When sexually reproducing creatures evolved, the primitive instinct warning them that something dangerous had entered their field of vision began to serve double duty, alerting them that a willing mate could be in the vicinity. The fear response became intimately associated with sexuality. In mammals and birds, the two phyla that display emotions, this bundling would become more visible. Sex and danger became integrated.
Because males produce so many sperm in comparison to the precious resource of females that only comes into estrus (“heat,” or whatever else ethologists choose to call the female’s “season”), the male must be the one to display courage. He must prove to the female that he is worthy of her attention above all others.
Peacocks strut their stuff, some frogs ribbit until they croak, a few moose sing their hearts out, but the preferred method for gaining dominance is to fight. Above all else, courage is the singular trait females are looking for. It tells the females that they are witnessing the display of a trait that guarantees superior genes.
Creativity is at its base a combination of fear and lust. Danger and sex are the fundamental processes that artists traditionally call upon to create a work of art. Of course, he or she is not aware that these are the root causes. Creativity begins with perceiving a pattern, a feature, or an alternative use for a common object. After recognizing something novel, the artist breaks down the observation into its component parts. This is primarily a left-brained function, reductionist and analytic. An artist will reassemble the pieces into a new and compelling manner that others will recognize as art. But the work of art must contain “passion.” It must be a work of “love.” He or she must be in a nearly “orgasmic” state to produce it. Our word enthusiasm comes from Dionysian enthousiasmos, a wild state of holy inspiration. Orgasm is a right-hemispheric function. Love is rooted in the right brain. Ecstasy is an emotion experienced at the right of the corpus callosum.
The scientist does the same, but is interested in understanding how the parts relate to the whole. Whereas the scientist uses reductionism and synthesis in the service of advancing knowledge, the artist uses the same in the service of aesthetics. The artist employs images and metaphors to interpret the relationships of reality; the scientist imposes numbers and equations on nature to express the relationships of reality. The writer Vladimir Nabokov observed, “There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts.” The revolutionary artist and the visionary scientist are both fundamentally engaged in investigating the essence of reality.
A sense of beauty would not have evolved unless it gave humans an edge in the fight against other animals for resources. But, the question must be asked: Of what conceivable benefit could it have been to be in awe of a gorgeous sunrise when the attention would have diminished one’s alertness to danger?
Beauty is, unfortunately, one of those short, slippery, all-purpose words that resemble children’s play bubbles. The word beauty is used so commonly in so many different contexts that trying to grab ahold of the word is like trying to wrap your arms around a rainbow. The experience of beauty, like love and truth, is subjective. Its qualia of nonobjectivity is the reason scientists have, for the most part, avoided getting stuck in this ambiguous word.
Further reflection on beauty’s definition, however, allows its breakdown into several different categories. There are three distinct kinds of beauty: sexual, natural, and artifactual. (An artifact here is something crafted by the human hand.) These three categories overlap each other.
Sexual beauty refers to the attraction between the sexes. Beautiful women are attractive to heterosexual men because that is the way men’s brains are hardwired. Heterosexual women are attracted to handsome men because that is the way their brains are hardwired. Gays and lesbians are attracted to the same qualities as heterosexuals, but their sexual interest is primarily focused on members of the same sex. Because every human is a psychic hermaphrodite—that is, each of us has a masculine side and a feminine side—all humans experience some degree of pleasure when looking at a healthy, well-formed human of either sex.
Natural beauty is a combination of features of the environment that evokes feelings of pleasure, serenity, or awe, and these combinations are fairly universal in their ability to arouse these feelings among peoples who live in widely diverse locales. Shady glens, clear running streams, craggy mountain vistas, waves breaking upon a sandy beach, and bright blue skies containing fluffy white clouds all produce a similar feeling in the vast majority of humans.
The third category, artifactual beauty, is the oddest. While humans are among a multitude of other creatures that fashion tools for a particular use, we appear to be the only animal concerned that the tool we make is aesthetically pleasing. From artisanal toolmaking, humans progressed to becoming artists. The objects they created increasingly had less and less practical value, until the artist was motivated to make something beautiful that was not utilitarian: art for art’s sake. But why would someone devote time and energy to create something that could not be used in any capacity other than to evoke a response in the viewers or the artists themselves? Why do we seek beauty for beauty’s sake?
The adaptation we call “appreciating beauty” begins with sexual attraction. How humans sublimated one of the instinctual drives, originally intended to heighten procreation, into an urge that propelled Leonardo to paint The Last Supper is instructive. It will lead to an understanding of how the quest for beauty became an integral part of human creativity.
