I was wondering how the human body discerns good vs. bad when it comes to odors, tastes, sights, etc.
Is one born with the notion that rotting eggs smell bad and fresh baked bread smells good or is it a taught/learned behavior that one learns by eating various foods in their developmental years?
Same with visuals. Does one learn that visually a rusty brown car that needs to be washed is ugly and a brand new red corvette is beautiful because someone told them it’s that way, or would a bushman from the outback make no discernable preference over one or the other?
A bushman from the outback would look upon washing, whether your body or a car, the equivalent of going to the supermarket and throwing all the food in the parking lot to spoil. Water is a precious commodity such that if you were to spoil it by using it to get dirt and smell off of your body would be unimaginably wasteful to them. They think washing makes us smell funny.
How we react to smells is in many ways culturally determined. American Indians used buffalo dung and alligator fat in ways I personally wouldn’t fing appealing, and Japanese farmers in years past supposedly used human feces as fertilizer for crops. On the other hand, an aversion to spoiled food is probably pretty much universal. So the answer, I suppose, is it depends.