Through the reading by Dissanayake, and the TED talk about a Darwinian theory about beauty, I have come to some realizations about what art really is and why it makes something appealing to us, or more commonly called beautiful. I enjoyed the ideas that the TED talk provided about why we think something is beautiful, and how things are beautiful to us when they remind us of the past that humans went through. So when we see a nice Savannah like landscape with tree’s, vegetation, life, and animals it is noticed in our evolved DNA that we used to look for these kinds of places and we today have strong feelings towards them. The fact that he states, “beauty comes from evolution”(Dutton) both intrigues me and scares me at the same time. It shows me that we value things from the past, and there is a rational reason why we are attracted to certain things. The part of this that scares me is that in the grand scheme of time humans are still so young, and if in this amount of time we perceive beauty as things we needed for like two and a half million years ago, couldn’t in the future things we perceive as beauty change to something as meaningless as some worthless piece of technology. If evolution dictated our beauty for now what will our conception of beauty turn to and become in the future when people will have completely different associations with living.

The fact that we have been creating art for so long during the existence of humans is also a very fascinating aspect of art. If our ancestors used to create art about things they desired, then the futures art should reflect this aspect as well. In Dissanayake’s writing it says, “art must be viewed as an inherent universal trait of the human species, as normal and natural as language, sex, sociability, aggression, or any of the other characteristics of human nature”(1). If this is true will the image of beauty change over time? I personally agree with the fact that we see beauty in any kind of skilled performance whether it be art or something else, and because of this there will be a certain talent based art and beauty, but at the same time what is considered beauty in the future could become completely different that what we know today.

While doing this reading many thoughts went through my head about my own values, and how I come to “know” something. This was one of the parts that I found most interesting, because it is what really defines a person and can have a huge impact on how a person acts and how a person develops their values will have a huge effect on what kind of person they will become. While looking at the four basic and two synthetic values I looked back at them to see which ones are most instilled in me when it comes to knowing something. The values that I feel I most align with are sense experience and deductive logic, as well as the synthetic value of science. I feel like these all go well together, and describe how I look at things. I am very detail and fact oriented, and have a hard time just going with my gut, or how I am feeling. When something if proven in front of me I am most likely to be able to believe it, and can then work on comprehending however ridiculous it might be. I think this might be part of the reason I am so fascinated with magic tricks, because I am missing the way the trick works, and it astounds me and I can barely believe the trick has happened.

The portion of this article that was most interesting to me was the part asking if values are chosen, ” But do values, in the sense of freely chosen values, truly exist?” (Lewis, 7). This topic looks back at both scientific data, and personal experiences, which makes it exceptionally confusing topic. The article talks about that fact that we are born with the genetic coding to do two very specific things, live and to reproduce. These two traits have been seen through all of humanity as some of the most apparent traits, but there have been times that humans have had the exact opposite behaviors. It talks about Japanese ritual suicide, as well as Tibet’s celibacy. These two instances show that values can be changed against human nature, and that values may not be the driving forces in human beings. This was my favorite part of the article, because it showed me that in a sense you can do anything, and go against the thousands of years of evolutionary values and do whatever you want. These deep rooted instincts can be ignored if someone has values that allow someone to look past our most primal urges, and in a way that is somewhat scary. At what point do our values become strongly enough ingrained that they are our driving factor on how we live?