Apologies if this is a GQ.
Why do people have an aesthetic sense? Is there an evolutionary reason to consider flowers pretty, the scent of orange blossoms good, or music nice?
Because we have souls. Or we are one. Same difference.
Depends on whose evolutionary reasons you are considering.
It makes sense that we’d be selected with programs to appreciate that certain characteristics are likely to be assocaited with some value (or lack of harm) to us, and that such characteristics would cause pleasure. It also makes sense that flowers that appealed so much to those senses that we aided them in propagation, would be selected and become increasingly exagerated stimulants of those senses. We are flowers’ pimps.
Also, in most cultures, that which is musical is also in keeping with basic rules of mathematics and of the natural world. Having an inate sense of that is advantagous. Then again it can then be overlaid with the desire to be laid over and over again. That is that musical ability as a sexually selected trait comes into play. The male who could perform musically well is not much different than a peacock strutting his stuff, and was chosen more often. To this day there are groupies trailing behind those whose only redeeming feature is musical success …
Spirituality.
(or, what elucidator said)
I appreciate music and art that resonates with who I am. Who I am is determined by thousands of years of evolution. Northern European Opera has begun to resonate within my as I have grown older. Because we were so barraged by music that was not mine in the sixties, I had no music. I had rejected country because I was repeatedly told by idiot intellectuals that I should. I hadn’t evolved to a frequency of being that allowed me to embrace classical, so I tried to enjoy pop and the jungle rythmn and beat promoted by the media. I just didn’t enjoy music much then.
As I have aged, I know who I am, and no one influences what I respond to. I wait all week for my NPR Opera fix on Saturday. I put my grandchildren to bed with light classical and opera sung in Nortern European languages. Allison Krauss and Enya warm me deeply. I have my Bill Monroe mountain music, and a lot of OLD country. I’ve freed myself from the media daily imposed confused culture crap, and I’ve realized that most intellectuals are idiots that aren’t worth listening to.
Want to see beauty?
Check out the art and traditional dress of the women. Beautifu!
Really? I have never heard an “intellectual” tell me that I should reject Country (or even C&W) music. I’d love to know who you believed to have been an intellectual who espoused that view.
Well, in the 60s, pop would have been represented by Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. I guess they would have been too Italian for you, although I don’t know what objection you would have had to Tom Jones or englebert Humperdinck–good Northen European types that they are. As to “jungle rythm,” I suspect that you have never heard any true “jungle rythmn” music. I’m curious as to how much music from the Amazon basin or the mountains of New Guinea you’ve actually heard. (Unless you are attempting to place foolish labels on African-inspired music–none of which originated in regions that can be considered jungle. You are certainly not required to enjoy any particular mode of music, but using error-filled insults does not help you make your case for quality.)
The problem with answering part of the op from an evolutionary standpoint is that such a subjective concept as beauty does not fit very nicely in a scientific reasonment. Do dogs appreciate beauty? One can only speculate. For all we know all of a slug’s perception is beauty.
As for artistic expression, the word ‘expression’ itself should point towards inter-species competition. Though this is no more than a WAG, I wouldn’t be surprised if anthropological data showed that in general artistic activity reinforces social bonds.
OWD:
I think you’ll like these women too; nice traditional dresses.
OWD, I’m wondering whether you spend a lot of time at the website you linked to. It links all kinds of interesting articles, like this and this. Maybe your comment on ‘jungle rhythm and beat’ means more than I initially presumed?
Nah. The artwork looks flat, and the people do not look like me or mine. Their music certainly does not strike a resonate chord within me. However, I do respect some Asian countries and peoples. Grandchildren will be practicing karate.
I was just about to say I didn’t see how evolution could depend significantly on an aesthetic sense, but as DSeid noted, flowers are a visible example that very thing. I’m sure it’s true humans have helped perpetuate pretty flowers (at least the ones we don’t cut from the bush and give to people :)), but flowers had to be around before we came on the scene. I vaguely remember something about coloring (and scents?) being related to attracting bugs, or serving a defensive purpose (certain color patterns being associated with poison, etc., particularly in animals), but neither of those things are really aesthetic.
It’s easier to see how aesthetics would be beneficial to certain humans, but that doesn’t explain why developing an aesthetic sense would be. Beautiful people might be more likely to propagate than ugly ones, but that wouldn’t be the case if humans had never possessed a sense of “beauty” to begin with.
So maybe beauty does come from a spirit, or something similar to that. Or perhaps there is something intrinsic in beauty itself that creates its own value, and therefore makes it significant to evolution?
My own experience is that highbrows in general have a disdain for country music and an affinity for jazz and classical. Indeed I have noticed a distinct musical snobbery among those who would consider themselves intellectuals.
When people talk about “sixties music” they generally are referring to the British invasion and psychadelic flavored stuff. True, Martin and Sinatra were making hits in that decade but they hardly defined the era.
Not that this has anything to do with the OP.
There really isn’t a need to speculate about evolved aesthetic preferences for flowers (although we may have them).
