Philosophy of art, aesthetics, is what I do 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. It’s an extremely complicated subject, in part because the things we call beautiful are so different. Think of the sheer variety:

* a baby’s face
* Berlioz’s Harold in Italy
* a movie such as The Wizard of Oz or any play by Chekhov
* the Geiranger Fjord
* a Hokusai view of Mount 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 list includes human beings, natural landforms, works of art, and skillful human actions. Given such variety, an account that explains the presence of beauty in everything here is not going to be easy. I want, however, to provide at least a taste of what I regard as the most powerful theory of beauty we yet have. It comes neither from a philosopher nor an art theorist, nor from a bigwig art critic. It comes instead from an expert on barnacles and worms and pigeon breeding — Charles Darwin.

Of course, many people think they already know the correct answer to that 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. The idea here is that the art objects — paintings or movies or music — are beautiful because the cultures in which they are created determine a uniformity of aesthetic taste.

Now, this idea cannot be completely wrong: there is a strong cultural component in responses to beauty and we all know examples where thinking outside our own familiar aesthetic culture can be difficult. (My favorite example: it is very difficult for many Westerners to take pleasure in the Beijing Opera — but each of us might have in mind examples of a foreign art form that is very hard for us to grasp.)

On the other hand, against this idea that beauty is simply and exclusively culturally-conditioned is the obvious fact that tastes for both natural beauty and the arts travel across cultural and historical boundaries with great ease: Beethoven is adored in Japan. Peruvians love Japanese woodblock prints. Inca sculptures are regarded as treasures by British museums, while Shakespeare is translated into every major language of the earth. Or think about American jazz, or American movies – like it or not, they go everywhere!

Underneath all of the cultural differences in artistic preferences, 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 both of the prehistoric, largely Pleistocene environments where we became fully human, and by the social situations in which we evolved. This reverse-engineering must enlist help from preserved human record left in prehistory – fossils, cave paintings, and so forth – but it should also take into account what we know of the aesthetic interests of isolated hunter-gather bands that survived into the 19th and 20th centuries.

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.

Evolution operates by means of two primary mechanisms. The first is natural selection – the random mutation and selective retention. Along with our basic anatomy and physiology – the evolution of the pancreas, the eye, our fingernails – natural selection also explains many basic revulsions (such as the horrid smell of rotting meat), fears (for snakes, or for standing close to the edge of a cliff). Natural selection also explains pleasures: sexual pleasure, or our liking for sweet, fat, and proteins, which explains the strong appeal many popular foods — ripe fruits, Belgian chocolate, barbequed pork 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. It did not evolve for natural survival. No, the peacock’s tail results from mating choices made by peahens. A familiar story — it’s the women who push evolutionary history forward. (Darwin himself, by the way, had no doubts that the peacock’s tail was beautiful in the mind of the peahen.)

With these ideas firmly in mind, we can state the following: the experience of beauty is one of the ways evolution has of arousing and sustaining interest (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. You cannot expect, for instance, to eat an adaptively beneficial landscape, and it would hardly do to eat your baby or your lover. Evolution’s trick is to make them, each in its different way, beautiful — to have them exert on you a kind of irresistible magnetism, to give you deep pleasure simply by looking at them.

Consider beautiful landscapes. In 1993, an American foundation commissioned a large international poll to determine cross-cultural picture preferences. It found, surprisingly, that people in very different cultures all over the world tended to like a particular kind of landscape — a landscape that just happens to be similar to the highest quality Pleistocene savannahs where we evolved. This landscape shows up today on calendars and postcards and chocolate boxes, in the design of golf courses and public parks, and in gold-framed pictures that hang in living rooms from Stockholm to New Zealand.

It is a kind of landscape the Americans identify as Hudson River School, but you see it in the whole history of European painting from the late Middle Ages and Renaissance up to the present day. This default” landscape features:

• open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees. The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground – trees that you could scramble up, if need be.
• the landscape shows the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water in a bluish distance;
• indications of animal and bird life; as well as diverse greenery.
• and finally, a path or road – or perhaps a river bank or shoreline – that extends into the distance, almost inviting the viewer to follow it.

One of the most startling revelations of the worldwide poll was that this landscape is preferred – and indeed purchased, for example in art prints and on calendars – in dusty lands and tropical localities that do not physically have it.

