Beauty and Biology

I think Dutton's talk is very captivating and succinct with the perfect amount of humor. However, upon reflection of his theory about beauty and how our understanding and acceptance of beauty are things determined by our human biology, I found myself in disagreement with the general ideology behind such theory past a certain extent.

One of his concluding remarks caught my attention and really seemed to bring me full circle with my own final reaction and thoughts. He stated, "the next time you pass by a jewelry shop window displaying a beautifully cut, teardrop-shaped stone, don't be so sure it's your culture telling you that sparkling jewel is beautiful."

When I heard him say this my immediate reaction was to scrunch my face and tilt my head as if I was saying, "huh?" I found it initially baffling and I think this is because he said it with such conviction that I felt there wasn't much space for me to consider a breadth of different perspectives to have, let alone consider my own. I watched the video again and came to the same observation that the intensity of his conviction throws me off and that once I sit with the ideas he lays out, I tend to disagree with them as they challenge my general values of what I hold to be true about human existence and what we individually make of beauty in our lives.

To me, culture and the environments in which we reside hold a tremendous influence in shaping individuals and what they each make of their lives, their existence, and what they value. More specifically, I believe greatly in the power of one's subjective experience at any given point in time. To hear Dutton kind of throw emotions and feelings into the cauldron of his strictly biology-based broth was a little unsettling for me because I didn't feel like he made a case for where exactly human subjectivities come into play when discussing beauty.

I also think it was quite bold and risky even to make such wide assumptions and generalizations about what people find beautiful. While I realize one of the biggest challenges to any theory is it being applicable and relevant to the entirety of its subjects, Dutton's completely skimps over the reality of individualization. If someone were to take a widespread survey called, "Is This Beautiful?" while only demonstrating or showing things that are widely regarded to be "universally" beautiful, the number of yes's would obviously support the claim. (Take Dutton's use of the "ideal savannah landscape" for example.) If the things demonstrated or shown were things that aren't necessarily popular across a wide expanse of people, such as the sport of bullfighting or lumpy stalagmites in a cave, there might be less of a unanimous outcome favoring their beauty. Dutton's theory does not take into account the truly infinite different factors, of which many are cultural factors, in a single person's life that can and will shape their own unique perspectives and understandings of what is beautiful to him/her.

I'm not completely denying the science/biology aspect that Dutton is grounding his theory in. As I said before, I think I agree with it up to a certain extent. The cutoff for me seems to be when he tries to apply the theory so broadly that it neglects the necessity to consider and incorporate individuality. Yes, I think all humans and our human nature is enabled and extended by our ancestral, biological capacity to discern and act upon things that stimulate and satisfy us. But to generalize and jump right over the factors of people's unique experiences that, arguably, are shaped and even determined by cultural influences is wrong to me and what I hold to be true about humans and their interpretations of the world around us.