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18 SKEPTIC MAGAZINE volume 25 number 1 2020“And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond
illusion, I’ve come to believe there’s no truth beyond illu-
sion. Because between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the
point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone,
a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being.”
—Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch, 2013For most people, selecting a mate is a complex
multifaceted decision of paramount importance for
their future happiness. It is the stuff of great novels
and plays, comedies and tragedies, filled with pleas-
ure or fraught with pain. Given the high stakes in-
volved in this life-changing decision it is both strange
and remarkable that an apparently trivial attribute,
physical beauty, should play such a prominent role.
Our common sense tells us that physical beauty is
merely a personal whim (“beauty is in the eye of the
beholder”) or a frivolous quality (“beauty is only skin
deep”) that we should ignore (“don’t judge a book by
its cover”). Despite these admonitions, however,
beauty is not ignored. Indeed, the enhancement of
beauty has spawned several multi-billion dollar inter-
national businesses: the cosmetics industry, cosmetic
surgery, and advertising. It appears that individuals
are willing to invest a great deal of time, money, and
effort in the pursuit of this ephemeral attribute. So
perhaps there is more to beauty than meets the eye.
Beauty does not exist in the external world.
Like all human feelings it’s an internal subjective
experience that only exists in the mind of a con-
scious observer. Nevertheless, these transitory mental
experiences are an integral part of our lives. We strive
for happiness, cry with pain, love our children, feel
sorrow at the death of a friend, and cherish the pleas-
ures of passionate love. It’s remarkable that we attach
so much importance to these inner feelings given that
they are not real objects in the physical world, like
hearts or kidneys. We cannot hold feelings in our
hands, look at them, hear them, or directly measure
them. However, despite their volatile and transitory
nature, we treasure our feelings because they add
value to the physical objects and events in the world
around us; without them our lives would be dull,pointless, and robotic. But where do our feelings come
from? Certainly no one has to, or could, teach another
human being what hunger, sweetness, anger, pain, or
jealousy feel like, for they are part of our nature.
Throughout our lives new events or circumstances can
evoke such feelings, but the feelings themselves are
part of our biological inheritance. But how could a
feeling like beauty evolve, what is its function, and
how does it influence the brain of a human ob-
server? These are the questions we must address to
uncover the mystery of this enticing experience.
In a previous article in Skeptic,“Darwinian
Goggles,” I used the metaphor of car race to illustrate
how mental attributes, such as sensations and feel-
ings, could evolve over generations and ultimately
modify the structure of the human brain. The race in-
volved self-driving cars built from a collection of com-
ponents that possessed intrinsic properties such as
brittle glass, volatile gasoline, malleable metal, hard
pistons, soft tires, acidic batteries, etc. However,
when these parts were assembled in the appropriate
manner they produced cars that possessed novel
emergent properties such as “acceleration,” “corner-
ing ability,” and “noisiness,” that were not present in
the components themselves, but were a product of
the arrangement and interactions among many differ-
ent components. A group of these cars was then en-
tered into a recurrent sequence of races. After each
race new cars were constructed based on slight varia-
tions of the design of the prior race’s winners. The
outcome of these races was used to illustrate the ef-
fects of evolution over generations.
It is the emergent properties, such as accelera-
tion and cornering ability, that determine which cars
are winning, and it is these same functional attributes
that are being enhanced over generations. A non-
functional attribute, such as noisiness, may well dis-
appear from future cars. By analogy, over generations
natural selection favoring mental properties that en-
hance reproductive success will inevitable modify and
refine the structural organization of the brain that
gives rise to those attributes. In an evolutionary para-
digm, function dictates structure, so selection favor-Biological Beauty
An Adaptive Illusion
B Y V I C T O R S. J O H N S T O N