TED2010
Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty
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TED collaborates with animator Andrew Park to illustrate Denis Dutton's provocative theory on beauty -- that art, music and other beautiful things, far from being simply "in the eye of the beholder," are a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins.
Denis Dutton - Philosopher
Denis Dutton was a philosophy professor and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In his book The Art Instinct, he suggested that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty. Full bio
Denis Dutton was a philosophy professor and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In his book The Art Instinct, he suggested that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
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Delighted to be here
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and to talk to you about a subject dear to my heart,
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which is beauty.
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I do the philosophy of art, aesthetics,
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actually, for a living.
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I try to figure out intellectually,
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philosophically, psychologically,
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what the experience of beauty is,
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what sensibly can be said about it
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and how people go off the rails in trying to understand it.
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Now this is an extremely complicated subject,
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in part because the things that we call beautiful
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are so different.
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I mean just think of the sheer variety --
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a baby's face,
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Berlioz's "Harold in Italy,"
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movies like "The Wizard of Oz"
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or the plays of Chekhov,
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a central California landscape,
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a Hokusai view of Mt. Fuji,
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"Der Rosenkavalier,"
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a stunning match-winning goal
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in a World Cup soccer match,
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Van Gogh's "Starry Night,"
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a Jane Austen novel,
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Fred Astaire dancing across the screen.
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This brief list includes human beings,
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natural landforms,
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works of art and skilled human actions.
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An account that explains the presence of beauty
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in everything on this list
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is not going to be easy.
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I can, however, give you at least a taste
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of what I regard
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as the most powerful theory of beauty
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we yet have.
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And we get it not from a philosopher of art,
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not from a postmodern art theorist
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or a bigwig art critic.
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No, this theory
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comes from an expert
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on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding,
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and you know who I mean:
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Charles Darwin.
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Of course, a lot of people think they already know
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the proper answer to the question,
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"What is beauty?"
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It's in the eye of the beholder.
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It's whatever moves you personally.
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Or, as some people,
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especially academics prefer,
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beauty is in the culturally conditioned
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eye of the beholder.
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People agree that paintings or movies or music
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are beautiful
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because their cultures determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste.
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Taste for both natural beauty and for the arts
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travel across cultures
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with great ease.
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Beethoven is adored in Japan.
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Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints.
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Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures
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in British museums,
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while Shakespeare is translated
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into every major language of the Earth.
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Or just think about American jazz
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or American movies --
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they go everywhere.
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There are many differences among the arts,
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but there are also universal,
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cross-cultural aesthetic pleasures
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and values.
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How can we explain
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this universality?
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The best answer lies in trying to reconstruct
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a Darwinian evolutionary history
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of our artistic and aesthetic tastes.
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We need to reverse-engineer
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our present artistic tastes and preferences
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and explain how they came
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to be engraved in our minds
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by the actions of both our prehistoric,
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largely pleistocene environments,
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where we became fully human,
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but also by the social situations
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in which we evolved.
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This reverse engineering
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can also enlist help
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from the human record
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preserved in prehistory.
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I mean fossils, cave paintings and so forth.
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And it should take into account
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what we know of the aesthetic interests
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of isolated hunter-gatherer bands
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that survived into the 19th and the 20th centuries.
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Now, I personally
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have no doubt whatsoever
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that the experience of beauty,
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with its emotional intensity and pleasure,
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belongs to our evolved human psychology.
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The experience of beauty is one component
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in a whole series of Darwinian adaptations.
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Beauty is an adaptive effect,
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which we extend
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and intensify
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in the creation and enjoyment
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of works of art and entertainment.
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As many of you will know,
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evolution operates by two main primary mechanisms.
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The first of these is natural selection --
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that's random mutation and selective retention --
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along with our basic anatomy and physiology --
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the evolution of the pancreas or the eye or the fingernails.
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Natural selection also explains
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many basic revulsions,
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such as the horrid smell of rotting meat,
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or fears, such as the fear of snakes
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or standing close to the edge of a cliff.
