290 - Nicholas Humphrey: Why Does Beauty Exist?
Show notes
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