Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Aesthetics from an Evolutionary Point of View

In Scharfstein's "Without Borders", he briefly goes in to how neuroesthetics and how different pictures stimulate different areas of the brain.  He mentions that pictures that subjects found beautiful affected the area of the brain associated with rewarding stimuli, while pictures that were perceived as ugly had the opposite effect.  I believe that this can be tied to Dennis Dutton's take on our perception of beauty having an evolutionary base.
Even after millions of years of evolution, we still have physical and emotional responses that we can trace back to our early ancestors.  For example, fight or flight responses.  These were, and still are, a necessity of survival, but we don't rely on them as much today.  We still have genetic coding that is, essentially, useless.  It makes sense that we would still have remnants of aesthetic taste from our ancestors as well, which explains why even with a multitude of tastes and aesthetic views, we can find common ground in certain aspects of beauty, such as symmetry and color.  However, the question that comes to my mind is this: If certain responses have been dulled or lost all together from our early ancestors, will our similarities in tastes be lost as well?  With so many views of beauty, will any trace of the similarities of taste that seem to be found in the majority of people be lost as evolution, in both our society and any physical aspects, takes place?

Evolution itself takes millions of years, so if after millions of years we find certain ancient hand-me-downs dulled or lost all together, where will that put our aesthetic taste in the next century?

 

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