”¹⁰ But treating efficiency as the sole measure of machinic perfection also means understanding technological evolution as seeking only greater optimization. In this linear narrative, there is little room for material diversity, open-ended play, or generative malfunction.

And yet perfectly efficient machines are also perfectly boring. While the Marxist understanding of automata as “objectified labor” is powerful in its characterization of industrial machinery under capital as a lifeless force of alienation, it risks conflating a specific tendency in the theories and practices of technology with a universal narrative of its ultimate nature. Before and beyond the “boring” impulses of industrialization, the irrepressible process of aesthetic radiation ensured that other lineages of wonderfully purposeless machines overcame this narrow vision.

An Alternative Genealogy of Machines

Beginning in antiquity, the long tradition of automata making has challenged strict utilitarian assumptions. The historian of science Derek J. de Solla Price once noted how hard it is to reconcile that eccentric, uncanny, and playful lineage with our modern concepts of technology, tied to improvements in industrial productivity and efficiency: “Amongst historians of technology, there seems always to have been private, somewhat peevish discontent because the most ingenious mechanical devices of antiquity were not useful machines but trivial toys.”¹¹

In contrast to a narrative in which technological evolution is primarily governed by efficiency and the reduction of waste, it is striking how many complex mechanical systems were created as recreational, theatrical, and religious devices. In the first century CE, Hero of Alexandria became renowned for the elaborate automata he built, detailed in his treatises On Automata and Pneumatica.¹² Among them were miniature automated theaters, depicting scenes from classical mythology and controlled by intricate systems of wheels, levers, and siphons whose workings remained hidden from a spectator’s view. One of these self-moving scenes pictured the god Dionysus surrounded by dancing and singing female worshippers and featured self-igniting braziers and fountains of milk and wine.

Some of the technologies Hero devised bear surprising similarities to modern machines, but their applications diverge dramatically from modern expectations. Although steam power has been associated with industrialization and the automation of work, its first known use was for wonder and religious spectacle, not labor. In his treatise on pneumatics, Hero describes in detail the construction of mechanical systems controlled by heat, water, and steam; he envisioned a device he called the aeolipile, in which a metal sphere is made to spin from the pressure of steam introduced by a boiler underneath. This machine, which lacked any useful application and was likely produced as an intellectual and playful exercise, is widely considered a precursor to the steam engine, invented over sixteen centuries later. Exploiting a similar pneumatic system, Hero also envisioned a machine that would automatically open and close the doors of a temple. Powered by a fire at the temple’s altar, it would allow crowds of devotees to witness the presence, or simulation, of invisible divine power.

In China, the earliest legend of an automaton appears in the Liezi, a Daoist text attributed to the fifth-century BCE philosopher Lie Yukou. An artificer named Yan Shi presents King Mu of Zhou with a life-size mechanical man that can sing and move when touched. At the end of its performance, the proto-android begins flirting with the king’s concubines. Enraged, the king orders Yan Shi executed, but the artificer quickly dismantles the machine to reveal its inner workings. Realizing that it is a work of artifice, and delighted by the creative power of skillful imitation, the king spares Yan Shi.

As the historians of technology Zhang Baichun and Tian Miao have noted in their writings on the “wondrous devices” of the Warring States period,¹³ in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE the Chinese philosopher Mozi decried the artisan Lu Ban, who carved a bamboo bird said to stay aloft for three days. To Mozi, only tools useful for mundane tasks or defense could be considered truly ingenious, and Lu Ban’s marvel was less skillful than a plain cart linchpin, since true inventiveness lay in practicality rather than wonder.

Like premodern Europe, China had, at least through the Tang dynasty, a strong tradition of pneumatic and hydraulic mechanical spectacles. The same waterwheels that drove trip hammers, milled grain, and worked the bellows of iron foundries also powered wooden figures that danced, played instruments, and performed acrobatics. Yet while hydraulic engineering continued to serve agriculture and industry, much of the tradition of hydraulic puppetry had faded by the time Europeans arrived in China.

This is a recurring pattern: The aesthetic drive in technological evolution tends to be submerged, absorbed into, or overshadowed by productive uses, only to resurface elsewhere in other forms. When Jesuit missionaries presented chiming clocks, animated statuettes, and other automata to the Ming court, the West’s mechanical marvels astonished their hosts, who called such devices qiqi: strange and wonderful things.

Indeed, it was in preindustrial sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, as mechanical philosophy took hold, that the aesthetic dimension of robotics was most richly elaborated. The architectural historian Philip Steadman writes in his aptly titled book Renaissance Fun that there is “a strangeness and remoteness to this world of pleasures and diversions.”¹⁴ In Mannerist and Baroque gardens and grottos, hydraulic engineering featured mechanical arrays of moving artificial creatures, including flying dragons, rocket-propelled birds, and singing owls. Fountains powered by elevated reservoirs and elaborate systems of pressure and weights produced water that flowed and spat, bubbled and gurgled, swept and wept. Water jokes (hidden jets that suddenly soaked unsuspecting visitors) and other tricks of surprise transformed mechanical and hydraulic ingenuity into a theater of artificial life, in which the dramatic operations of the machine itself became a source of awe and delight.

