Saturday, January 16, 2021

Aesthetic evolution

 This post will look at some of the potential implications for evolutionary theory of two books for the general reader, both published fairly recently. These are The First Minds: Caterpillars, Karyotes, and Consciousness by Arthur Reber and Richard Prum's The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World - and Us.  If the central arguments of these two books are accepted and juxtaposed with each other, the implications for evolutionary theory are very deep.