Beauty

Denis Dutton’s lecture regarding a Darwinian theory of beauty interested me. He argues that “Beauty belongs to our evolved human psychology. The experience of beauty is one component in a series of Darwinian adaptations. Beauty is an adaptive effect, which we extend and intensify in the creation and enjoyment of works of art and entertainment.” Before coming across Dutton’s video, I thought beauty was in the eye of the beholder, not something that was handed down from our ancestors through evolution.

Dutton claims beauty can travel across cultures easily, that there is something deeper that causes us to see beauty in a certain way. Why does culture not affect our definition of beauty? In most Asian cultures, porcelain skin is considered beautiful as opposed to tan skin. Many women in Asia buy skin lighting creams to achieve the pale skin. This is because those with pale skin were thought of as upper class; they didn’t have to suffer the harsh sun rays from working outside. Let’s compare this to the United States. Here, rather than light complexion being the goal, many women spend hours outside tanning or spend money on tanning beds or spray tans. Why is that?

As convincing as Denis Dutton’s argument is, it is difficult for me to agree with it entirely.

Pinker and the Nobel Savage

In Steven Pinker's article "The Blank Slate" he attacks Rousseau's idea of the Noble Savage and instead clearly favors Hobbes' view that man is inherently cruel. To support this claim he cites evidence of behavioral genetics showing a biological basis for aggression and antagonistic personalities to conclude that man has always been born with these traits. I do not refute that people possess negative qualities, such as a tendency toward crime or hate, but these qualities have not driven our species. If man was inherently violent with no sense of natural good, how could the societies of today have come about? For civilization to have been started, people had to have communicated with each other in nonviolent ways that benefited more than just themselves. It would have not been possible to produce societies like Mesopotamia, with all of their art, culture, and language, if man were inherently violent, as we never would have had any motivation to advance beyond any form higher than barbaric tribalism.
Pinker then continues to back up his claims with a survey stating that a certain percentage of people think about killing another person on occasion, and he even was so bold to claim that those who denied every having these thoughts were lying. To this my response is, who cares? The majority of people that have these thoughts do not act on them and the same goes for the persons that started the ancient societies previously mentioned.  Pinker argues that this is because the actual act of killing another has been beaten out of us by social pressure and other consequences, but that it still remains a part of our nature. Now I cannot speak for others, but when I have a violent thought that I don't act upon, I do so not to avoid consequence, but rather after a moment of reflection I don't actually want to be a violent person. I would like to think that this would hold true in some lawless post-apocalyptic world where there would truly be no consequences, but I guess I'm just going to have to wait to test that.
In conclusion man cannot be inherently evil as Pinker states because if it was our nature we could not have built the societies of today. In fact using evidence of evolutionary biology, which Pinker seems fond of using to support his arguments, one could claim, genetically, that these violent predispositions are being removed from our species as they are not favorable characteristics for reproduction, and in theory will eventually die out, potentially leading to the Utopian society envisioned by Rousseau and many other writers/philosophers before him.

The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

"Despite concerted attempts by respectable 19th century scientists, no one has yet found a way to communicate with the dead" (Pinker, 4). This piece contradicted my values as it was strategically placed at the end of the paragraph after discussing the idea of a soul being dissected in half in a split-brain surgery, closing the conversation with the idea that a way of communicating with the dead does not exist.

This piece from Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, stood out to me because it discussed the existence of spirits of the dead. Spirits of the dead are strongly believed in my culture and religion. Many aspects of my religion relate to the well-being  and the peace of spirits of ancestors and family. In the Hmong community, there are special people who are chosen to engage in rituals that allow them to communicate with the dead. These people may be referred to as shamans and they only communicate with spirits or the dead for the well-being of a living person. Usually the shaman will help resolve the issues of the unwell person by communicating or leading the unwell person's soul back to their body. In my religion, it is believed that when the soul leaves the body, the body will deteriorate and the person will become ill and possibly die.

