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Chapter 4 looks at how key stimuli and brain programming affect our own species’ aesthetics and determine which shapes, colors, and landscapes humans are attracted to and consider beautiful. Like other animals, people are predisposed to respond to certain key stimuli, which have been associated with an expectation of functionality, fitness, and increased well-being. In other words, the perception of beauty represents a strong internal indicator, which it pays to be guided by in order to gain various benefits. In this investigation, the chapter enters the micro-processes of artistic creation. It looks at the aesthetic effects that make up an artwork and at the understanding of why something captivates and fascinates people. The right embellishment can transform a trivial everyday object into an overwhelming power object—a kind of fetish that means the world to us and costs a fortune. How does something like this happen?

Chapter 3 explores even further back in evolutionary history and examines whether there are traces of the aesthetic impulse in species other than our own. Do other species have a sense of aesthetics? Do they make aesthetic choices, and do they exhibit examples of aesthetic behavior? Among other things, this chapter looks at bird song and crane dance. It follows the fascinating bowerbirds as they create their remarkable and colorful constructions. And it follows the action as experiments are conducted with chimpanzees in the lab. The chapter also discusses honest signals, innate sensibilities, sexual selection, and the evolution of beauty.

Chapter 10 concludes with showing the strength and limitations of the approach presented in this book, in a discussion that highlights the differences between a classic humanistic approach and an evolutionary, behavioral approach. The aim is not to move aesthetics from the humanities and into behavioral psychology and other sciences. On the contrary, the aesthetic field is a house with many doors, and you will need several keys to open them. However, aesthetics and art are also behavior. They are something our species does, and that is why behavioral sciences were prioritized. Furthermore, with behavioral and evolutionary psychology as tools, we can really shine an extensive and important light on the big Why of art and aesthetics.

The supposed problem of perceptual error, including illusion and hallucination, has led most theories of perception to deny formulations of direct realism. The standard response to this apparent problem adopts the mistaken presupposition that perception is indeed liable to error. However, the prevailing conditions of observation are themselves elements of perceptual representation, functioning in the manner of predicate modifiers. They ensure that the predicates applied in perceptual representations do indeed correctly attribute properties that perceived physical objects actually instantiate. Thus, perceptual representations are immune to misrepresentation of the sort misguidedly supposed by the spurious problem of perceptual misrepresentation. Granted the possibility that perceptual attribution admits of predicate modification, it is quite possible that perceptual experience permits both rudimentary and sophisticated conceptualization. Moreover, such treatment of perceptual predication rewards by providing an account of aspect alteration exemplified by perception of ambiguous stimuli.