Julian F. V. Vincent

In October 2000, Julian Vincent took the newly-created Chair in Biomimetics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, thus becoming the only biologist in the world to occupy such a senior position in an engineering department. His MA (zoology) was from Cambridge; his PhD (insect hormones) and DSc (insect cuticle) were from Sheffield.
He spent most of his research career in the Zoology Department at the University of Reading, studying the mechanical design of organisms and working out ways in which aspects of the design can be used in technology. During his last 9 years at Reading he ran the Centre for Biomimetics, which he had started with a professor from the Department of Engineering in Reading, and attracted over £2M in grants and industrial contracts. He has published over 220 papers, articles and books and has been invited to give conference lectures (mostly plenary) and research seminars around the World. His interests are very wide, covering aspects of mechanical design of plants and animals, complex fracture mechanics, texture of food, design of composite materials, use of natural materials in technology, advanced textiles, deployable structures in architecture and robotics, smart systems and structures. He is a professional Member of the Institute of Materials, which awarded him the Leslie Holliday Prize in 1980. In 1990 he won the Prince of Wales Environmental Innovation Award. In 1997 he gave the Trueman Wood lecture at the RSA. He is a member of the Arts Council England Interdisciplinary Arts Taskgroup

His remit in the University of Bath is to introduce concepts from biology into engineering and design, thus making the adaptive design of organisms available to advanced engineering design and control. In pursuit of this he is expanding a Russian system for inventive problem solving (TRIZ) to make biological design available to engineers, and wants to extend this general approach to all human endevours. He is also moving into biorobotics with projects based on mud-burrowing worms (to design a new type of colonic endoscope) and jumping insects (a jumping robot for surveillance duties).

He is a keen musician, having played the banjo, solo, around the UK (including the Purcell Room on London's South Bank), Ireland, Germany and The Netherlands, on BBC 2 "Horizon" and Radios 4 and 3. During his days of penury he taught himself practical engineering by stripping and rebuilding old cars and motorcycles, sometimes at the side of the road. He only once failed to get home.


The Selective Advantage of Art
One of the basic concepts of evolution is that survival depends on your being just that bit better than the rest. That’s the “advantage”. And natural selection ensures that those better individuals have a better chance of survival. Anything that enhances survival gives “selective advantage”. The prevalence of arts – story-telling, music, dance, graphics, literature, poetry, etc. – suggests that art confers selective advantage. How does the selective advantage operate?

Consider the premise that your survival is enhanced if you know what’s going to happen next. But you can guess what’s going to happen next only if (a) you know what’s happening now, and (b) you know the sort of thing that then tends to happen. In other words prediction, and hence survival, is based on pattern recognition. Now pattern is one of the basic characteristics of art of all sorts, so is art a safe way of rehearsing a variety of futures? In some instances this is fairly obvious: story-telling of various sorts (acting, literature; especially stories involving sex and survival such as RomCom? and the hoodunnit) teaches people how to react under a variety of circumstances. In other instances it’s less obvious – music, for instance. Except, of course, that music is one of the most patterned of arts. And the complexity of that pattern covers a wide range, from chant-like pop music, through the melodies of Mozart and the complexities of Bach to the apparent lack of pattern in the more developed forms of improvised music, classical and jazz. Appreciation of music seems to be associated with the degree to which the listener can appreciate and predict the patterns. If the structure is too simple for the listener and prediction is trivially easy, then the music is boring; if too complex and unpredictable it is also boring because there is no chance of interacting with it (note in passing that harmonic, melodic and rhythmic pattern can all be quantified, so comparisons of expectation and subsequent reality are not only possible but probably easy – a chance for experimental testing). However, if the structure is such that the listener has a certain difficulty making the prediction, then success in that prediction produces a feeling of pleasure which is usually interpreted as “artistic appreciation”, but which can also be interpreted as the feedback mechanism which reinforces behaviour that tends to increase the likelihood of survival – i.e. seek ways to improve skills in pattern recognition and prediction.

The thesis therefore is that music and the other arts comprise a system for rehearsing pattern recognition skills; the pleasure involved reinforces behaviour likely to improve survival. This suggests that all conversations which involve “artistic appreciation” are doomed never to reach a conclusion (an advantage for some!) since artistic appreciation is a meta-phenomenon with no intrinsic reality. It’s a chat-show gravy-train which will never hit the buffers because there are none! It also explains why artists are often inherently “sexy” (i.e. the opposite sex sees them as a route to enhanced survival of their genes), despite often producing nothing which materially and directly improves survival, such as shelter or more food.

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