5th June, 2019

Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of Beauty -

SUMMARY
The author is an art philosopher who is trying to find the concept of beauty, by
studying it in an intellectual, philosophical, and psychological way. The diverse types of
beauty (human beings, natural landforms, works of art, etc), makes the look for a unique
concept complicated. Many people consider that beauty is in the eye of the beholder
while academics add that it is also culturally conditioned.
In order to explain the universality of beauty, Dutton argues that it is necessary to
reverse engineer in order to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our artistic taste and
in that way explain how they came to be engraved in our minds along history. The
author also explains that the experience of beauty belongs to our evolved human
psychology and that it is an adaptive effect. According with Darwin evolution operates
mainly by 2 principles, natural selection (random mutation, selective retention,
repulsion, pleasures) and sexual selection. The experience of beauty is one of the ways
that evolution has of maintaining interest while encouraging the humans to make
adaptive decisions for survival and reproduction.
The beauty in landscapes is an absolute example of how people everywhere find
beauty in similar visual experiences from the earliest known works of arts, made by
Homo erectus and Homo ergaster between 50.000 and 100.000 years ago, the
symmetry and attractive material of their works are beautiful even today.
All in all, beauty is a gift passed from our most ancient ancestor and that will be
with us and our descendants while the human race exists.

JESSICA SABBATELLE
CERP - ENGLISH