Although it is difficult and has yet to be well recorded, I believe souls, spirits, and the ability to communicate with the dead does exist. Souls, spirits, and the ability to communicate with the dead has played and continues to play a big role in my reality along with many other Hmong people. I have witnessed people communicating with the dead and just because a man in a white coat has yet to declare it to be in existence or true, it is my truth and my reality,

Pinker: "Ghost in the Machine"

In Pinker’s “Blank Slate,” he argued with the idea of the “ghost in the machine” which sparked my interest since he was trying to reject Rene Descartes’s idea that the mind is entirely different from the body –where the body is the “vessel” of the soul/mind. Pinker then later stated that “…when ensoulment takes place in embryonic development, which means that perhaps the most promising medical technology of the 21^st century is being debated in terms of when the ghost first enters the machine.” The idea behind this statement, regarding when the soul enters the body, somewhat confirms what I know is right and true to my beliefs.

Growing up in a religious, catholic, family, I was always taught that everything on earth was created by a higher being and that “god” created our souls. I was taught that people are born with a soul and that soul acts as kind of like our consciousness. This is one of the reasons, but not the main reason, why I cannot agree with Pinker’s argument that everything is genetically inherited from our parents. The main reason why I cannot agree with Pinker is due to Descartes’s idea that our mind is not corporeal but a separate entity, hence the psyche and the soma. Descartes basically supports my argument that the soul inside the body is its own entity that we cannot extract in to pieces unlike our physical bodies. However, if we cannot extract the “soul” from our body, then how does such entity enter our body during the embryonic development? There is no solid evidence; even neuroscience and psychology cannot explain such feat and still being challenged. In addition, in the statement “…when the ghost first enters the machine,” I assume that they are referring to the idea that the embryonic development stage is basically the development of a “vessel” in which the soul can enter. If so, Descartes’s idea plays another part here since we can see that the body and the mind are separate. 

Reality of Beauty

I agree with Denis Dutton's statement that, humans see beauty in things that are well done, namely the arts. There is beauty in skilled performances that demonstrate traits such as, "Intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability, conscientiousness, and sometimes access to rare materials." and that all of these have deep roots in evolutionary theory.

Dutton claimed that beauty has a Darwinian component to it. This means that the reason why we see things as beautiful is because our "primitive" ancestors saw these things as beneficial to them. For example, the reason why we like paintings of beautiful landscapes with flowing rivers and climbable trees is that our ancestors saw it as a habitable area and one that would protect them from predators. This is also to say that the definition of beauty also crosses cultures, meaning that what is beautiful to a certain culture, is also beautiful to another one.

Despite his claims, I still can't help but feel that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is still the best way to describe people's perceptions around beauty.  The reason why I agree with his analysis on beauty is because, as a pre-med student, I find beauty in the skills physicians demonstrate to bring patients back to complete health, or close to it. Not only is it the skill or work that is appealing to me and perhaps others, but it can be as simple as seeing a person transition from a status of illness to that of a healthy person. In a Future Physicians course that I took, an internal medicine doctor gave her testimony that although it holds true that her specialty was rooted in scientific practice, an equal amount of her practice revolved around arts & humanities, and to me and others that is beautiful. To other people, however, they might not see that as beautiful. If this is the case, then why doesn't it hold true that those with intelligence and fine motor controls should be seen as beautiful or to doing beautiful work? A better example is that a long time ago overweight males and females were seen as attractive because they could afford to eat good food. Today, on the other hand, it is safe to say most men and women want a more lean/ muscular look to their bodies. This then disproves that the definition of beauty follows an evolutionary origin and that we all share similar perspectives around beauty.

I personally believe that we have our own bias towards what we consider aesthetically pleasing that we can't possibly backtrack it to a reason to why we think it is beautiful by simply looking back at certain aspects of our "primitive lives." It is important to not simply say that due to our ancestors having some advantage to something is why we see it beautiful because we are then forced to believe that beauty is limited to the experiences of those before us.

