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Aesthetic Preferences: An Evolutionary Approach

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Understanding Cultural Traits

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Abstract

Human aesthetic preferences towards a certain landscape type, a certain bodily traits of the opposite sex, a figurative style rather than another, are embedded in what we call “aesthetic experience”, a complex network of instinctive reactions, emotions, feelings, thoughts and judgments. Are these preferences universal and species-specific, that is to say are they the same for every member of a particular species? Evolutionary aesthetologists advocate the universality and species-specificity of the aesthetic preferences: they claim that, over the generations, a particular set of preferences, more advantageous in terms of fitness and survival, has been selected. Every man loves and prefers a certain type of environment (savannah hypothesis), certain bodily traits and so on. Going back to Darwin’s writings, in particular to his Notebooks, Portera and Bartalesi ask if alternative explanations are possible: can aesthetic preferences be also understood as the consequences of social learning, as the results of the transmission of cultural knowledge over the generations?

The authors have both contributed to the conception and design of the entire work; Mariagrazia Portera is responsible for Sects. 20.1 (second part), 20.2, 20.4; Lorenzo Bartalesi is responsible for Sects. 20.1 (first part), 20.3.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Connection: Chap. 19 presents a theory of how visual art, as documented in the archaeological record, originated in this period of human history.

  2. 2.

    Connection: Aesthetic preferences as cultural traits are addressed also in Chap. 10.

  3. 3.

    See Dissanayake (1998) – who was the first scholar to notice the similarity between Komar and Melamid’s polls and paintings and the ideas of Environmental Evolutionary Aesthetics – and Dutton (1998).

  4. 4.

    Criticism has been expressed about the psycho-evolutionary studies concerning human environmental and sexual preferences, in particular about their methodology. We refer the readers to Buller (2005), Eldredge (2004), Ruso et al. (2003), and Dupré (2001).

  5. 5.

    Connection: Similar assumptions, but with a much stronger role of culture, may be recognized in gene-culture coevolutionary theory (Chap. 11).

  6. 6.

    Connection: Darwin’s thoughts, as expressed in his writings, are protagonist also of Sects. 11.2, 13.3, 16.2, and 18.2.

  7. 7.

    Connection: The relationship between brain and culture is explored in Chap. 7, and problematized in Chaps. 2, 16, and 21.

  8. 8.

    Neuroscientist Steven Brown, in Brown et al. (2011), comes to a similar conclusion regarding “aesthetic” as positive and negative evaluations in certain regions of the brain. Darwin of course did not know the neurobiology. Furthermore, the term “instinct” is nowadays not as used as it was earlier for Darwin and for the early ethologists, e.g. Nikolaas Tinbergen. Contemporary neuroscientists prefer to use the term “predisposition” and suggest that we might think of certain predispositions as almost automatic.

  9. 9.

    Lamarckian theory and the inheritance of acquired characteristics theory are two different theoretical hypotheses: Darwin, for instance, was persuaded by the latter, but not by the former. Moreover, the adjective “Lamarckian” has acquired, in the course of the development of biological research, a rather pejorative meaning.

  10. 10.

    A minimal definition of ‘chiasmus’ is the following: the (rhetoric) figure in which two or more elements are related to each other through a reversal of structures.

  11. 11.

    Connection: See Chap. 11 on gene-culture coevolutionary theory.

  12. 12.

    See Pigliucci and Müller (2010) and Odling-Smee et al. (2003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Mariagrazia Portera & Lorenzo Bartalesi

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  1. Mariagrazia Portera
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  2. Lorenzo Bartalesi
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Correspondence to Lorenzo Bartalesi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Paris School of Economics, Paris, France

    Fabrizio Panebianco

  2. CISEPS-CenterforInterdisciplinaryStudies, University of Milano - Bicocca, Milano, Italy

    Emanuele Serrelli

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Portera, M., Bartalesi, L. (2016). Aesthetic Preferences: An Evolutionary Approach. In: Panebianco, F., Serrelli, E. (eds) Understanding Cultural Traits. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_20

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