A neurobiological quest for what enables us to experience beauty and what that experience signifies is vastly impoverished without significant reliance on speculations in the humanities. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin made sexual selection the centerpiece of his views on beauty and there seems little doubt that, for example, plumage on male birds, often perceived as beautiful by humans, reveals a (subjective) truth in the females about desirable male characteristics in that species, making the bearer a suitable mate for reproductive selection. But, as Rothenberg (2011) has
emphasized, this raises the question of why a particular combination of colors is chosen, and why particular structural patterns are used by, for example, bowbirds to create their Vorinostat mw bowers to attract selleck chemicals llc females. Basing beauty on sexual selection alone also
leaves out of account other examples of beauty such as camouflage, which have functions the opposite of attracting sexual attention ( Rothenberg, 2011). Hence, an enquiry into why particular patterns or colors are chosen to act as sexual attractors also constitutes an enquiry into whether from what is experienced as beautiful is related as well to what coincides with patterns in our brain, which has evolved to construct a picture of the external world. That fundamental laws governing the structure of our Universe can be expressed in mathematical formulations that arouse the “aesthetic emotion” has long been emphasized by mathematicians, who in general place a high premium on beauty. Plato and the Platonic tradition suppose that mathematical formulations are experienced as beautiful because they give insights into the fundamental structure
of the Universe and hence its beauty. Kant went beyond and supposed that such formulations arouse the aesthetic emotion because of the feeling that “they make sense” (Breitenbach, 2013). What “makes sense” is of course what corresponds to the workings and above all the logic of the brain. Hence the aesthetic emotion, even in the “queen of sciences,” may be a pointer as much toward truths about both the Universe as about the workings of the brain. It leads one to enquire, for example, whether humans would have developed string theory, for which there is little if any experimental evidence, if we did not possess the kind of brain organization that we have. It is a fascinating question.