Our aesthetic sense probably evolved to respond to certain stimuli (like the body shapes of potential mates) and ended up ALSO responding to extraneous things like horizons and sunsets. It’s kind of a common property of neural nets.
Aesthetics are primarily influenced by culture. Play a Western wedding march and a requiem for somebody who has no experience with Western music (somebody raised in rural Thailand, for example, where the music scale does not match the Western scale at all) and they won’t be able to say which song is “happy” and which is “sad.” Similarly, those of us who have only heard music on the Western scale will not be able to tell which traditional Thai court songs are “happy” or “sad” or whatever have you. Musical scales don’t seem to have any inherent connotations associated with them – the connotations are cultural, which isn’t to say that they’re invalid, but is simply to say that they’re not biological (evolutionary). If I like sad music, then I’m not going to have the same reaction to a piece of sad Thai court music as I am to Mozart’s Requiem mass – the latter will be thoroughly enjoyable, the former will probably be nonsensical. (Of course the example of the cultural identification of musical scales only explicitly applies to aesthetics in music, but IMO it bears some large degree of extension into other areas of aesthetics – art, literature, human beauty, etc. F’rinstance, there is nothing inherently beautiful about skull shape – different cultures throughout history have identified various skull shapes as being “beautiful,” from the modern Western ideal of round skulls to the until-recent Peruvian ideal of a flattened forehead and angular skull to the until-recent ideal of some Pacific islanders of an elongated skull.)
I’ve actually been thinking about this issue a whole lot lately, especially since I am a musician and thus beauty and aesthetics are very much involved in my life. I have come to think that what a person sees as beautiful is something that they see or hear or touch or whatever, that somehow reflects something that is inside of them. I think that under this assumption, there are sort of different types of beauty. There are things that a person will almost always find beautiful, because they reflect some underlying trait in their personality that is usually active. But I also think that sometimes there are some specific traits that sort of come and go throughout ones life, and when we see something that is in alignment with this trait, then we recognize it, and see it as beautiful. I think this explains why certain everyday objects are sometimes seen as beautiful, and then other times are just everyday objects.
I’ve also thought of a couple of explanations for why this would be the case as well. I think that it’s possible that seeing something external that reflects what is inside of us is a validating experience. It makes us feel less alone, like our feelings and ideas aren’t totally off-base and irregular. It makes us see the beauty within ourselves. Another possible explanation is more spiritual. It’s possible that there is an inherent Godliness in everything around us, and in us. But since we are human, and not God, we cannot see all of the Godliness in everything all at once, so we are limited to the shifting view of God that we see inside of us. So when we have a particular portion of God in our mind at any given moment, if we happen to see something outside of ourselves that has that same piece of God in it, then we can recognize that Godliness, and thus recognize the Godliness inside of ourselves. So seeing something beautiful can be thought of as seeing God, or perhaps a portion of God. I can see this making us feel good, since it would make us feel a little more interconnected with what is around us, and more connected to the Godliness in ourselves.
Why wouldn’t they be? How can you show that, say, a buck doesn’t experience beauty at the sight of a doe? Unless you come up with a solid definition of ‘beauty’ in scientific terms, I don’t think you can.
That being said, though, I’ll venture the hypothesis that beauty is the perceptual equivalent to play. Play is an activity engaged in for the pleasure it procures and that doesn’t have any direct benefit. Beauty then would be pleasurable perceptions that do not necessarily contain usefull information. Neither skipping rocks or watching a sunset achieve anything directly. However, in the same way that play is beneficial in that it helps physical development, beauty could help mental development.
Given that many animals engage in play, it does not seem improbable that they would be able to sense some sort of beauty. Though, like I said above, it would be very hard to prove.
You’re right; I probably couldn’t show for certain that a buck doesn’t experience a sense of beauty, or that it does. However, as far as evolution is concerned, that doesn’t really matter; what matters is whether a buck would be more likely to mate with an attractive doe vs. an “ugly” one. I haven’t studied zoology at all and haven’t taken much biology either, so I can’t really say for sure whether or not this actually happens (or what standards would determine beauty/ugliness). My impression, though, is that animals in heat will mate with whatever they can, and if that’s true there would be no evolutionary impetus to develop something like a sense of beauty.
The suggestion of beauty as the perceptual equivalent of play is interesting, though.
Loinburger says:
Now this is interesting. You are talking about skull shapes only. Faces are perhaps another matter. There is a television show on the Discovery Channel here (produced by the BBC) called The Human Face. Its hosted by John Cleese.
A recent episode look at beauty in the human face. Apparently irrespective of racial make-up, if your facial proportions fall within a ration of 1:1.5753 (or something like that), yoiu are considered “beautiful”. The ratio is measured with reference toseveral points on the face - front teeth to next teeth, width of mouth to space to the jaw line.
It was quite amazing because every example they used, of people from Chinese, African, Caucasian racial make-up were, to me, all asthetically appealling and their features were all governed by this ratio.
I’m not a zoologist either, but I believe you are wrong on that. Witness the peacock, and countless other animals for whom appearance is very important when it comes to finding a mate.
Keats just about sums it up for me:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
N.