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Author : John Goulstone
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 14 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (8 download)
Download or read book Human Evolution Through Aesthetic Selection written by John Goulstone and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Richard O. Prum
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385537220
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)
Download or read book The Evolution of Beauty written by Richard O. Prum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, SMITHSONIAN, AND WALL STREET JOURNAL A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum—reviving Darwin's own views—thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change. Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time. The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.
Author : John Goulstone
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 38 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (9 download)
Download or read book The Role of Aesthetic Rejection and Selection in Human Evolution written by John Goulstone and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : John Goulstone (Historian)
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 26 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (499 download)
Download or read book The Role of Aesthetic Rejection and Selection in Human Evolution written by John Goulstone (Historian) and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Eckart Voland
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 3662071428
Total Pages : 376 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (62 download)
Download or read book Evolutionary Aesthetics written by Eckart Voland and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolutionary aesthetics is the attempt to understand the aesthetic judgement of human beings and their spontaneous distinction between "beauty" and "ugliness" as a biologically adapted ability to make important decisions in life. The hypothesis is - both in the area of "natural beauty" and in sexuality, with regard to landscape preferences, but also in the area of "artificial beauty" (i.e. in art and design) - that beauty opens up fitness opportunities, while ugliness holds fitness risks. In this book, this adaptive view of aesthetics is developed theoretically, presented on the basis of numerous examples, and its consequences for evolutionary anthropology are illuminated.
Author : Denis Dutton
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1596914017
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (969 download)
Download or read book The Art Instinct written by Denis Dutton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges popular conceptions in art theory and criticism to argue that human tastes in the arts are evolutionary traits shaped by Darwinian selection as opposed to social construction, in a volume that explains the role of evolution in aesthetic preferences while calling for a practice of art criticism from an evolutionary standpoint. 40,000 first printing.
Author : Richard O. Prum
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0345804570
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (458 download)
Download or read book The Evolution of Beauty written by Richard O. Prum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A major reimagining of how evolutionary forces work, revealing how mating preferences—what Darwin termed "the taste for the beautiful"—create the extraordinary range of ornament in the animal world. "A delicious read, both seductive and mutinous.... Minutely detailed, exquisitely observant, deeply informed, and often tenderly sensual."—New York Times Book Review In the great halls of science, dogma holds that Darwin's theory of natural selection explains every branch on the tree of life: which species thrive, which wither away to extinction, and what features each evolves. But can adaptation by natural selection really account for everything we see in nature? Yale University ornithologist Richard Prum—reviving Darwin's own views—thinks not. Deep in tropical jungles around the world are birds with a dizzying array of appearances and mating displays: Club-winged Manakins who sing with their wings, Great Argus Pheasants who dazzle prospective mates with a four-foot-wide cone of feathers covered in golden 3D spheres, Red-capped Manakins who moonwalk. In thirty years of fieldwork, Prum has seen numerous display traits that seem disconnected from, if not outright contrary to, selection for individual survival. To explain this, he dusts off Darwin's long-neglected theory of sexual selection in which the act of choosing a mate for purely aesthetic reasons—for the mere pleasure of it—is an independent engine of evolutionary change. Mate choice can drive ornamental traits from the constraints of adaptive evolution, allowing them to grow ever more elaborate. It also sets the stakes for sexual conflict, in which the sexual autonomy of the female evolves in response to male sexual control. Most crucially, this framework provides important insights into the evolution of human sexuality, particularly the ways in which female preferences have changed male bodies, and even maleness itself, through evolutionary time. The Evolution of Beauty presents a unique scientific vision for how nature's splendor contributes to a more complete understanding of evolution and of ourselves.
Author : Gregory F. Tague
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004319484
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (43 download)
Download or read book Evolution and Human Culture written by Gregory F. Tague and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evolution and Human Culture argues that values, beliefs, and practices are expressions of individual and shared moral sentiments. Much of our cultural production stems from what in early hominins was a caring tendency, both the care to share and a self-care to challenge others. Topics cover prehistory, mind, biology, morality, comparative primatology, art, and aesthetics. The book is valuable to students and scholars in the arts, including moral philosophers, who would benefit from reading about scientific developments that impact their fields. For biologists and social scientists the book provides a window into how scientific research contributes to understanding the arts and humanities. The take-home point is that culture does not transcend nature; rather, culture is an evolved moral behavior.
