Charles Darwinian theory of Beauty

Today i watched the Ted video about the idea of beauty being engraved into our minds. Denis Dutton argues that: beauty is not in the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder, it's deep in our minds. His ideas are that we must reverse engineer the Darwinian theories in order to understand the idea of beauty. He uses natural selection and sexual selection to describe it. 


he gave some interesting examples, such as that from 1.5 million years ago the homo erectus and the homo...sar..? turned their generic weapon tool into an art object. Acheulian hand axes
This axe was made for pure artisitic reasons and it helped the evolution in the sense that, who ever that could craft such beautifully symmetrical pieces had qualities that others did not- such as higher level of intelligence, skill, patience, fine motor control, planning abilities and so on, thus this resulted in higher reproduction chances than the less skilled- such as the nature of natural and sexual selection. 


Denis Dutton's speech is not without holes, while he sufficiently provided examples of the hard-wired ideas of beauty and evidentially disregarded the cultural conditioning influences, he did not take into consideration of the natural human traits, emotions and thus personalities. For example he argues that what we find beautiful is something that is skillfully and well done- this is true to some degree however it is also vague. When we find the Mona Lisa beautiful, it is indeed that we appreciate the virtuoso skill needed to create such a marvelous painting, however, beauty does not exist without contrast. If we were all able to paint the way mona lisa is painted, we would thus no longer find the original beautiful or anything special. This is because the Mona Lisa shows us nothing that we do not already have, however in reality, very little people can paint like that. When one finds the Mona LIsa beautiful, we are admiring a skill that we lack- we admire what the Mona Lisa embodies. Thus this goes back to my last week's reading of beauty being something we need to resemble. This is further supported by Dutton's example of the reproductivity of the skilled homo erectus craftsman. The women were attracted to him because he demonstrated a skill that others do not have- their natural instinct is to possess his abilities and thus she mates with him. [I'm just spitting this out of my head randomly so it's not without problems] My point is that it follows exactly what my last week's research argued for.

Dutton's example of the generic Suvanna Forest Landscape, he says that it is hardwired into out brains and thus people from all countries can appreciate and find it beautiful- even people who come from countries who do not actually have such landscapes natively finds this image beautiful- he may be right that this image is hardwired into our brains- though as with a lot of evolution-related theories like that, it's difficult to prove without substantial research. Anyway, the reason why we find these landscape beautiful may be because we've completely lost nature in our selves, we want the life that those landscapes my embody. If i lived in the place of these images, i surely would not celebrate it by putting it on my wall, i may put images of new york city streets on the wall. However, if i were to be taken away from such place, i would surely linger for it, wish for it and dream about it- such is the nature of being human.

i'm not trying to disregard his work or trying to say that my way is the way to look at the perception of beauty but that he didn't not counter everything- this is usually how we go about in our research, we forget multi-disciplinary!


For my thesis, i'm here to sow together all these ideas that emerge from all disciplines- and hope to come to the best possible conclusion.