The beauty of the ideal savannah landscape is one of the clearest areas where human beings everywhere find aesthetic pleasure in a similar visual experience that is to some degree independent of culture and background. Our pervasive emotional attachment to such landscapes is a direct product of the fact that our ancestors tens of thousands of generations back in prehistory who preferred such landscapes enjoyed marginally greater survival rates. Even a small marginal advantage can over thousands of generations can leave aesthetic preferences deeply engraved in the human mind. But, one might argue, that’s a matter of natural beauty.

But what about artistic beauty? Isn’t that at least exhaustively cultural? No, it is not, and once again we can best understand this by looking back to human prehistory.

It is widely and incorrectly assumed that the earliest human art works are the spectacularly skillful cave paintings that we all know from Lascaux and Chauvet, which is maybe 32,000 years old, along with a few small realistic sculptures of women and of animals from the same period.

But artistic and decorative skills are much older than that. Beautiful shell necklaces that look like something you’d see today at an arts & crafts fair, as well as ochre body-paint, have been found from 100,000 years ago. But the most intriguing prehistoric artifacts are older even than this. I have in mind what are known as the Acheulian hand axes.

The earliest stone tools are choppers from Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, from 2.5 million years ago. These crude tools were around for thousands of centuries, until maybe 1.4 million years ago when Homo erectus started shaping single, thin stone blades, sometimes rounded ovals, but often in what to our eyes are arresting symmetrical pointed leaf or teardrop forms. These are the Acheulian hand axes (named from finds at St. Acheul in France) and they’ve been unearthed by the thousands, scattered across Asia, Europe, and Africa — almost everywhere Homo erectus roamed.

The sheer numbers of these hand axes is evidence that they cannot have been made just for butchering animals. And the plot thickens where you realize that, unlike other Pleistocene stone tools, hand axes often exhibit no signs of wear on their delicate blade edges. Some are far too big for practical use, and others are made of especially attractively colored stone, sometimes even featuring embedded fossils. Acheulian hand axes are unlike practical choppers and other utilitarian tools in that the sharp edge extends, rather pleasingly, all the way around the axe. It would have been more practical to haft the sharpened edge on one side and retain a rounded handgrip opposite on the other.

Their striking tear-drop symmetry, attractive materials, and above all their meticulous workmanship make the hand axes quite simply beautiful to our eyes. What were these ancient — yet somehow familiar — artifacts for?

The best available explanation is that they are 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 prehistory, tools fashioned to function as what Darwinians call “fitness signals” — displays, performances that are like the peacock’s tail in showing their makers’ strength and vitality. Except that hand axes were not grown like hair or feathers, but consciously, cleverly crafted.

Competently made hand axes indicated desirable personal qualities: intelligence, fine motor control, planning ability, conscientiousness, and sometimes, access to rare stone materials. Over tens of thousands of generations, such skills increased the status of those who displayed them. These skilled individuals gained a reproductive advantage over the less-capable.

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.” Except of course, that we can’t be sure how that idea was conveyed because the Homo erectus that made these did not have language. It’s hard for us to grasp, but these incredible objects were being made 50,000 – 100,000 years before our ancestors had evolved the ability to speak.

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 epoch, Homo sapiens (as we now call them) were doubtless finding new ways to amuse and amaze each other with — who knows? — jokes, storytelling, dancing, tattooing, or hairstyling. Yes, hairstyling. I like to imagine two stone-age women 100,000 years ago dismissing some hapless male: “Oh, him and his old hand axes. He’s so Lower Paleolithic!” Of course, geological layers do not record these more fleeting aspects of prehistoric life.

For us moderns, virtuoso technique is used to create imaginary worlds in fiction and in movies, and 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 — where now and again a pianist or a soprano can cause the Homo erectus hairs stand up on the backs of our necks – 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 by a jewelry shop-window displaying a beautifully cut, tear-drop shaped stone, don’t be so sure that it’s just your culture telling you that this 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.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder? No! Beauty is a feeling deep in the evolved mind of the beholder. It is a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors. Our powerful reactions to images, to the expression of emotion in art, to the beauty of music, to a story that leaves us enraptured, will be with us and our descendents for as long as the human race exists.