Author : Antonio R. Damasio
Publisher : Pantheon
ISBN 13 : 0307908755
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)
Download or read book The Strange Order of Things written by Antonio R. Damasio and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2018 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our preeminent neuroscientists: a landmark reflection that spans the biological and social sciences, offering a new way of understanding the origins of life, feeling, and culture. The Strange Order of Things is a pathbreaking investigation into homeostasis, the condition of that regulates human physiology within the range that makes possible not only the survival but also the flourishing of life. Antonio Damasio makes clear that we descend biologically, psychologically, and even socially from a long lineage that begins with single living cells; that our minds and cultures are linked by an invisible thread to the ways and means of ancient unicellular life and other primitive life-forms; and that inherent in our very chemistry is a powerful force, a striving toward life maintenance that governs life in all its guises, including the development of genes that help regulate and transmit life. In The Strange Order of Things, Damasio gives us a new way of comprehending the world and our place in it. www.antoniodamasio.com
Author : Stephen Davies
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199658544
Total Pages : 310 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (996 download)
Download or read book The Artful Species written by Stephen Davies and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the idea that our aesthetic responses and art behaviors are connected to our evolved human nature reaching back hundreds of thousands of years to our humanoid ancestors. Examines human aesthetic interest in animals, decouples human beauty from mate selection, and weighs the arts as biological, social, or mixed adaptations.
Author : David Rothenberg
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1408830566
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (88 download)
Download or read book Survival of the Beautiful written by David Rothenberg and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The peacock's tail makes me sick!' said Charles Darwin. That's because the theory of evolution as adaptation can't explain why nature is so beautiful. It took the concept of sexual selection for Darwin to explain that, a process that has more to do with aesthetic taste than adaptive fitness. Survival of the Beautiful is a revolutionary new examination of the interplay of beauty, art, and culture in evolution. Taking inspiration from Darwin's observation that animals have a natural aesthetic sense, philosopher and musician David Rothenberg probes why animals, humans included, have an innate appreciation for beauty - and why nature is, indeed, beautiful.
Author : Stephen Davies
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 0191015857
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)
Download or read book The Artful Species written by Stephen Davies and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Artful Species explores the idea that our aesthetic responses and art behaviors are connected to our evolved human nature. Our humanoid forerunners displayed aesthetic sensibilities hundreds of thousands of years ago and the art standing of prehistoric cave paintings is virtually uncontested. In Part One, Stephen Davies analyses the key concepts of the aesthetic, art, and evolution, and explores how they might be related. He considers a range of issues, including whether animals have aesthetic tastes and whether art is not only universal but cross-culturally comprehensible. Part Two examines the many aesthetic interests humans take in animals and how these reflect our biological interests, and the idea that our environmental and landscape preferences are rooted in the experiences of our distant ancestors. In considering the controversial subject of human beauty, evolutionary psychologists have traditionally focused on female physical attractiveness in the context of mate selection, but Davies presents a broader view which decouples human beauty from mate choice and explains why it goes more with social performance and self-presentation. Part Three asks if the arts, together or singly, are biological adaptations, incidental byproducts of nonart adaptations, or so removed from biology that they rate as purely cultural technologies. Davies does not conclusively support any one of the many positions considered here, but argues that there are grounds, nevertheless, for seeing art as part of human nature. Art serves as a powerful and complex signal of human fitness, and so cannot be incidental to biology. Indeed, aesthetic responses and art behaviors are the touchstones of our humanity.
Author : John L. Bradshaw
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 131771587X
Total Pages : 254 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (177 download)
Download or read book Human Evolution written by John L. Bradshaw and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2014-01-02 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The last decade has seen an explosive burst of new information about human origins and our evolutionary status with respect to other species. We have long been considered unique as upright, bipedal creatures endowed with language, the ability to use tools, to think and introspect. We now know that other creatures may be more or less capable of similar behaviour, and that these human capacities in many cases have long evolutionary trajectories. Our information about such matters comes from a diverse variety of disciplines, including experimental and neuropsychology, primatology, ethology, archaeology, palaeontology, comparative linguistics and molecular biology. It is the interdisciplinary nature of the newly-emerging information which bears upon one of the profoundest scientific human questions - our origin and place in the animal kingdom, whether unique or otherwise - which makes the general topic so fascinating to layperson, student, and expert alike. The book attempts to integrate across a wide range of disciplines an evolutionary view of human psychology, with particular reference to language, praxis and aesthetics. A chapter on evolution, from the appearance of life to the earliest mammals, is followed by one which examines the appearance of primates, hominids and the advent of bipedalism. There follows a more detailed account of the various species of Homo, the morphology and origin of modern H. sapiens sapiens as seen from the archaeological/palaeontological and molecular-biological perspectives. The origins of art and an aesthetic sense in the Acheulian and Mousterian through to the Upper Palaeolithic are seen in the context of the psychology of art. Two chapters on language address its nature and realization centrally and peripherally, the prehistory and neuropsychology of speech, and evidence for speech and/or language in our hominid ancestors. A chapter on tool use and praxis examines such behaviour in other species, primate and non-primate, the neurology of praxis and its possible relation to language. Encephalization and the growth of the brain, phylogenetically and ontogenetically, and its relationship to intellectual capacity leads on finally to a consideration of intelligence, social intelligence, consciousness and self awareness. A final chapter reviews the issues covered. The book, of around 70.000 words of text, includes over 500 references over half of which date from 1994 or later.