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Natural selection also explains pleasures --
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sexual pleasure,
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our liking for sweet, fat and proteins,
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which in turn explains a lot of popular foods,
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from ripe fruits through chocolate malts
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and barbecued ribs.
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The other great principle of evolution
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is sexual selection,
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and it operates very differently.
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The peacock's magnificent tail
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is the most famous example of this.
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It did not evolve for natural survival.
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In fact, it goes against natural survival.
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No, the peacock's tail
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results from the mating choices
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made by peahens.
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It's quite a familiar story.
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It's women who actually push history forward.
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Darwin himself, by the way,
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had no doubts that the peacock's tail
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was beautiful in the eyes of the peahen.
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He actually used that word.
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Now, keeping these ideas firmly in mind,
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we can say that the experience of beauty
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is one of the ways that evolution has
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of arousing and sustaining
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interest or fascination,
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even obsession,
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in order to encourage us
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toward making the most adaptive decisions
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for survival and reproduction.
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Beauty is nature's way
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of acting at a distance,
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so to speak.
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I mean, you can't expect to eat
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an adaptively beneficial landscape.
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It would hardly do to eat your baby
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or your lover.
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So evolution's trick
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is to make them beautiful,
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to have them exert a kind of magnetism
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to give you the pleasure of simply looking at them.
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Consider briefly an important source of aesthetic pleasure,
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the magnetic pull
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of beautiful landscapes.
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People in very different cultures
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all over the world
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tend to like a particular kind of landscape,
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a landscape that just happens to be similar
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to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved.
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This landscape shows up today
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on calendars, on postcards,
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in the design of golf courses and public parks
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and in gold-framed pictures
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that hang in living rooms
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from New York to New Zealand.
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It's a kind of Hudson River school landscape
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featuring open spaces
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of low grasses
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interspersed with copses of trees.
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The trees, by the way, are often preferred
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if they fork near the ground,
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that is to say, if they're trees you could scramble up
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if you were in a tight fix.
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The landscape shows the presence
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of water directly in view,
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or evidence of water in a bluish distance,
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indications of animal or bird life
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as well as diverse greenery
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and finally -- get this --
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a path
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or a road,
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perhaps a riverbank or a shoreline,
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that extends into the distance,
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almost inviting you to follow it.
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This landscape type is regarded as beautiful,
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even by people in countries
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that don't have it.
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The ideal savanna landscape
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is one of the clearest examples
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where human beings everywhere
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find beauty
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in similar visual experience.
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But, someone might argue,
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that's natural beauty.
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How about artistic beauty?
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Isn't that exhaustively cultural?
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No, I don't think it is.
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And once again, I'd like to look back to prehistory
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to say something about it.
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It is widely assumed
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that the earliest human artworks
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are the stupendously skillful cave paintings
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that we all know from Lascaux
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and Chauvet.
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Chauvet caves
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are about 32,000 years old,
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along with a few small, realistic sculptures
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of women and animals from the same period.
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But artistic and decorative skills
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are actually much older than that.
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Beautiful shell necklaces
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that look like something you'd see at an arts and crafts fair,
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as well as ochre body paint,
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have been found
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from around 100,000 years ago.
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But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts
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are older even than this.
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I have in mind
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the so-called Acheulian hand axes.
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The oldest stone tools are choppers
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from the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa.
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They go back about two-and-a-half-million years.
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These crude tools
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were around for thousands of centuries,
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until around 1.4 million years ago
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when Homo erectus
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started shaping
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single, thin stone blades,
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sometimes rounded ovals,
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but often in what are to our eyes
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an arresting, symmetrical pointed leaf
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or teardrop form.
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These Acheulian hand axes --
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they're named after St. Acheul in France,
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where finds were made in 19th century --
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have been unearthed in their thousands,
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scattered across Asia, Europe and Africa,
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almost everywhere Homo erectus
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and Homo ergaster roamed.
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Now, the sheer numbers of these hand axes
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shows that they can't have been made
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for butchering animals.
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And the plot really thickens when you realize
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that, unlike other pleistocene tools,
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the hand axes often exhibit
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no evidence of wear
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on their delicate blade edges.
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And some, in any event, are too big
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to use for butchery.