When we compare how humans mate to the manner by which other animals mate, the human conception of beauty begins to be seen as one very strange adaptation. In almost all sexually reproducing species extant on the planet, males are attracted to females by means of a signaling device she emits around the time her eggs (or ova) become ripe. In every other species other than humans, this is the prod that informs his instinctual nervous system that it is time for him to get sexually aroused.
This simple arrangement alerts the male that the female of the species is approaching a time when copulation (or its equivalent) will result in a maximal chance that conception will occur. This ensures that the next generation of the species will endure, and that the entire species will avoid extinction.
In elephants, ethologists call this signal “musth”; deer have their “rut,” dogs experience “heat,” and primates have “estrus.” Despite the colorful names humans have assigned to these periodic celebrations, the purpose of all the signals is the same. In the majority of instances, the female wafts a pheromone into the surrounding environment. This enticing odor, sometimes measuring molecules in the minutest concentration, reaches the sensitive olfactory organ of the male, producing an altered state in his nervous system manifested by profound changes in his behavior. The male becomes fixated on one thing and one thing only—sex. Males of some species can detect the females’ pheromonic siren scent/song from miles away.
In most species, males congregate around the females and a great sexual emporium begins. Sometimes males engage in fights for dominance to see who has the heart, strength, and courage to mate with the females. In other species, males perform elaborate courting displays. The female signaling is the method that has been used with enormous success for millions of years for millions of species. It is extremely efficient, because this instinct gets the job done by selecting the most superior genetic material of males and matching them with the precious and sparse ova of the female.
So why did we humans abandon this system? What benefit to our species was so great that Natural Selection chose to give us an entirely new way to do it? Of all the species present on the planet, the one we know for sure that does not give an easily identifiable signal is the human female. And if humans abandoned the signaling system, what device has replaced it? What is it that attracts men to women and, to a lesser extent, women to men? Although pheromones continue to play a minor role in humans, they have receded into insignificance.
The signaling device that replaced leading pheromon
es or an involved swelling of vulvar signaling in humans was—beauty! A ravishingly beautiful woman could and does turn a man weak in the knees. What a fascinating and interesting development! Beauty as a means of sexual attraction seems to be nonexistent in other animals. Drawing on the observable behavior of other creatures, we do not see males interested in the overall shape of a female’s body or the configuration of her facial features when he is in the mood to mount.
Jane Goodall and her team observed that Flo, an old, scrawny, and, to them, relatively ugly female chimp, was the preferred female of the troop. The males, young and old, would patiently line up awaiting their turn to copulate with Flo, passing up the opportunity to have sex with much younger females. Goodall’s team concluded that Flo’s superb mothering skills meant more to the chimpanzees than physical beauty. As far as we can ascertain, only in humans are the males of the species profoundly influenced by the female’s outward appearance.
Two other physical indicators are so entwined with beauty that the three are nearly inseparable: health and youth. Both, when added to beauty, were prime indicators by which a male’s limbic system could gauge whether the female was fertile and likely to bear healthy children.
A prospective mate’s health also determined whether the infant she bore would survive the critical early years of childhood. Muscle tone, limber limbs, a shapely body, and a symmetrical face were good indications a man could use to unconsciously choose a woman who most likely would increase the odds of his genes surviving in the next generation. From an evolutionary point of view, this was a very radical development. Rather than giving a signal that her eggs had departed her ovaries, a female attracted a male by her “looks.”
Human females—by virtue of their radical reproductive makeover—were also no longer driven by the urgent instinct to mate during ovulation, as all other females were. This gave them the opportunity to reflect on their choice of mate. Despite the fact that females of any species also exercise choice, none exercise near the degree of choosiness as the human.
For sure, the human female, similar to her non-human counterparts, is still attracted to a male that exhibits outstanding physical traits. Only the human female consciously makes the connection between sex and pregnancy, leading her to understand that she needs a male companion who not only comes and goes in a heated rush, but one who will stay by her side to help her raise their young. Unlike health, strength, and handsomeness, few external signs exist to indicate the internal character of the male. The human female needs an instinct to see beyond the physical appearances of a man and ferret out his true nature (eventually labeled “woman’s intuition”). This assessment, which she has come to understand over many generations, is of more value than choosing a male based on physical characteristics alone. While beauty continues to play an important role in female selection of men, it plays a far lesser role in sexual desire than it does for a man.
Despite the enormous variations in body type and facial features, the standard for sexual beauty is buried deep within the human genome. Once this feature became manifest, it began to leak over to other areas so that humans would use beauty for more than just sexual survival.
