# 3 = Beauty

Denis Dutton in his Ted talk named “A Darwinian Theory of Beauty” explains aesthetics according Darwin’s principles. He expounds that the experience of beauty is part of the whole series of Darwin’s adaptations, so beauty is an adaptive effect since evolution operates by two primary mechanisms. The first one is Natural Selection which explains fears and pleasures. The second mechanism of evolution is Sexual Selection for which he can say that the experience of beauty is one way that evolution has awaken and supporting interest and obsession to make decisions for survival and reproduction. Dutton complement his theory saying that people all over the world have a tendency to like a particular kind of landscapes, those that show the presence of blue water, animal life, diverse greenery, and a path or a road. These are the same characteristics of the Pleistocene savannas were we evolved. Also, he says that hand axes characteristics are attractive and beautiful to our ayes today. For that reasons he concludes that the concept of beauty is acquired from the intellectual skills and rich expressive lives of our ancient descendants.

Two thinks that caught my attention are the ideas that Dutton used to explain our inherit thoughts about beauty, like the tendency for landscapes and the hand axes characteristics because they work in my elections for beauty too in some ways.