Author : Marilynn Johnson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350104272
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (51 download)
Download or read book Adorning Bodies written by Marilynn Johnson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-24 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is meaning in our bodies constructed? To what extent is meaning in bodies innate, evolved through biological adaptations? To what extent is meaning in bodies culturally constructed? Does it change when we adorn ourselves in dress? In Adorning Bodies, Marilynn Johnson draws on evolutionary theory and philosophy in order to think about art, beauty, and aesthetics. Considering meaning in bodies and bodily adornment, she explores how the ways we use our bodies are similar to - yet at other times different from - animals. Johnson engages with the work of evolutionary theorists, philosophers of language, and cultural theorists - Charles Darwin, H. P. Grice, and Roland Barthes respectively - to examine both natural and non-natural meanings. She addresses how both systems of meaning signify relevant information to other humans, with respect to both bodies and clothes. Johnson also demonstrates that how we dress could negatively influence the way our bodies can be read, and how some humans and animals use their bodies to deceive.
Author : Andrew Shryock
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520270282
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (22 download)
Download or read book Deep History written by Andrew Shryock and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-11-07 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This breakthrough book brings science into history to offer a dazzling new vision of humanity across time. Team-written by leading experts in a variety of fields, it maps events, cultures, and eras across millions of years to present a new scale for understanding the human body, energy and ecosystems, language, food, kinship, migration, and more.
Author : Katya Mandoki
Publisher : Lexington Books
ISBN 13 : 1498503071
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (985 download)
Download or read book The Indispensable Excess of the Aesthetic written by Katya Mandoki and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TheIndispensable Excess of the Aesthetic: Evolution of Sensibility in Nature traces the evolution of sensibility from the most primal indications detectable at the level of cellular receptors and plant tendril sensitivity, animal creativity and play to cultural ramifications. Taking on Darwin’s insistence against Wallace that animals do have a sense of beauty, and on recent evolutionary observations, this book compellingly argues that sensibility is a biological faculty that emerges together with life. It argues that there is appreciation and discernment of quality, order, and meaning by organisms in various species determined by their morphological adaptations and environmental conditions. Drawing upon Baumgarten’s foundational definition of aesthetics as scientia cognitionis sensitivae, this book proposes a non-anthropocentric approach to aesthetics as well as the use of empirical evidence to sustain its claims updating aesthetic understanding with contemporary biosemiotic and evolutionary theory. The text leads us along three distinct but entwined areas: from the world of matter to that of living matter to the realm of cultivated living matter for exploring how and why sensibility could have evolved. It points out that aspects traditionally used to demarcate and characterize human aesthetics—such as appreciation of symmetry, proportion and color, as well as pleasure, valuation and empathy, sensory seduction, creativity, and skills for representation, even fiction—are present not only in humans but among a variety of plant and animal species.
Author : Winfried Menninghaus
Publisher : Academic Studies PRess
ISBN 13 : 1644692597
Total Pages : 227 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (446 download)
Download or read book Aesthetics after Darwin written by Winfried Menninghaus and published by Academic Studies PRess. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition and courtship is (or at least was) the driving force of “art” production not only in animals, but also in humans. The present book is the first to reveal that Darwin’s hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually strongly informed both by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics, thereby Darwin’s theory far richer and more interesting for the understanding of poetry and song. The book also discusses how the three most discussed hypothetical functions of the human arts––competition for attention and (loving) acceptance, social cooperation, and self-enhancement––are not mutually exclusive, but can well be conceived of as different aspects of the same processes of producing and responding to the arts. Finally, reviewing the current state of archeological findings, the book advocates a new hypothesis on the multiple origins of the human arts, posing that they arose as new variants of human behavior, when three ancient and largely independent adaptions––sensory and sexual selection-driven biases regarding visual and auditory beauty, play behavior, and technology––joined forces with, and were transformed by, the human capacities for symbolic cognition and language.