As the poet and literary critic Daniel Tiffany writes in Toy Medium, “If the seventeenth century witnessed the emergence of the automaton as a device poised between science and spectacular culture, the eighteenth century was the golden age of the mechanical toy, estranged from science yet still charged with philosophical implication.”¹⁵ The extraordinary machines of the inventors Jacques de Vaucanson and Pierre Jaquet-Droz—including a defecating duck, a mechanical flautist, and a clockwork boy who could write—were, as the historian Jessica Riskin has noted, especially eclectic in their material constitution, encompassing Baroque combinations of hard, soft, and organic materials.¹⁶ These inventors’ ingenuity generated, in their creations, a wide variety of lifelike behaviors in the service of a deeper philosophical project that was also, significantly, a form of aesthetic cultivation: simulating the manifold forces of nature to investigate the continuities and discontinuities between the worlds of organic and inorganic matter. This mimetic project found a popular manifestation in the story of the puppet Pinocchio, a block of wood that comes to life. Its author took his pen name, Carlo Collodi, from the Tuscan village where he lived, home to the great garden of Villa Garzoni, which is filled with dramatic grottos, theatrical fountains, and moving statuettes. In the early twentieth century, Freud wrote about the tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann to theorize about the line between the animate and the inanimate, the real and the copy, the original and its double as the uncanny—a rare case where psychoanalysis was “impelled to investigate the subject of aesthetics.”¹⁷

In the nineteenth century, as industrialization took hold, machinic diversity was increasingly marginalized, even if it never disappeared entirely. The mechanical clock was first built by Su Song in the late eleventh century,¹⁸ and a giant, elaborate clock tower was displayed in the Song capital of Kaifeng—centuries before the technology emerged in Europe. It was there, as the philosopher and urbanist Lewis Mumford and the historian of economics David S. Landes argued, that clocks then became the key machine of modern capitalism, enabling the standardization of railways, the synchronization of markets, and the disciplining of labor.¹⁹

In their relentless struggle against waste, modern industrial machines—and the discourse around technology more broadly—became homogeneously organized around maximizing efficiency, rather than aesthetics or the simulation of nature’s diverse processes. When each part of a machine, from its materials to the mechanics of its movements, is designed toward a single purpose and measured against a single metric, technology acquires a newfound concept of progress. It no longer branches out into different forms, but proceeds linearly toward increasing perfection.

Purposiveness Without a Purpose

Useful things can, of course, be beautifully designed. Yet aesthetics, in its most profound articulation, names a dimension irreducible to functional utility. Aesthetics became a distinct branch of philosophy in the eighteenth century, and it was Kant, in the Critique of Judgment, who developed it most fully. He defined aesthetic judgment as both intensely subjective and entirely universal, and as characterized by a disinterested pleasure that enables free play of the imagination. He famously called that “purposiveness without a purpose.” Pleasure tied to interest, as in the case of tasty food or a comfortable shirt, Kant contended, belongs merely to the empirical domain of the agreeable. Judgments about beauty, whether of nature or art, arise instead when the imagination quickens in harmony with understanding and when the free play of one’s cognitive faculties brings pleasure independent of any desire for possession or practical use. But if aesthetic experience overwhelms cognitive powers, disinterested pleasure gives way to the sense of the sublime: an encounter with what exceeds the imagination’s capacity to comprehend, offering a glimpse of the inaccessible and unbounded realm of the supersensible.²⁰

Since the Industrial Revolution, there has been a tendency to tie technological evolution to labor, efficiency, and purpose, an emphasis that has become especially pronounced in today’s discourse on AI and robotics. Yet beauty has never ceased to be a crucial driving force behind humanity’s relationship with the artificial. Throughout centuries and across cultures, machines served not merely as instruments of labor but as playful companions, instruments of wonder, and mirrors for contemplating the richness of the natural world. We argue that reducing the evolution of machines to a deterministic progression toward greater purposefulness and perfection obscures their aesthetic and cultural complexity, ultimately restricting their diversity as well as our own technological imagination.