Nowhere in the thousands of pages that Leonardo wrote does he ever explicitly offer his personal concept of beauty. Yet, there can be no other subject that consumed Leonardo more. Art critics and subsequent painters had to invent a special art term, Leonardoesque, to convey his unique ability to capture the beauty of the human face and form. He created animals so lifelike they appear ready to step right off the page. And, in the run-up to the Renaissance, no ancient, medieval, or contemporary artist was ever able to re-create with such unerring accuracy the beauty of their natural surroundings. Leonardo’s renderings of rocks, water, clouds, plants, and flowers were exceptionally beautiful. And yet no meaningful hypothesis of why we have an aesthetic sense appears in his voluminous writings.
Natural Selection installed the code in our genome that established beauty as the key criterion associated with sexual attraction, and this extraordinary new aesthetic would be pressed into a new role in our environment. An unusual feature of humanhood made this transition imperative for the survival of the species. The beauty gene was pressed into service to cover another function, because humans wandered away from the template used by practically all other animals: We are explorers.
Endowed with a thirst for exploration, humans are willing to venture far away from what can be considered home. This untethering of humans from an invisible border fence that more or less hems in other creatures has enabled humans to populate the entire globe. There is no environmental niche that humans have not explored or inhabited. Human communities can be found thriving in steamy rain forests, arid deserts, arctic tundras, and air-thin mountain peaks. With the possible exception of rats, there are no other species of mammals that can make that statement.
What makes human wanderlust so extraordinary is how poorly equipped Homo sapiens originally were for a life of trekking. Being the only one of 270 species of primates that have permanently molted any vestige of a thick coat of fur that might keep them warm in the winter, humans were dependent on the availability of resources to fashion garments to serve as a substitute. Author Desmond Morris aptly named our species, and his book, The Naked Ape. He pointed out that if the pelts of all primates were arranged in a line, the one that would stand out from all the others was the one that had no fur. In extreme heat humans need to perspire to control their internal temperature; this requires them to have a constant source of freshwater and salt.
To supplement this extraordinary foray away from the norm of animal behavior, Natural Selection found it necessary to install in these intrepid travelers an instinct that would inform them when they were in an environment that could sustain them. This new instinct was based on aesthetics.
There was a considerable trade-off, however, when Mother Nature enlarged the function of the sexual attraction gene to include natural beauty. Lost in the reverie of observing a beautiful tableau, a prehistoric human would be less aware of the wild beast stealthily creeping up behind him or her. It is a measure of just how urgent it was for Mother Nature to install an instinct for appreciating natural beauty. To do so, she had to override the instinct designed to keep an individual safe. The “Wow!” factor was for the wandering human more important than the “Look out!” factor.
Once archaic humans evolved into the exploratory primate willing to leave the comfort and safety of a familiar territory to strike out for parts unknown, they needed a sense that would subconsciously inform them when they were in an area propitious to their survival. Fast-running streams, meandering rivers, or waterfalls not only fill humans with a sense of beauty, but also provide necessary water. Craggy cliffs and rugged mountains provide rock shelters, ledges, and caves for refuge. Wide-open spaces, crystal-clear atmospheric conditions, and distant sight lines allowed our ancestors to spot potential prey and identify approaching predators or enemies.
When we more closely examine the aesthetic associated with nature, we encounter very different criteria for determining what is beautiful and what is not. Instead of using the most common ratios and regular proportions among various facial and body features to evaluate beauty, we judge the wild by how distant a feature resides from the crest of the bell-shaped curve. The highest mountains, deepest valleys, fullest waterfalls, wildest rivers, and steepest cliffs are the ones designated as national parks. Whereas the beautiful in human faces tends toward the familiar and symmetrical, in nature it is the unfamiliar and irregular.
At some unconscious level, randomness and asymmetry appeals to our aesthetic sensibilities. Who has not lain on their back in fresh, sweet-smelling grass while looking at the sky, festooned with shape-shifting clouds? It is the sheer unpredictability of their ever-changing patterns that makes them so beautiful. Strolling in a forest planned and planted by humans in which the trees are spaced in neat rows is not as aesthetically exciting as exploring the irregular twists a
nd turns of a wilderness. Snowflakes, the vein pattern in leaves, and the random arrangement of features in a meadow drive home the point: Natural phenomena never exactly repeat. Unlike the regularity and symmetry we seek in sexual attraction, our attraction to the wild is spiced by its stupendous variety.
The instinct to appreciate beauty, originally installed for sexual attraction, eventually served to alert us to beautiful natural surroundings. It then made one final leap to a new set of chromosomes, and the new combination infused something spectacular into the life of humans.
From that evolutionary moment forward, the species that would evolve into Homo sapiens began to create, seek, find, assemble, and rearrange material objects and abstract symbols. Increasingly, these artifacts possessed the qualities of elegance and grace. The instinct to search for beauty is so powerful that in many cases, it is capable of overriding the instinct for sexual attraction or natural beauty. Many artists and scientists would rather forgo the pleasures of carnal delight in order to complete their quest to create something of beauty.
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