QuestionsIs beauty in the eye of the beholder?The sense of beauty comes from sexual selection, and each people has its own ideal
Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?It is all relative

The sense of beauty comes from sexual selection, and each people has its own ideal

Sexual selection and the taste for beauty

Charles Darwin 1809 · 1882Living things are explained by natural selection, without a prior plan.
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What it claims

The sense of beauty is a natural product, formed by sexual selection and habit: it differs between species and peoples, and there is no universal standard of beauty.

Why

Animals choose what they find beautiful, and each species or people likes different things: there is no universal beauty.

The same idea through history
Voltaire1764Voltaire notes that beauty changes with species and country. Darwin looks for its origin in the history of species.
Charles Darwin1871In The Descent of Man, Darwin argues that animals have a sense of beauty, that sexual selection made it the ornament of males, and that there is no universal standard of human beauty.
Pierre Bourdieu1979Bourdieu keeps the idea that taste varies, but explains it by society and not by biology.
In short

"The sense of beauty comes from sexual selection, and each people has its own ideal" is an argument by Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man, 1871, ch. III, IV, VIII and XIX, 1871) on the question "Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?" (answer: it is all relative). Its claim: The sense of beauty is a natural product, formed by sexual selection and habit: it differs between species and peoples, and there is no universal standard of beauty. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Descent of Man, 1871, ch. III, IV, VIII and XIX
Valid with an implicit premise

A peacock displays his tail to a peahen. Why does he have such a large tail, which hampers him and exposes him to predators? Darwin answers: because peahens find it beautiful, and choose the best-adorned males. For him, a sense of beauty already exists in animals. But this sense does not look at the same things everywhere: each species admires what it is used to seeing. It is the same with humans, whose tastes differ greatly from one people to another. Beauty would not be a fixed pattern written in things, but a taste produced by evolution and habit.

P1The females of many animals admire the beauty of the colours, ornaments and song of the males. Otherwise all the labour the males put into displaying themselves would be wasted, which it is impossible to admit.
P2Animals have a sense of beauty, but they do not admire the same things: what one species finds beautiful is not what another does.
P3It is not true that there is in the mind of man any universal standard of beauty for the human body.
P4The men of each race prefer what they are accustomed to, cannot endure any great change, but like variety and admire each characteristic carried to a moderate extreme.
P5 · implicit premiseA sense of beauty formed by sexual selection and habit, and which differs from one species and one people to another, is not the perception of a single quality that things would have in themselves.
So the sense of beauty is a natural product, formed by sexual selection and habit: it differs between species and peoples, and there is no universal standard of beauty.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a case where everything Darwin describes is true and yet beauty would be a real quality of things: for example if each species, each people saw only part of the same beauty, like people looking at one mountain from different sides. This is what the defenders of a universal taste coming from evolution say.
With P5 the argument is valid: animals have a sense of beauty (P1) that varies (P2), man has no universal standard (P3) and follows the habit of his people (P4); so, by P5, there is no single beauty that would be in things.
Analogy. Dogs and humans do not like the same smells: a dog loves the smell of a bone, a human prefers that of warm bread. Neither is the "right" smell: each nose has been shaped for its own life. Darwin says the taste for beauty is like that.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

A
Alfred Russel Wallace 1889 · attacks premise 1

There is no reason to attribute to the female the aesthetic emotions that the beauty of plumage arouses in us, nor the still more improbable taste that would make her choose a male for tiny differences of form or colour. The display of the plumes is the chief sign of the male's maturity and vigour, and that is why it attracts the female.

a defender replies
No reply possible: objection raised in 1889, after the author's death (1882).
M
Malte Andersson defender of the argument · 1982
Andersson ran an experiment on the long-tailed widowbird of Africa: he shortened the tails of some males and lengthened those of others. The males with lengthened tails attracted more females. Females therefore do choose according to the ornament itself, which is the point Wallace refused to grant.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Female choice is now widely accepted. It is still debated whether this choice is a taste for beauty itself (Darwin) or a way of spotting the male's good health (Wallace, then Zahavi).
D
Denis Dutton 2009 · attacks premise 3

Evolution did not produce tastes without rules: some aesthetic preferences are shared by all peoples, because they were born from our ancestors' lives. The liking for a certain kind of landscape, close to the savannah, is the best-known example. There is therefore a universal core of human taste, which must not be confused with the fashions of each culture.

Darwin replies
Darwin 1871 · Darwin on the inheritance of tastes (anticipated reply)
Darwin grants that it is possible that certain tastes become inherited, but writes that there is no evidence in favour of this belief. If it were true, each race would have its own innate ideal standard of beauty.
The debate goes on (our summary) Darwin answers a neighbouring idea, not Dutton: Dutton speaks of preferences shared by the whole human species, not of tastes peculiar to each race. There is a basic disagreement over the facts: Darwin judges that there is no evidence of an innate taste, Dutton thinks there is.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point. Shared preferences (faces, landscapes) are studied, but their extent and origin are still debated.
Immanuel Kant 1790 · attacks the conclusion

A satisfaction that serves survival or desire (here, attracting a mate and reproducing) is an interest. But the pure judgment of taste has no interest: the least interest mixed into the pleasure makes it partial. To explain the sense of beauty by sexual selection is to explain desire, not beauty.

Darwin replies
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Darwin in the texts.
Darwin 1871 · Darwin on the difference with cultivated man (partly anticipated reply)
Darwin writes that we must not suppose the sense of beauty of animals to be comparable with that of a cultivated man, with his multiform and complex associated ideas.
The debate goes on (our summary) This sentence gives Kant part of his point: a cultivated man's taste is richer than a bird's. But Darwin does not write that this cultivated taste is disinterested. For Kantians the difference is one of kind; for Darwinians it is one of degree.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point. Basic disagreement: can the pleasure of beauty, even in humans, be detached from all usefulness (Kant), or is it only a transformed form of it (Darwin)?