Evolutionary Beauty

In Dutton’s video, it’s interesting to me how he starts off by saying that there are a lot of things we find (“call”) beautiful. This leads to the thought of how do we differentiate beauty? And, what is beauty? A flower is beautiful but so are Christmas lights. A sunset is beautiful but so is the mind. There really are so many things we think are pleasing to the eye. He goes on to talk about how different cultures find different things beautiful but there are cross-cultural values of beauty. According to him, it’s all evolutionary.

It’s hard to argue that. We have evolved to form opinions of people and things, and one of those opinions is whether or not its aesthetically pleasing. As we, as a species, are introduced to new things, from animals to art and music to education, we have a wider variety of objects to form opinions about, and thus, a wider variety of what we believe holds beauty.

Another interesting point he brings up is how, universally, we think that a landscape with trees, a river or body of water, and path (among other things) is beautiful, even if that sort of landscape doesn’t exist in a certain country. He then says people believe that to be natural beauty rather than artistic beauty, so of course we all think it’s amazing. But artistic beauty has to be culturally exclusive, right? No. In short, art and artistic beauty is way older than I can fathom, and all of it was beautiful.

“We find beauty in something done well” and beauty is not, in fact, in the eye of the beholder, thanks to evolution.