Evolutionary Emergence of Aesthetics (or Love and Beauty)

As Plato proposed and Emanuel Kant and his sccessors have analyzed, beauty is one of the essential factor of value together with truth and good. Truth and good are clearly important for human life related to knowledge and ethics respectively. It's natural to think these two factors have effects that improve reproductive success in the evolutionary process of humans. But, how is beauty? Denis Dutton's book entitled The Art Instincs provided hints to answer this question from a view point of Evolutionary Psychology [1]. He introduced two important factors, sexual selection and resource finding, that promote psychological tendency of preference typically in vision. Mating strategies is important for sexual organisms to meet appropriate partner to realize a combination of genes between two individuals. Many of the multi-cellular animals widely known by people have two sexes, male and female as same as humans. The psychological trait of preference on any sensory stimuli caused by another individual is effective to make two individuals attract each other. Based on an assumption that the attractiveness is one of feasible source of beauty, we developed an agent-based simulator of society of evolutionary lovers. This simulater is useful to make not only scientific research on humanities and sociology but also a form of generative art. The other approach is to build a physical installation by a group of courtship robots.

1. Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution, Bloomsbury Pub., 2010.

Subprojects

1. LoversFlow2: An Individual-Based Evo-Eco Simulator on Sexual Dimorphism ... our simulator running on macOS X 10.12.
2. Rapid Biography in a Society of Evolutionary Lovers ... computer-based audio visual installation that rapidly produces biographies to display and read loud them.
3. Courtship robots ... on development.
4. Applications to Sociology and Humanities.