Evolutionary Psychology Question: Beauty in dangerous things

[speaker-to-trolls]

Creationists sometimes talk about how there is clearly a designer because there is so much beauty in the world, now usually I think this is a really poor version of the argument from design (the most ridiculous example is a man on Darth Wongs hatemail page who said strawberries could not have evolved because they are so attractive as a food source), but thinking about it has led me to consider something about beauty. I can understand why we think some things are beautiful, for instance other humans who display the right indicators, or landscapes that show fertility, or things that just activate curiosity/fascination with their shiny colours or strange patterns. But some things I have a hard time understanding, most of all is why people find beauty in hostile environments; deserts, tundra, mountains, the ocean, these places are very hostile to human life, but people find them to be beautiful, awe inspiring, and so on.
The only explanation that comes to my mind is that these places evoke our hidden curiosity, like some of those other things, just because they're something we aren't used to noticing, and we like seeing the new patterns. This is the most basic terms I can put this idea in, as I'm trying to work out what, in our earliest primate ancestors, could have given rise to it.

Does anyone think or know anything that might shed light on this? If I've got some facts embarrassingly wrong don't hesitate to tell me (as if I needed to say that.).

[lance]

It could be a way to spread around. A couple of people go "Wow that mountain/the place just a little bit more cold/dry/whatever sure looks beautiful I would love to live there" They take their family and move there and establish a small inbred village. Couple of millenia later the earth is covered by hairless apes.

[Darth Wong]

I can understand why we think some things are beautiful, for instance other humans who display the right indicators, or landscapes that show fertility, or things that just activate curiosity/fascination with their shiny colours or strange patterns. But some things I have a hard time understanding, most of all is why people find beauty in hostile environments; deserts, tundra, mountains, the ocean, these places are very hostile to human life, but people find them to be beautiful, awe inspiring, and so on.

Places which are hostile to human life usually fall into the category of what people call "stark beauty", and are characterized precisely by the absence of life. While life is often viewed as beautiful, it is also messy, whereas places devoid of life tend to be relatively clean. Look at a typical Arctic circle photograph of glaciers in ice-cold waters: the water is crystal-clear and the glacier is shimmering white, without a trace of dirt, grime, or moss to be seen.

Personally, I think that there's an aesthetic appeal in the sterility of it. The same goes for sand dunes. They are beautiful precisely because they are untouched by Man, and their lines are clean. Mess up those peaks with some dune buggies and the beauty is lost.

[Broomstick]

Tribal/pack/family members willing to seek out danger and learn about it may bring back information advantageous to the rest of the group, thereby helping to perpetuate their genes.

Social insects such as ants and hive bees also send out "scouts" into the world to bring back information, so in a sense the urge to explore the wider environment is not limited to just humans, or even mammals.

[Junghalli]

The only explanation that comes to my mind is that these places evoke our hidden curiosity, like some of those other things, just because they're something we aren't used to noticing, and we like seeing the new patterns. This is the most basic terms I can put this idea in, as I'm trying to work out what, in our earliest primate ancestors, could have given rise to it.

I think something like this is the most likely explanation. Don't forget that we also often find predatory animals like jaguars and tigers beautiful, even though this makes pretty much no sense whatsoever, evolutionarily speaking (they're dangerous to humans so we really should find them totally repulsive - like xenomorphs or something). Remember that evolution is not survival of the fittest so much as survival of the least inadequate; there's no need to desperately try to shoehorn every single trait an organism has into being somehow adaptive. Especially something like this, which would probably be pretty survival neutral - early human foragers would have been much more likely to get pushed into marginal environments by climate change or population pressure than because they thought dunes were pretty.

Personally what really puzzles me is the origins of the human tendency toward rampant self-deception, because that just seems so utterly maladaptive. Seriously, if you had two guys and one of them objectively weighed the evidence of whether a predator was stalking him or not but the other one ignored it because he didn't want to believe it, how in the blue hell did the first guy's lineage not outcompete the second guy's back in the dawn of human sapience?

