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290 - Nicholas Humphrey: Why Does Beauty Exist?

290 - Nicholas Humphrey: Why Does Beauty Exist?

Robinson's Podcast vor 1 Monat

0:00

1:17:43

Why Is the World So Beautiful?: https://a.co/d/0d3LsupA

Nicholas Humphrey is a theoretical psychologist and Emeritus
Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics, where
his work has focused on the evolution of intelligence and
consciousness. Among his many contributions, he was the first to
demonstrate “blindsight” in monkeys, studied mountain gorillas
with Dian Fossey, and developed influential theories about the
social evolution of intelligence. In this episode, Robinson and
Nicholas discuss the evolutionary origins of beauty and why human
beings are so drawn to it. More particularly, they talk about
rhyme, pattern-recognition, the adaptive value of aesthetic
experience, the relationship between beauty and social life, and
the methodology of evolutionary psychology. They also discuss
whether beauty implies agency or creation, difficult cases for an
evolutionary theory of aesthetics, spirituality and
transcendence, and why some art is deliberately ugly. Nicholas’s
upcoming book is Why Is the World So Beautiful? Our Minds in
Search of Nature’s Rhymes (MIT Press, 2026).

Nicholas’s Website: https://humphrey.org.uk

OUTLINE

00:00 Why Is the World So Beautiful?

08:48 What Is Rhyme?

18:47 The Utility of Beauty

24:09 Beauty and Pattern-Recognition

34:26 Beauty and Society

41:21 The Methodology of Evolutionary Psychology

49:20 Creation and Agency

56:24 Problem Cases

01:02:26 Spirituality and Transcendence

01:07:34 Ugly Art