Today, we are comfortable describing these animals as having self-awareness, complex emotions, language-like communication, and even culture, but we hesitate to say they have a sense of beauty.
Perhaps that is because our ideas about beauty have been shaped by the philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment. Back then, beauty was conceived as a rarefied property best appreciated by mostly disinterested intellectual observers. That nose-in-the-air, art-for-art’s-sake concept of beauty no longer holds much sway in a culture that recognises the potential for beauty in pretty much anything, from classical art to windblown plastic bags. But Enlightenment thinking left behind a habit of regarding aesthetic experiences as distinct from other pleasures. Animals could hardly be expected to share them.
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Studies on whether other animals share these sensibilities mostly involve primates, rats, and a few test-amenable bird species. Chimpanzees seem to share our fondness for the colour red and for curved objects; newborn junglefowl soon develop a preference for symmetry. Even so, one can imagine that aesthetic sensibilities have far-reaching evolutionary roots, which go beyond tested species. Choosing mates is an obvious context: some researchers suggest that symmetry is generally a marker of good health. Another context is risk avoidance: jagged, angular objects are often dangerous. More broadly, complexity tends to reward a sense of curiosity. Richard Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, suggests that beauty demands ‘prolonged social and sensory engagement’. That engagement may have clear evolutionary benefits: an animal that lingers on a flowering tree’s loveliness might have a better chance of remembering its location when fruiting season comes.
We are even capable of finding beauty in ideas
To Prum, animals can only take aesthetic pleasure in those entities with which they have coevolved : wood thrushes and their layered, flute-like courtship songs, for example, or bumblebees and the pinks of wild roses. After countless generations of evaluation and choice, those stimuli are now entrained in their brains. Prum also thinks humans are unique in their ability to project tastes from one domain onto another, as when a predilection for colours that coevolved with fruit are projected onto the hues of a sunset.
- More Here and it was the them of 2017 Max's Holiday Card
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