Denis Dutton: A Darwinian theory of beauty
TED collaborates with animator Andrew Park to illustrate Denis Dutton’s provocative theory on beauty — that art, music and other beautiful things, far from being simply “in the eye of the beholder,” are a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins.
Dutton teaches philosophy at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and is the editor of Arts & Letters Daily, a three-column compendium of culture news from all over the web. (His own homepage is another storehouse of tidbits from his wide-ranging explorations in philosophy and culture.) He’s on the advisory board of Cybereditions, a publisher specializing in ebooks and print-on-demand editions of nonfiction works. And he’s an editor of Climate Debate Daily, a lively blog that takes a skeptical view of some climate-change arguments.