[Samuel]

And a place with no life means no predators!

Personally what really puzzles me is the origins of the human tendency toward rampant self-deception, because that just seems so utterly maladaptive. Seriously, if you had two guys and one of them objectively weighed the evidence of whether a predator was stalking him or not but the other one ignored it because he didn't want to believe it, how in the blue hell did the first guy's lineage not outcompete the second guy's back in the dawn of human sapience?

You are assuming are minds started off with the ability to think rationally- I sincerely doubt that is the cornerstone of our brain.

[Starglider]

I think something like this is the most likely explanation. Don't forget that we also often find predatory animals like jaguars and tigers beautiful, even though this makes pretty much no sense whatsoever, evolutionarily speaking (they're dangerous to humans so we really should find them totally repulsive - like xenomorphs or something).

Beauty isn't defined on a per-animal basis; it would be impractical to encode that into the genome even if it was possible to do it on a neural level. Subjective impressions of beauty are generated by the weighted combination of a host of feature evaluators. Most of the selection pressure was focused on making this work for selection of mates, habitat and food sources. There's inevitably some crosstalk which generates bizarre values for less important parts of the environment, and if there's no strong selection pressure to get rid of it it will stick. For example I doubt the fact that lions look pretty ever stopped anyone from running away from a hungry lion - lion aversion works just fine using mechanisms completely separate from beauty evaluation.

Personally what really puzzles me is the origins of the human tendency toward rampant self-deception, because that just seems so utterly maladaptive.

The human brain is a mess of patches upon patches upon jury-rigs. A lot of self-deception is workaround for our oversimplified and unreliable emotional system; like Microsoft, evolution takes the easiest short-term solution to any given design problem no matter how much of a mess it makes. Below that there is a fundamental problem in that the architecture of the brain does not have a hard separation between likelihood and desirability; it is very difficult to prevent leakage from one to the other, not to mention explicit 'short circuits' where goals are reached by declarative fiat rather than actual achievement.

[Shroom Man 777]

We find lions beautiful because we're comfortable and coddled up yuppies typing away on our keyboards in our airconditioned rooms and are thus detached from the harshness of the natural world.

A caveman won't find anything beautiful in the lion that's torn his tribe mate's guts out.

It's like how you can admire a Great White Shark being shown in National Geographic. But if you're in the water with one, you're definitely not going to find anything pretty in it.

[Starglider]

We find lions beautiful because we're comfortable and coddled up yuppies typing away on our keyboards in our airconditioned rooms and are thus detached from the harshness of the natural world.

This is an arbitrary assumption that flies in the face of evidence; primitive peoples did in fact make great use of dangerous predators in decorative art and religious traditions.

A caveman won't find anything beautiful in the lion that's torn his tribe mate's guts out.

Granted but that's relatively rare. Most predators will only go after humans if they are threatened or desperate.

[Shroom Man 777]

Presumably they placed lions and other predators in deorative art and religious traditions because they were animals that affected them in their lives. They drew mastadons because they killed and ate mastadons. They drew sabertooth tigers because they were killed and eaten by sabertooth tigers. Or because sabertooth tigers competed with them for prey.

[Duckie]

Presumably they placed lions and other predators in deorative art and religious traditions because they were animals that affected them in their lives. They drew mastadons because they killed and ate mastadons. They drew sabertooth tigers because they were killed and eaten by sabertooth tigers. Or because sabertooth tigers competed with them for prey.

Despite that noble qualities and worship was assigned to predatory animals in all eras and times that I know of, from the lioness-goddess Bast to the wolves of iron age Germany?

People can consider something beautiful and scary at the same time- that lions can kill you doesn't make them stop being pretty, and I don't think it's some artefact of modern civilisation that explains it or else people wouldn't have worshipped lions or snakes or hippos in egypt.

