title: The biological roots of aesthetics and art.
abstract: Animals' choice behavior is driven by motivation that is attributable to both innate urges and from positive and negative reinforcements. Using a comparative approach as well as experimental evidence, I explore how the first involves fitness-enhancing benefits from aesthetics that are derived from ancestral choices via natural selection. Innate urges and aesthetics help guide animals to produce appropriate positive and negative choices that are species-specific. Choices of food, habitat and mates or associates are considered. I propose that art is not a uniquely human product, but a representation or an extension of the maker, as are the ornaments, displays, and songs of a bird.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA. bheinric@umv.edu
authors.forename: Bernd
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Heinrich
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001154:Art; D004954:Esthetics; D006801:Humans; D012641:Selection, Genetic