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Their symmetry, their attractive materials
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and, above all,
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their meticulous workmanship
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are simply quite beautiful
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to our eyes, even today.
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So what were these ancient --
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I mean, they're ancient, they're foreign,
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but they're at the same time
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somehow familiar.
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What were these artifacts for?
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The best available answer
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is that they were literally
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the earliest known works of art,
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practical tools transformed
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into captivating aesthetic objects,
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contemplated both for their elegant shape
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and their virtuoso craftsmanship.
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Hand axes mark
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an evolutionary advance in human history --
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tools fashioned to function
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as what Darwinians call "fitness signals" --
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that is to say, displays
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that are performances
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like the peacock's tail,
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except that, unlike hair and feathers,
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the hand axes are consciously
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cleverly crafted.
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Competently made hand axes
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indicated desirable personal qualities --
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intelligence, fine motor control,
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planning ability,
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conscientiousness
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and sometimes access to rare materials.
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Over tens of thousands of generations,
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such skills increased the status
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of those who displayed them
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and gained a reproductive advantage
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over the less capable.
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You know, it's an old line,
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but it has been shown to work --
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"Why don't you come up to my cave, so I can show you my hand axes?"
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(Laughter)
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Except, of course, what's interesting about this
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is that we can't be sure how that idea was conveyed,
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because the Homo erectus
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that made these objects
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did not have language.
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It's hard to grasp,
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but it's an incredible fact.
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This object was made
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by a hominid ancestor,
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Homo erectus or Homo ergaster,
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between 50,000 and 100,000 years
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before language.
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Stretching over a million years,
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the hand axe tradition
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is the longest artistic tradition
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in human and proto-human history.
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By the end of the hand axe epic, Homo sapiens --
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as they were then called, finally --
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were doubtless finding new ways
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to amuse and amaze each other
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by, who knows, telling jokes,
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storytelling, dancing, or hairstyling.
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Yes, hairstyling -- I insist on that.
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For us moderns,
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virtuoso technique
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is used to create imaginary worlds
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in fiction and in movies,
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to express intense emotions
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with music, painting and dance.
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But still,
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one fundamental trait
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of the ancestral personality persists
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in our aesthetic cravings:
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the beauty we find
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in skilled performances.
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From Lascaux to the Louvre
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to Carnegie Hall,
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human beings
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have a permanent innate taste
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for virtuoso displays in the arts.
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We find beauty
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in something done well.
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So the next time you pass a jewelry shop window
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displaying a beautifully cut
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teardrop-shaped stone,
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don't be so sure
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it's just your culture telling you
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that that sparkling jewel is beautiful.
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Your distant ancestors loved that shape
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and found beauty in the skill needed to make it,
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even before
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they could put their love into words.
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Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?
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No, it's deep in our minds.
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It's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills
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and rich emotional lives
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of our most ancient ancestors.
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Our powerful reaction to images,
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to the expression of emotion in art,
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to the beauty of music, to the night sky,
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will be with us and our descendants
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for as long as the human race exists.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Denis Dutton - PhilosopherDenis Dutton was a philosophy professor and the editor of Arts & Letters Daily. In his book The Art Instinct, he suggested that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty.
Why you should listen
Why do humans take pleasure in making art? In his 2009 book The Art Instinct, philosopher Denis Dutton suggested that art is a need built into our systems, a complex and subtle evolutionary adaptation comparable to our facility for language. We humans evolved to love art because it helps us survive; for example, a well-expressed appreciation of art can -- even in modern times -- help us to find a mate. It’s a bold argument to make, bolstered by examples from the breadth of art history that Dutton kept at his fingertips.
Dutton taught philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and was the editor of Arts & Letters Daily, a three-column compendium of culture news from all over the web. (His own homepage is another storehouse of tidbits from his wide-ranging explorations in philosophy and culture.) He was on the advisory board of Cybereditions, a publisher specializing in ebooks and print-on-demand editions of nonfiction works. And he was an editor of Climate Debate Daily, a lively blog that takes a skeptical view of some climate-change arguments.
Dutton died from cancer in December 2010.
Denis Dutton | Speaker | TED.com