‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn
When I first read these lines in my high school English class on the romantic poets, I wondered what might be wrong with me that I could not find such ecstasy over the beauty in that “still unravish’d bride of quietness” on the Grecian urn. Now I wonder what might have been wrong with young Keats, but these lines have earned him much ink and hard thought by many people smarter than me. Is beauty really the only truth we need to know? What I know now about beauty in people after another fifty years of wondering is that a heavy dose can make me shiver or weep. But how and why that happens is still a mystery, artful magic that demands a handkerchief.
At the California wedding I attended in October seven bridesmaids in matching blue dresses, each with lush hair and radiant complexions, strode at a graceful pace down the aisle toward the altar, each in step with the groomsman on her elbow and with the beat of the processional tune, each adorned with a fragrant gardenia, taking her place opposite her male counterpart to form the wings that would focus our attention on the bride and groom in the center. Such a concentration of gorgeousness demanded my handkerchief. And at the Arkansas wedding I attended a month later the same ritual played itself out, to equally wet effect. Weddings pull out all the stops for this kind of beauty.
But what truths do we know about beauty and how it works on us? The October 8, 2015, issue of the weekly journal Nature devotes its Outlook Supplement to nine articles on the science of beauty, providing some truths that Keats and the rest of us can only dimly sense. Have you ever wondered why we think of Neanderthals as ugly? The Nature interview with Karl Grammer, an Austrian anthropologist, describes the role that beauty has played in natural selection and evolution. Beauty favors attraction, and attraction favors contact, the kind that leads to procreation. That is, beautiful people make more babies. The not-so-beautiful people lose in the competition, so they’re weeded out of the gene pool. This is true not only for Neanderthals and fashion models, but for flies, butterflies, and orangutangs. All species engage in the ultimate beauty contest, and our sense of beauty may be rooted in those features that attract us to each other for procreation.
But for humans, isn’t “beauty in the eye of the beholder,” a fickle thing subject to fashion or decree? No, say several articles in this series. Our sense of beauty is shared across all cultures and is wired into our human brains. Here are the eight “pillars of beauty” that we instinctively find attractive in Biloxi, Borneo, or Beijing:
Symmetry
Youthfulness
Averageness
Sexual dimorphism (sex-hormone markers)
Healthy body odors
Graceful Motion
Skin complexion
Hair texture
Both wedding parties paraded these pillars of beauty (such a show at a funeral might seem obscene). The evolutionists tell us that these universal pillars of beauty advertise robust health and fertility. People (and animals) who find these traits attractive tend to have greater success breeding healthy offspring. Natural selection has chosen you and your ancestral line because of your impeccable instincts for who might breed well.
The article on “The Aesthetic Brain” describes the neuroanatomy and brain circuits that underlie our abilities to sense beauty as an indicator of health and fertility. We attract each other through complex circuits for experiencing arousal, seeking and feeling the rewards of sex, and learning to establish the relationships that not only make the babies but raise them. The capacity to be attractive and attracted to others overlaps with the capacity to trust and be trusted. Beauty helps us get started, but it doesn’t do the dirty work of raising the kids.
The science of beauty has not been lost on the merchants. Long ago they learned how to prey on our vanity and our fascination with beauty. Now the cosmetics industry flourishes, and the newest merchant, the cosmetic surgeon, has more options than ever for catering to the wants of those who can afford to purchase symmetric faces, youthful complexions, and lush crops of hair in the right places. You can now boost your beauty index through hormones, cosmetic surgery, joint replacement, hairstyling, exercise, and daily cosmetics. The beauty culture has taken on a value of its own, beyond chasing fertility, because beauty is so intimately linked with pleasures of many kinds that have little to do with procreation, such as art, music, science, and entertainment.
The interview with the physicist David Deutsch raises the question of why flowers, which evolved to attract insects, are so attractive to people. Deutsch asserts that the essentials of beauty cut across species, “and these aesthetic truths are as objective as the laws of physics or maths.” This assertion leaves us with some tantalizing questions. If our aesthetic sense is rooted in features that attract us to fertile members of our own species, what is it about sunsets and campfires and gardenias that fascinate us all? How can Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony be so universally beautiful without featuring any of the “eight pillars of beauty”? Is beauty just another word for attraction, the kind that can happen at any level, from the bride and groom down to quarks and leptons?
Maybe that’s what Keats meant. The only truth we need to know to survive is the art of attraction.