Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts

Opening Mysteries: The Anomaly of the Arts in the Evolutionary Landscape

Organic evolution has two independent components, which together explain how all of the evolved features of organisms came into being. The first is randomness, which by its inconstant and capricious nature cannot build anything organized. The second is natural selection, which drives the incorporation of adaptively functional features into a species’ design over evolutionary time (Dawkins, 1986). Organisms are full of exquisitely organized functional machinery (adaptations), from eyes and muscles to circulatory systems and neural circuits. Natural selection is the only explanation presently known to the scientific community for functional relationships that are more highly ordered than chance can account for (Williams, 1966). Reciprocally, this means that all functional organization discovered to be part of the design of a species must have been built by natural selection. If not, then our complacently nontheistic materialist theories are in trouble (Tooby and Cosmides, 1992).