quiet, easy to dismiss

quiet, easy to dismiss

heaving with beauty, torrid raw hunger of life

squeezed into the tip of a point

forgotten, abused for convenience

overwhelming, simply bypassed

hard-won satisfaction with disease

still overwhelming, pivoting

remembered.

expanding point, enveloping, inviting, becoming

aching awe, blinding pure fury love

quiet,  set inside like a wall  

Beauty and Evolution

How does one explain beauty if one believes in a materialistic (purely physical) universe? There have been heroic attempts to explain away human physical beauty as nature’s means of selecting the most vigorous agents for replication, but how does one explain the pleasure one feels when looking at a great painting? What possible evolutionary value could that have?

It hasn’t escaped my notice that evolutionists vary rarely speak about aesthetics in terms other than human anatomy and sexuality. You won’t see much ink spilled (or pixels lit) about the evolution of music appreciation. When contemplating aesthetics, Darwin-worshippers tend to get very ponderous and ill-defined, because their theory fails to explain heaping swaths of the human experience.

I would be greatly impressed at anyone who has a plausible materialistic theory for how man came to appreciate non-anatomical beauty. When we look at the things that define man, abstract aesthetics, self-conciousness, forethought, magnanimous selflessness, it seems that something quite key is missing from evolutionary theory.

Perhaps that something is truth.