Steven Pinker Post

1. The text from Pinker’s article I selected is as follows: “all of our experiences, thoughts, feelings, yearnings, and emotions consist of physiological activity in the tissue of the brain.”


I selected this because above all else in the world I believe in the brain. Before I believe in love or joy, anger or evil, rationality or violence as concepts, I believe that the human brain is the source and arbiter of them as a physiologic process. We may judge and name them a certain way, but each word I listed exists without a label in our cortex and did before language.

2. This underlies a rather important distinction I will try to present.


Why is okay to call someone a “bodybuilder” and not acceptable to call someone a “schizophrenic”?

The answer lies in pathology. A body builder has made an informed decision about a reversible lifestyle choice and is able to attenuate the degree to which it permeates and controls their life. A person with schizophrenia does not control their condition, as such they should not receive a social label. If a person’s brain produces emotions such as depression, recognizing that depression stems from a chemical source can allow a diagnosis to be dissected away from a person’s conscious and purposeful choices. With enough work, mental health issues could fall away from defining a person much in the same way that people do not think to call someone a hypertensive when their bp is too high by folding them into the group of conditions we consider “normal.” I do recognize the danger in this path, as pointed out in the link between condition and economics section of the keyword document. It seems to be a very fine line between distributing off label non-FDA approved homeopathics that harm patients and profiting from people who have been pushed onto the ferris wheel of conditions you can pay to treat.

3. I am acting out the science wars by accepting a narrow biological view of “being.” I have taken “I think therefore I am” and made it into “I am my brain and my brain is me.” What is fascinating to me is that the blank slate ideology fails when one considers the genetic component of health, but it is fully in effect when one considers the “nurture” effects of the environment. As everyone knows, the answer lies in between. I believe this extends elsewhere; the noble savage and leviathan concepts appear to be similar in how they must applied to the correct situation. Laws serving to deter people from crime may be a form of nurture, however no law can correct for a condition such as psychopathy. The answer of leviathan or noble savage must lie in the middle of the two.

Insights on Pinker's "The Blank State"

Something that struck me in Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” is the statement “the idea is that if we’re blank slates, we must be equal.” This statement somewhat confirms and contradicts what I know is right. I would think that when we are newborns, we are blank slates and we are all equal. However, that is ignoring nature (i.e. the environment we are born into, whether that be a poorer family, a minority family, etc.) Babies are all born brand new with no idea of what the world holds for them. This statement really struck me because of all the inequality our world is facing right now, racial and gender inequality. The idea that we are born equal, as beings that have no voice, but a body and brain means we are blank and malleable. From my own life, I think my experiences and how my parents influenced me is how I turned out to be. I come from a middle class family and my parents were immigrants. I was born in the United States, however my parents had different values than the typical American culture. They raised me in a strict household where education was everything to make sure I ended up nothing like them. Our situation isn’t even that bad, yet my parents instilled success and wealth into my young mind to potentially become a medical doctor someday. Although when I was younger, being a doctor sounded fun, but as an adult finishing up my undergrad… I’m completely unsure of what I want to do and I feel like a failure to my parents. It is because of their influence that I take a completely normal feeling and turn it into one of the main stressors in my life. That is why I think the influences and experiences as a young child is important for how they develop psychologically. This is how everyone has different values than I do. To compare, I have a friend whose parents didn’t put such pressure on her and now she is living her life traveling and working of her photography. Our situations are different because of our different experiences and values instilled into us as young children.  

When most things are psychological, there is a lot at stake. The way people think represents what they do and how they treat other people. The way they think was influenced by someone else’s thoughts and experiences. This can scar or inspire a young child’s malleable mind. An example would be Elliot’s article on people who desire to be amputees. I don’t think someone is born with the will to cut off a limb, but have an experience that led them to this desire. The way people interact with one another is important to how one’s mind is developed throughout their life.