For example, Space. I have some sort of pathological, mostly uncontrollable fear of the dark of space and celestial objects, to the point where my interest in science fiction and astronomy alike suffer from my inability to not flinch in the presence of pictures of stars or Jupiter or whatnot. I have no clue why I'm afraid, but I'm certainly more afraid of Pictures of Outer Space than of wild animals (which is a big blow to the 'brains are wired rationally therefore we have a reason for being afraid of things' camp in my anecdotal experience.)

But space is still pretty, and if I had to invent a god I'd invent one for stars above all things.

[Shroom Man 777]

Alright, conceded. Starglider was right that my first post was an arbitrary assumption (that flies in the face of evidence).

[Dooey Jo]

What evidence? People draw things for many reasons, certainly not just because they are beautiful. You can find spiders in "primitive people's" decorative art, too. Are "we" now supposed to find spiders beautiful? Some people may take issue with that...

People can consider something beautiful and scary at the same time- that lions can kill you doesn't make them stop being pretty, and I don't think it's some artefact of modern civilisation that explains it or else people wouldn't have worshipped lions or snakes or hippos in egypt.

Are you saying people worshipped lions because they thought they were pretty, and not because they are awe-inspiring and dangerous animals that they could not control, and were useful for symbolism? The Egyptians worshipped the scarab too, but that's because its dung-rolling symbolised the movement of the sun to them, not because it was pretty. Similarly, lots of people do, and probably did, find dogs to be pretty, but actual dog worship is rare, because dogs are basically slaves (especially in those days).

And a place with no life means no predators!

And no food...

[Duckie]

People can consider something beautiful and scary at the same time- that lions can kill you doesn't make them stop being pretty, and I don't think it's some artefact of modern civilisation that explains it or else people wouldn't have worshipped lions or snakes or hippos in egypt.

Are you saying people worshipped lions because they thought they were pretty, and not because they are awe-inspiring and dangerous animals that they could not control, and were useful for symbolism?

The Egyptians worshipped the scarab too, but that's because its dung-rolling symbolised the movement of the sun to them, not because it was pretty. Similarly, lots of people do, and probably did, find dogs to be pretty, but actual dog worship is rare, because dogs are basically slaves (especially in those days).

Perhaps it's vocabulary differences, but that's pretty much what I said. Lions are beautiful (pretty, awe-inspiring, etc.) and scary. You can worship beautiful things, you can worship scary things, or you can worship beautiful and/or scary things- I was arguing against the idea that one cannot find something both beautiful/awe-inspiring/pretty and scary at the same time, not claiming it was solely due to their intrinsic aesthetics that lions became worshipped.

Although they do look pretty rad (and so do dung beetles) when depicted in iconography so I think that's part of it- nobody wants to worship a stupid-looking deity.

[kinnison]

Starglider - You are quite right; most predators stay away from humans unless they have no choice. I strongly suspect, however, that very early humans didn't have that benefit.

I have a theory about this, and it's pure Darwinism. Presumably, individual lions (for example) vary in their tastes and habits. Now; what happens if a lion eats a human from a neolithic village? Answer; pretty soon, it dies. Almost certainly before its next opportunity to reproduce. Its preference for human meat dies with it.

Humans use weapons by instinct, and we are pack animals, and humans (in groups) are the most lethally effective predator the Earth has ever seen. We are MUCH more dangerous than baboons, for example, and lions will stay the hell away from a tribe of them. And one more thing that makes us even worse; we bear grudges.

[TithonusSyndrome]

Are there not "thrillseeker" genes that a significant chunk of the population have? I imagine that might also contribute to this as well. One of the unstated problems with intelligent design that it's adherents can't even begin to address is that it does nothing to account for individual variations within a population - specific features that are largely common to a species or other set are held up as being "designed" while all individuality is neglected of being accounted for.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

As to the beauty of predators, it is probably symbolic of qualities that people admire or emulate in other people. People are drawn to strong, capable physically fit humans. The archetypal strong warrior gets the devotion and admiration of his fellow men and the attention of the women. Now see enormously powerful big cats successfully bringing down large prey to feed their offspring, and you probably wouldn't be surprised to see spillover of the feelings people have for a successful tribe member projected onto the animal.

