On his book A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction
Cover Interview of January 07, 2018
Lastly
Beauty is all around us and it is intoxicatingly diverse.
Much of this diversity exists because beauty enters our sexual brain through
different sensory modalities, which strains our ability to make comparisons: we
cannot objectively rank the beauty of a dance, a song, and a fragrance. The
diversity of beauty is no less astounding within a single sensory domain—the
collage of colors of many fishes and the vocal repertoires of songbirds are
both overwhelming. The existence of all this diversity makes it obvious that
there is no single platonic ideal of beauty. This is true within our own
species and also amongst the hundreds of thousands of species that reproduce
sexually. The diversity of beauty springs from the diversity in how different
species and even individuals of the same species sense the world around them.
Our sexual aesthetics, those of humans and other species, are not handed down
from above but are generated from within, specifically from within our brains.
We are the ones who define beauty, and understanding the existence of beauty as
well as our taste for it is not possible without viewing beauty through the
brain of the beholder.
Of course, beauty is not restricted to sexual beauty. The
perspective I present here also leads us to wonder how the idiosyncrasies and
quirks in our own brains influence our own appreciation of a work of art, a
field of flowers, or an expertly executed move on the football field. Might any
of these percepts of beauty be a side-effect of our sexual aesthetics? Or,
alternatively, can our appreciation of beauty in other domains influence what
we find to be sexually beautiful? What is it about our senses, our brains, and
our cognitive architecture that gives us an appreciation for beauty all around
us? Why does beauty matter so much?
Like Darwin, we will continue to be confounded by aspects
and elements of beauty as we encounter them, but we have come to understand so
much more about the evolution of beauty since his time. As scientific
exploration continues, we are sure to expand even further our ability to see
the ways that beauty is woven into existence, the many forms it assumes, and
the wild appreciations it elicits.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
Beauty is all around us and it is intoxicatingly diverse. Much of this diversity exists because beauty enters our sexual brain through different sensory modalities, which strains our ability to make comparisons: we cannot objectively rank the beauty of a dance, a song, and a fragrance. The diversity of beauty is no less astounding within a single sensory domain—the collage of colors of many fishes and the vocal repertoires of songbirds are both overwhelming. The existence of all this diversity makes it obvious that there is no single platonic ideal of beauty. This is true within our own species and also amongst the hundreds of thousands of species that reproduce sexually. The diversity of beauty springs from the diversity in how different species and even individuals of the same species sense the world around them. Our sexual aesthetics, those of humans and other species, are not handed down from above but are generated from within, specifically from within our brains. We are the ones who define beauty, and understanding the existence of beauty as well as our taste for it is not possible without viewing beauty through the brain of the beholder.
Of course, beauty is not restricted to sexual beauty. The perspective I present here also leads us to wonder how the idiosyncrasies and quirks in our own brains influence our own appreciation of a work of art, a field of flowers, or an expertly executed move on the football field. Might any of these percepts of beauty be a side-effect of our sexual aesthetics? Or, alternatively, can our appreciation of beauty in other domains influence what we find to be sexually beautiful? What is it about our senses, our brains, and our cognitive architecture that gives us an appreciation for beauty all around us? Why does beauty matter so much?
Like Darwin, we will continue to be confounded by aspects and elements of beauty as we encounter them, but we have come to understand so much more about the evolution of beauty since his time. As scientific exploration continues, we are sure to expand even further our ability to see the ways that beauty is woven into existence, the many forms it assumes, and the wild appreciations it elicits.