Evolutionary Aesthetics edited by Eckart Voland and Karl Grammer. Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2003

Abstract

The question “Why do we find certain things beautiful?” is familiar to any student of Aesthetics. Many philosophers have struggled with the question of where beauty resides - in the object, the beholder’s mind, or the interrelationship of object with mind. The question many philosophers fail to address, however, is why do humans have aesthetic preferences (e.g. beauty)? It may well be true that our aesthetic preferences are based on the mental pleasure produce by certain features of things but why do we get pleasure from these features? Furthermore, if we understood why humans have aesthetic preferences, perhaps we would be in a better position to postulate what our preferences are (and thus what beauty is). Evolutionary Aesthetics, is a collection of articles that attempts to answer these questions and explain aesthetic experience from an evolutionary perspective. The aesthetic preferences of human beings and their spontaneous distinction between “beauty and “ugliness” are posited in a Darwinian framework as a biologically adapted ability to make important decisions in life. The contributors to this collection are a mixture of psychologists, anthropologists and art historians and the book is divided into four sections which cover the evolution of human perception and perceptual biases, and the particular aesthetic preferences in human sexuality and reproduction, landscape, smell, and bodily motion.