It's not necessarily conscious symbolism, it could be just a visceral feeling, the result of the often ill-advised processing shortcuts Starglider always complains about. Of course once conscious symbolism places an animal into a mythical framework, cultural reinforcement probably massively amplifies the effect, with young people being urged to take on aspects of the admired animals of their tribe's mythos, and positive images of the animals themselves being exaggerated for the sake of emphasis to the young.

[speaker-to-trolls]

As to the beauty of predators, it is probably symbolic of qualities that people admire or emulate in other people. People are drawn to strong, capable physically fit humans. The archetypal strong warrior gets the devotion and admiration of his fellow men and the attention of the women. Now see enormously powerful big cats successfully bringing down large prey to feed their offspring, and you probably wouldn't be surprised to see spillover of the feelings people have for a successful tribe member projected onto the animal.

This is my theory on the beauty of predators, and I'm not sure how much of this is cultural conditioning, but I find that just looking at something like a lion, the power and coordination in its body are obvious, and these are also the kind of things we find attractive in people. It's kind of a misapplication of the recognition of indicators, as Terry Pratchett says in one of his books, we're like mice saying "cats have got great style"

And a place with no life means no predators!

And no food...

Even 'no predators' is a dangerous assumption to make. "OK, yes it's a desolate icy wasteland, but at least there's no way that there could be bears here".

Places which are hostile to human life usually fall into the category of what people call "stark beauty", and are characterized precisely by the absence of life. While life is often viewed as beautiful, it is also messy, whereas places devoid of life tend to be relatively clean. Look at a typical Arctic circle photograph of glaciers in ice-cold waters: the water is crystal-clear and the glacier is shimmering white, without a trace of dirt, grime, or moss to be seen.

A good point and something I hadn't thought of; cleanliness is good because dirtiness tends to lead to disease and attracting scavengers. I think that's a good example of Stargliders Hastily Assembled Brain hypothesis: at one instinctive level a human observer can't tell the difference between a mountain and his wifes hair! (though at another he's also intimidated by the mountain because it's large, hard, cold and spiky)

[Starglider]

I think that's a good example of Stargliders Hastily Assembled Brain hypothesis

Most of what I say about human brains isn't a personal position, it's part of the standard consensus for evolutionary psychologists. The only reason it isn't equivalent to normal scientific consensus is that the field of psychology is still suffering under a significant load of unscientific hangers on. If they condemn you as 'ultra materialist', 'bottom up' and 'non-holistic', and prefer to spew pretty virtually-untestable nonsense that would be more at home in the philosophy department, then they're part of the disease. Evolutionary psychology is the cure.

[Singular Intellect]

I have a theory about this, and it's pure Darwinism. Presumably, individual lions (for example) vary in their tastes and habits. Now; what happens if a lion eats a human from a neolithic village? Answer; pretty soon, it dies. Almost certainly before its next opportunity to reproduce. Its preference for human meat dies with it.

Humans use weapons by instinct, and we are pack animals, and humans (in groups) are the most lethally effective predator the Earth has ever seen. We are MUCH more dangerous than baboons, for example, and lions will stay the hell away from a tribe of them. And one more thing that makes us even worse; we bear grudges.

It should be noted that humans today can afford to be more precise in dealing with predators, going after the one guilty animal; even to the point of attempting to relocating them before resorting to killing them. More primitive man would've had no qualms about wiping out entire packs of lions nearby if one of them happened to kill one of their own.

