Why Would Beauty Evolve?

A couple of days ago I did a post on beauty and meaning. Today I'd like to do one that addresses a different question raised by beauty: How can we account for it in an evolutionary framework?

Glenn Stanton has a column at The Federalist in which he poses a question that we've occasionally discussed on VP: Why would beauty evolve in living creatures? How does it enhance survival?

Stanton thinks that beauty is counterproductive from an evolutionary point of view, and he cites both Charles Darwin and Alfred North Wallace, the co-founders of the theory of natural selection, as having said essentially the same thing.

Here are some excerpts from Stanton's essay:

The genius of evolution is its brutal pragmatism; do whatever is needed to pass your genes onto the next generation in the fastest, most efficient, enduring way possible. It knows nothing else. As such, it should be inherently prejudiced against not only complex beauty, but any conspicuous beauty at all.

Mr. Guppy is a child’s starter fish for a reason. He lives years in a tiny, dirty fishbowl needing minimal attention. Algae thrives there. The same is true of the common finch over the peacock, or the dandelion and the orchid. One is common, while the other is rare for a reason.

If natural selection reined [beautiful fish like the above Moorish Idols] would see the runaway genetic success and durability of the common guppy and ask, “Why am I knocking myself out trying to maintain this extravagantly conspicuous design when I could be that guy?”

In survival of the fittest, the fittest is the least complex and needy — Occam’s razor applied to living things. Extravagant, superfluous beauty is not evolution’s friend.

Thus, beauty is one of evolution’s most serious and persistent problems. Its adherents have no good answer for it, and not for want of trying.

The two men who simultaneously developed the theory of natural selection, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, were profoundly burdened by the problem of beauty. Darwin confessed to a friend, “The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”

Wallace held that a peacock’s raiment was more than unnecessary under natural selection; it was a detriment. He confessed the “excessive length or abundance of plumes begins to be injurious to the bearer of them.” Darwin and Wallace both worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to come up with a sufficient explanation for beauty. Both disagreed passionately with the other’s answer.

Darwin proposed that natural selection was not the only phenomenon at work here and developed the theory of sexual selection. The more "handsome" an organism is, the more likely it is to attract a mate.

The theory of sexual selection has lots of problems, but one big one is that it raises an even greater difficulty. Why would organisms evolve sexual reproduction in the first place, with all of the necessary adaptations - behavioral, genetic, biochemical, anatomical and physiological - when asexual reproduction is far simpler, more efficient and involves far less expenditure of energy?

The asexuality of the mudworm or hydra is simple and highly efficient. Why remove that ability from the individual and require complex coupling? Natural selection is not inclined to say, “Let’s make this exponentially more difficult,” which finding, competing for, wooing, and impregnating a mate certainly is.

Moreover, spectacular beauty not only requires more more energy to develop and maintain, Stanton writes, but it also makes one highly conspicuous and attractive to predators.

In short, there's no good evolutionary account for why our world should be filled with beauty, but it is. Perhaps that's because naturalistic evolution isn't the answer, or at least not the entire answer, for why and how beauty came to be.

Read Stanton's article at the link. It's very interesting, particularly his remarks on Mr. and Mrs. Blobfish.