A Darwinian theory of beauty | Denis Dutton

Delighted to be here

and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart,

which is beauty.

I do the philosophy of art, aesthetics,

actually, for a living.

I try to figure out intellectually,

philosophically, psychologically,

what the experience of beauty is,

what sensibly can be said about it

and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it.

Now this is an extremely complicated subject,

in part because the things that we call beautiful

are so different.

I mean just think of the sheer variety --

a baby's face,

Berlioz's "Harold in Italy,"

movies like "The Wizard of Oz"

or the plays of Chekhov,

a central California landscape,

a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji,

"Der Rosenkavalier,"

a stunning match-winning goal

in a World Cup soccer match,

Van Gogh's "Starry Night,"

a Jane Austen novel,

Fred Astaire dancing across the screen.

This brief list includes human beings,

natural landforms,

works of art and skilled human actions.

An account that explains the presence of beauty

in everything on this list

is not going to be easy.

I can, however, give you at least a taste

of what I regard

as the most powerful theory of beauty

we yet have.

And we get it not from a philosopher of art,

not from a postmodern art theorist

or a bigwig art critic.

No, this theory

comes from an expert

on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding,

and you know who I mean:

Charles Darwin.

Of course, a lot of people think they already know

the proper answer to the question,

"What is beauty?"

It's in the eye of the beholder.

It's whatever moves you personally.

Or, as some people,

especially academics prefer,

beauty is in the culturally conditioned

eye of the beholder.

People agree that paintings or movies or music

are beautiful

because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste.

Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts

travel across cultures

with great ease.

Beethoven is adored in Japan.

Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints.

Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures

in British museums,

while Shakespeare is translated

into every major language of the Earth.

Or just think about American jazz

or American movies --

they go everywhere.

There are many differences among the arts,

but there are also universal,

cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures

and values.

How can we explain

this universality?

The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct

a Darwinian evolutionary history

of our artistic and aesthetic tastes.

We need to reverse-engineer

our present artistic tastes and preferences

and explain how they came

to be engraved in our minds

by the actions of both our prehistoric,

largely pleistocene environments,

where we became fully human,

but also by the social situations

in which we evolved.

This reverse engineering

can also enlist help

from the human record

preserved in prehistory.

I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth.

And it should take into account

what we know of the aesthetic interests

of isolated hunter-gatherer bands

that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries.

Now, I personally

have no doubt whatsoever

that the experience of beauty,

with its emotional intensity and pleasure,

belongs to our evolved human psychology.

The experience of beauty is one component

in a whole 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.

As many of you will know,

evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms.

The first of these is natural selection --

that's random mutation and selective retention --

along with our basic anatomy and physiology --

the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails.

Natural selection also explains

many basic revulsions,

such as the horrid smell of rotting meat,

or fears, such as the fear of snakes

or standing close to the edge of a cliff.

Natural selection also explains pleasures --

sexual pleasure,

our liking for sweet, fat and proteins,

which in turn explains a lot of popular foods,

from ripe fruits through chocolate malts

and barbecued ribs.

The other great principle of evolution

is sexual selection,

and it operates very differently.

The peacock's magnificent tail

is the most famous example of this.

It did not evolve for natural survival.

In fact, it goes against natural survival.

No, the peacock's tail

results from the mating choices

made by peahens.

It's quite a familiar story.

It's women who actually push history forward.

Darwin himself, by the way,

had no doubts that the peacock's tail

was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen.

He actually used that word.

Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind,

we can say that the experience of beauty

is one of the ways that evolution has

of arousing and sustaining

interest or fascination,

even obsession,

in order to encourage us

toward making the most adaptive decisions

for survival and reproduction.

Beauty is nature's way

of acting at a distance,

so to speak.

I mean, you can't expect to eat

an adaptively beneficial landscape.

It would hardly do to eat your baby

or your lover.

So evolution's trick

is to make them beautiful,

to have them exert a kind of magnetism

to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them.

Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure,

the magnetic pull

of beautiful landscapes.

People in very different cultures

all over the world

tend to like a particular kind of landscape,

a landscape that just happens to be similar

to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved.

This landscape shows up today

on calendars, on postcards,

in the design of golf courses and public parks

and in gold-framed pictures

that hang in living rooms

from New York to New Zealand.

It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape

featuring open spaces

of low grasses

interspersed with copses of trees.

The trees, by the way, are often preferred

if they fork near the ground,

that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up

if you were in a tight fix.