[Rye]

I think it's a lot simpler than some of the ideas floating around in this thread. Danger comes from power, and power produces awe. Awe is aesthetic appreciation. If it's anything that provides a survival trait, it's probably to keep us cognisant of danger by being interested in it. Alternatively, it is a corruption of the "curiosity gland" that drove ancient man to see what carrion birds were circling around, etc. A giant fucking cat is powerful and scary and amazing to see in action. Curiosity is important for survival and all that sensory data will be important when communicating such an event with others. It's a dangerous game, curiosity, but it's a critical part of intelligent animals.

I think some of it is down to a sort of proportion-spotting part of our visual evaluation, the same thing that dictates we find babies helpless and cute and want to help them, the same thing that makes the xenomorph a generally terrifying but alluring shape and texture. I think much of it will be down to the emotional imprint we put on to something; negative or positive, the thing being associated in our minds with an emotion will have a less obvious association that may run contra the main association. A lion produces fear, respect and a human will desire to wield those things, thus they are fetishised accordingly. It's a similar thing with rooting for the villain. The evaluation being according to the person's individual values would explain why people like AV get a sort of fetish for pandemics, or why Jehovah's Witnesses and similar religious nuts become obsessed with eschatology.

[kinnison]

I have a theory about this, and it's pure Darwinism. Presumably, individual lions (for example) vary in their tastes and habits. Now; what happens if a lion eats a human from a neolithic village? Answer; pretty soon, it dies. Almost certainly before its next opportunity to reproduce. Its preference for human meat dies with it.

Humans use weapons by instinct, and we are pack animals, and humans (in groups) are the most lethally effective predator the Earth has ever seen. We are MUCH more dangerous than baboons, for example, and lions will stay the hell away from a tribe of them. And one more thing that makes us even worse; we bear grudges.

It should be noted that humans today can afford to be more precise in dealing with predators, going after the one guilty animal; even to the point of attempting to relocating them before resorting to killing them. More primitive man would've had no qualms about wiping out entire packs of lions nearby if one of them happened to kill one of their own.

You're quite right. However, prides of lions are usually related; so the selection pressure on the genes responsible for the lions' choice of diet remains. Diluted somewhat, granted.

[Feil]

There doesn't need to be an evolutionary reason for things to be the way they are as long as the alternative isn't particularly better. It doesn't do any harm to go all goggle-eyed over the nearest inhospitable wasteland as long as we're smart enough to turn around and go back to the river basin when our toes start to freeze. There's no clear evolutionary reason for people to be overwhelmingly right-handed, or to have earlobes, either but that hasn't stopped us yet.

[speaker-to-trolls]

There doesn't need to be an evolutionary reason for things to be the way they are as long as the alternative isn't particularly better. It doesn't do any harm to go all goggle-eyed over the nearest inhospitable wasteland as long as we're smart enough to turn around and go back to the river basin when our toes start to freeze. There's no clear evolutionary reason for people to be overwhelmingly right-handed, or to have earlobes, either but that hasn't stopped us yet.

Look, I don't think anybody's under the impression that this kind of thing is useful in and of itself, I'm certainly not under any illusions about there being a purpose to everything that evolves. I just wanted to know how this could have been derived from the psychological traits that have evolved in humans, I mean presumably earlobes and righthandedness are byproducts of some other, at least partly useful traits as well.

[Broomstick]

Righthandedness may be a product of increased manual dexterity and tool use, with one hand specializing in fine motor control and the other in holding onto things being manipulated by the dominant hand. It probably isn't that important which hand is dominant, just that one is, and whatever mechanism was at work wound up favoring the right. Most other species either do not have a dominant "hand", or, if they do, it seems which hand is dominant is a 50/50 chance through the whole species. The one exception I've heard of is parrots, many species who are predominantly lefthanded. Why, no one knows.

As for earlobes - I think it's one of those things that didn't matter enough to get edited out of the gene pool. I can't see that they serve any real useful purpose, but they cause no harm, either.