A Study On Contemporary Western Evolutionary Aesthetics

This dissertation is taking the contemporary western evolutionary aesthetics as research topic,analyzing its research contents,research methods,and research significant.The contemporary western evolutionary aesthetics is using evolutionary adaptation theory,i.e.theory of natural selection and sexual selection,to explain the initiation,development and influence of beauty and art.As far as the current research is concerned,a complete framework of evolutionary aesthetics mainly consists of two parts:one is beauty and evolution,and the other is art and evolution.Under this framework,this dissertation is divided into six chapters.Chapter one introduces the basic concepts involved in the thesis.Chapter two,chapter three,and chapter four discuss "beauty and evolution",chapter five and chapter six discuss "art and evolution".The second chapter focused on standard of physical beauty and its evolutionary motivation.Many experiments have shown that both babies and adults have a kind of instinctive and subconscious perception of facial beauty and physical beauty,and the unconscious aesthetic preferences also coincides with a certain standard,such as symmetry,average,waist-to-hip ratio,etc.Further research shows that these standards all have a sexual selection motivation.In the history of evolution,people who meet these criteria were preferred by the opposite sex.In the meantime,people who meet these criteria were healthier and more fecund.Healthy body and superior reproductive condition is crucial to the success of ingravidation,procreate and rear young.The success of every single detail can ensure the descendant get more advantages in the next round of sexual selection,and produce the next generation.The cycle repeats,the species was preserved,and the beautiful features were emerged.Therefore,the standard of physical beauty is not artificial,but selected by nature.The third chapter focuses on natural beauty,sublimity and evolutionary environment.Kant believed that when people face the natural environment,it is possible to have beautiful feelings and sublime feelings.In order to study beautiful feelings from the perspective of evolution,researchers let local residents who lived in Nigeria rain forest watched five groups of photos,which displayed tropical rain forest,temperate deciduous forest,coniferous forest,savanna,and desert respectively.And let them choose which place they would like to live,they chose the savanna with one accord.According to current research in archaeology and genetic biology,the ancestors of humans first appeared in the savannas of East Africa and began migrating from there.Although we have gone through a long evolution,but human preference for savanna still exists,because this is the place where human was born,is the optimum natural environment for human’s survival and reproduction.Assessment of habitat conditions,and assessment of potential hazards,weather,seasons,are critical to human’s survival.Natural environment which is beneficial to our survival will prefer by us,we call it beautiful.Natural environment which is unbeneficial to our survival will object by us,we call it ugly.The concept of natural beauty was emerged during the assessment process.In order to explore sublime feelings from an evolutionary perspective,researchers first used experiment of neuro science to prove that the experience of beauty and the experience of sublime belong to different brain systems.On this basis,we found that the emerged of natural sublimity is not only because of the motivation of instinctive physiological evolution,but also because of the motivation of rational cultural evolution.The interaction of both sides made it possible to produce natural sublimity.The fourth part focuses on the evolutionary root of aesthetic preferences and cultural intervention.Human’s aesthetic preference was influenced by physiological evolution and cultural evolution,the key is how to explain the relationship between them.The civilization and complexity of human society let pure physical beauty shared less proportion during the process of sexual selection,but it is because of cultural intervention,not because of the decline of vitality.More importantly,the so-called cultural factors,is either the extension of human "good genes",such as clothing,makeup and plastic surgery,which can enhance the beauty of the human body;or the enhancement of sexual selection advantages,such as the influence of intelligence,power and financial resources on human mating and marriage.Either way is trying to overcome restrictions of genetic factors and increase advantages through cultural factors during the process of sexual selection.Therefore,when we studying human’s aesthetic preferences,we cannot discuss biological motivation of aesthetic preferences and ignore the cultural intervention,neither can we focus on the cultural elements and ignore the fundamental biological motivation.In general,when discussing the relationship between beauty and evolution,from the human body,to nature,to culture,is a process from the inside to the outside,from the primary to the advanced.Moreover,in the process of interaction between physiological foundation and cultural,behavior,art,an important study object of aesthetics,was emerged.Therefore,we begin to discuss the relationship between art and evolution.The fifth chapter focused on non-human "art" and passive evolution.The art here is enclosed in quotation marks,because the artistic creation of animals is a kind of passive behavior under the pressure of sexual selection.Their "art works" only used for mating and reproduction.In addition to observing the instinctive artistic behavior of low-level animals,humans trained apes to draw pictures.With these experimental training,not only can we find the relationship between human artistic ability and non-human artistic ability,but also can we show the differences between them.The root of these differences lie in the brain,so comparing the brains of humans and apes allows us to understand human artistic ability better.The sixth chapter focused on human art and active evolution.Compared with animals,human’s artistic behavior has a strong initiative.Some scholars believe that art is a by-product of highly developed human brain,it is like a spandrel we left behind when building a church,is not intentional act.However,some scholars have explored the origin and development of art from the perspective of evolution,and believe that artistic creation and appreciation have important adaptive significance in human society.The adaptive role of art is mainly manifested in two aspects:firstly,art is the means of sexual selection,which increases the advantage of sexual selection and is conducive to the inheritance of its own genes.Secondly,as a medium of cultural adaptation,art regulates social relations and helps promote group solidarity and increase the chance of group survival.Different from the top-down research method,the study of evolutionary aesthetics adopts the bottom-up research method.Under the guidance of this method,we can summarize the triple significance of the research on evolution aesthetics:It uses the study method of scientific aesthetics,but not mean to negate other research approaches.It highlights the evolutionary root of human aesthetic preferences,but is not a kind of reductionism.It concerns the common features of human beings’aesthetic activity,but still faces up to the diversity aesthetic standards which emerged from different time and space.