The landscape shows the presence

of water directly in view,

or evidence of water in a bluish distance,

indications of animal or bird life

as well as diverse greenery

and finally -- get this --

a path

or a road,

perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline,

that extends into the distance,

almost inviting you to follow it.

This landscape type is regarded as beautiful,

even by people in countries

that don't have it.

The ideal savanna landscape

is one of the clearest examples

where human beings everywhere

find beauty

in similar visual experience.

But, someone might argue,

that's natural beauty.

How about artistic beauty?

Isn't that exhaustively cultural?

No, I don't think it is.

And once again, I'd like to look back to prehistory

to say something about it.

It is widely assumed

that the earliest human artworks

are the stupendously skillful cave paintings

that we all know from Lascaux

and Chauvet.

Chauvet caves

are about 32,000 years old,

along with a few small, realistic sculptures

of women and animals from the same period.

But artistic and decorative skills

are actually much older than that.

Beautiful shell necklaces

that look like something you'd see at an arts and crafts fair,

as well as ochre body paint,

have been found

from around 100,000 years ago.

But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts

are older even than this.

I have in mind

the so-called Acheulian hand axes.

The oldest stone tools are choppers

from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa.

They go back about two-and-a-half-million years.

These crude tools

were around for thousands of centuries,

until around 1.4 million years ago

when Homo erectus

started shaping

single, thin stone blades,

sometimes rounded ovals,

but often in what are to our eyes

an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf

or teardrop form.

These Acheulian hand axes --

they're named after St. Acheul in France,

where finds were made in 19th century --

have been unearthed in their thousands,

scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa,

almost everywhere Homo erectus

and Homo ergaster roamed.

Now, the sheer numbers of these hand axes

shows that they can't have been made

for butchering animals.

And the plot really thickens when you realize

that, unlike other pleistocene tools,

the hand axes often exhibit

no evidence of wear

on their delicate blade edges.

And some, in any event, are too big

to use for butchery.

Their symmetry, their attractive materials

and, above all,

their meticulous workmanship

are simply quite beautiful

to our eyes, even today.

So what were these ancient --

I mean, they're ancient, they're foreign,

but they're at the same time

somehow familiar.

What were these artifacts for?

The best available answer

is that they were literally

the earliest known works of art,

practical tools transformed

into captivating aesthetic objects,

contemplated both for their elegant shape

and their virtuoso craftsmanship.

Hand axes mark

an evolutionary advance in human history --

tools fashioned to function

as what Darwinians call "fitness signals" --

that is to say, displays

that are performances

like the peacock's tail,

except that, unlike hair and feathers,

the hand axes are consciously

cleverly crafted.

Competently made hand axes

indicated desirable personal qualities --

intelligence, fine motor control,

planning ability,

conscientiousness

and sometimes access to rare materials.

Over tens of thousands of generations,

such skills increased the status

of those who displayed them

and gained a reproductive advantage

over the less capable.

You know, it's an old line,

but it has been shown to work --

"Why don't you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes?"

(Laughter)

Except, of course, what's interesting about this

is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed,

because the Homo erectus

that made these objects

did not have language.

It's hard to grasp,

but it's an incredible fact.

This object was made

by a hominid ancestor,

Homo erectus or Homo ergaster,

between 50,000 and 100,000 years

before language.

Stretching over a million years,

the hand axe tradition

is the longest artistic tradition

in human and proto-human history.

By the end of the hand axe epic, Homo sapiens --

as they were then called, finally --

were doubtless finding new ways

to amuse and amaze each other

by, who knows, telling jokes,

storytelling, dancing, or hairstyling.

Yes, hairstyling -- I insist on that.

For us moderns,

virtuoso technique

is used to create imaginary worlds

in fiction and in movies,

to express intense emotions

with music, painting and dance.

But still,

one fundamental trait

of the ancestral personality persists

in our aesthetic cravings:

the beauty we find

in skilled performances.

From Lascaux to the Louvre

to Carnegie Hall,

human beings

have a permanent innate taste

for virtuoso displays in the arts.

We find beauty

in something done well.

So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window

displaying a beautifully cut

teardrop-shaped stone,

don't be so sure

it's just your culture telling you

that that sparkling jewel is beautiful.

Your distant ancestors loved that shape

and found beauty in the skill needed to make it,

even before

they could put their love into words.

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?

No, it's deep in our minds.

It's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills

and rich emotional lives

of our most ancient ancestors.

Our powerful reaction to images,

to the expression of emotion in art,

to the beauty of music, to the night sky,

will be with us and our descendants

for as long as the human race exists.

Thank you.

(Applause)