In The Evolution of Beauty, the biologist Richard Prum argues that aesthetics, rather than strictly survivalist adaptation, is among the most powerful drives in animal evolution.²¹ In his account, arbitrary aesthetic preferences in sexual selection produce a vast range of striking but practically purposeless, even wasteful, traits, such as ornamental organs, bright colors, and elaborate songs; usefulness can hardly explain them. His position is contested. Some adaptationists,²² for instance, argue that ornamentation signals health and mate quality because only the fittest individuals can afford to produce them. That view, too, is debated.²³ Yet despite disagreeing over the relative weight of mating preferences, biologists broadly accept that those preferences can evolve independently of fitness and drive the elaboration of traits that serve no further purpose. Darwin defended the idea in The Descent of Man, but it was long overlooked. Prum attributes this neglect to a persistent bias against the idea that animals, especially females, exercise aesthetic choice.

Biological and technological evolution diverge in obvious respects. Technology develops on a much faster timescale, and its traits are transmitted not through the survival and reproduction of organisms but through design and imitation. Still, theories of biological evolution can offer intriguing suggestions for what utilitarian accounts of technology might be missing. Prum’s model implies that when taste acts freely, the result is aesthetic radiation, an explosion of divergence and multiplicity driven by nonutilitarian preference. Where a single standard of selection is imposed, the result is convergence and homogeneity. In machines, that standard has been efficiency, and today’s “boring” age of technology is the product of its uniform application. Perhaps the way out of the technocultural Boring Billion—this age of obedient, agreeable chatbots and useful robots—lies in what that narrative ignores: the proliferation of variation unleashed by what is beautiful, ephemeral, mysterious, terrifying, wondrous, and sublime.

Anna Greenspan is an associate professor of global media and the director of the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. Laura Tripaldi is a postdoctoral fellow of interactive media arts at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai.

1. Yuyan Wang’s Boring Billion was screened by Fondazione In Between Art Film in Venice as part of the group exhibition Canicula, which opened on May 6, 2026. ↩︎
2. Lanyun Miao et al.,“1.63-Billion-Year-Old Multicellular Eukaryotes from the Chuanlinggou Formation in North China,” Science Advances 10, no. 4 (2024): https://10.1126/sciadv.adk3208. For a general-audience article explaining the research, see Jasna Hodžić, “1.63-Billion-Year-Old Fossil May Rewrite the History of Multicellular Life,” Big Think, February 8, 2024, https://bigthink.com/life/fossil-eukaryote-multicellular-life/ ↩︎
3. Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (Random House, 1969), 85. ↩︎
4. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (John Murray, 1859), 490. ↩︎
5. Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Fantastic Melodrama in Three Acts and an Epilogue, trans. Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair (Doubleday, Page and Company, 1923). ↩︎
6. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Basic Books, 1990), 51–52. ↩︎
7. Rabinbach, Human Motor, 59–61. ↩︎
8. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (Penguin/New Left Review, 1973), 690–712. All subsequent Grundrisse quotations are from this section. ↩︎
9. Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (Exmilitary Press, 2018), 29. ↩︎
10. Jennifer Karns Alexander, The Mantra of Efficiency: From Waterwheel to Social Control (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 55. ↩︎
11. Derek J. de Solla Price, “Automata and the Origins of Mechanism and Mechanistic Philosophy,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 15. Quoted in Philip Steadman, Renaissance Fun: The Machines Behind the Scenes (UCL Press, 2021), 125. ↩︎
12. The reference for Hero of Alexandria’s inventions comes from Steadman, Renaissance Fun,111–131.
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13. Zhang Baichun and Tian Miao, “Attitudes of Pre-Qin Thinkers towards Machinery and their Influence on Technological Development in China,” in Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines, eds. Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal (Oxford University Press, 2023), 353–360. ↩︎
14. Steadman, Renaissance Fun, 6. ↩︎
15. Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press, 2000), 57. ↩︎
16. Jessica Riskin, “Eighteenth-Century Wetware,” Representations 83, no. 1 (2003): 97–125, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2003.83.1.97. ↩︎
17. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17, An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917–1919),trans. James Strachey (Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 217–256. ↩︎
18. Joseph Needham, Wang Ling, and Derek J. de Solla Price, Heavenly Clockwork: The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1986). ↩︎
19. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934). David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, 2nd ed. (Harvard University Press, 2000). ↩︎
20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Hackett Publishing, 198), 45–53, 62, 73. ↩︎
21. Richard O. Prum, The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (Doubleday, 2017), 6–12. ↩︎
22. Amotz Zahavi, “Mate Selection: A Selection for a Handicap,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 53, no. 1 (1975): 205–14, https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-5193(75)90111-3. W. D. Hamilton and Marlene Zuk, “Heritable True Fitness and Bright Birds: A Role for Parasites?,” Science 218, no. 4570 (1982): 384–87, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7123238. ↩︎
23. Dustin J. Penn and Szabolcs Számadó, “The Handicap Principle: How an Erroneous Hypothesis Became a Scientific Principle,” Biological Reviews 95, no. 1 (2020): 267–90, https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12563. ↩︎