Beauty: Difference between revisions

Animal's preference for objective beauty as geometrical simplicity is likely just a fluke of evolution and only exists because simple shapes are easy to process, resulting from the (actually useful) preference for order and predictability.

Due to this preference, members of a species tended to choose objectively/mathematically beautiful mates and hence species evolved to be beautiful (''aesthetic sexual selection'') and beauty became an important factor of attraction.

Some simple and elegant body shapes may, however, not necessarily be a result of aesthetic selection, but simply coincidental result of optimizing e.g. for resources efficiency or resilience favoring simple shapes. This explains why even blind or very primitive species and even plants can be beautiful. Though some flowers in turn may have evolved beauty to be particularly salient to insects who spread their pollen, and beauty likely has similar function of attracting sex partners in animals as well, for conspicuously advertising oneself for the opposite sex.

Complex ornament and "few millimeters of bone", however, likely cannot entirely be explained by mathematical simplicity because they are unnecessary specific and complex. The simplest nose shape would be simply two nostrils as found in some apes. A flat chest is simpler than one with permanently swollen breasts. Even more obviously, the peacock tail is unnecessarily complex.

or these shapes are an honest signal of e.g. health, mutational load and intelligence, can thus signal ''good genes'' overall,