In 1994, Russian-American artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid set out to create America’s most beautiful painting. The result was striking: a verdant lakeside scene complete with trees, deer, picturesque hills, dawdling youngsters and, incongruously, George Washington, the first president of the United States.

This odd inclusion points to the artwork’s unusual origins. Komar and Melamid had contracted a market research company to survey the American public about its views on beauty in art. The painting’s cool blues, natural setting and eminent historical figure all reflected majority preferences of the US population.

This painting, “America’s Most Wanted”, was one product of The People’s Choice art project. The artists repeated the exercise in several countries, finding some variations – in Kenya, a hippopotamus and Jesus replaced deer and president – but almost all images depicting natural landscapes featured water, plants and hilly terrain.

Review: Why Is the World So Beautiful? Our Minds in Search of Nature’s Rhymes – Nicholas Humphrey (MIT Press)

The project also explored ugliness. A painting titled “America’s Most Unwanted” is a mess of triangles that looks like an explosion in a corn-chip factory or, as one critic observed, “the ragged old linoleum under the kitchen stove, only oranger”.

The People’s Choice is a parody of popular taste, but it also suggests there is something universal about what people find beautiful. Perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but human nature has shaped that organ.

That, at least, is the starting point of the field of evolutionary aesthetics. According to its “biophilia hypothesis”, which proposes that humans possess an innate desire to seek connections with nature, we find vistas that afford good prospects for human habitation beautiful. Water, greenery, animals and other people signify places where we could live comfortably off the fat of the land.

The psychology of beauty

Nicholas Humphrey, author of Why Is the World So Beautiful, shares this evolutionary worldview, but to him our adapted psychology of beauty goes much deeper than landscape preferences.

A self-described theoretical psychologist, Humphrey is a lucid writer with a wonderful nose for intriguing topics and original angles. He has written extensively on consciousness, religious faith and the origins of social intelligence.

His new book brings a gentle, donnish erudition to the study of aesthetics. An extended speculative argument on why we perceive beauty and how our world is furnished with it, the book is richly illustrated with examples from visual art, poetry and the natural world. It’s a splendid collision of philosophy with biological and cognitive science.

The central concept in Humphrey’s account of aesthetics was inspired by a quote from the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “All beauty may by a metaphor be called rhyme”.........

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