HOW BEAUTY IS MAKING SCIENTISTS RETHINK EVOLUTION

A male Indian peafowl.

The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can’t be explained by natural selection alone— so how did it come to be?  The author of the article asks (about the sounds a certain bird projects), "But why would females be attracted to those particular sounds in the first place?"

To Prum, (the scientist he is interviewing), it was a question without an answer — and thus a question not worth contemplating. “Not everything,” he said, “has this explicit causal explanation.” 

Could this be Intelligent Design?

Philosophers, scientists and writers have tried to define the essence of beauty for thousands of years. The plurality of their efforts illustrates the immense difficulty of this task. Beauty, they have said, is: harmony; goodness; a manifestation of DIVINE perfection; a type of pleasure; that which causes love and longing; and M = O/C (where M is aesthetic value, O is order and C is complexity).

Click here to read the New York Times Magazine article discussing beauty.