Do animals have aesthetics?

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

A beaver builds a dam.

Not all beaver dams are the same, or even close. They are custom structures that follow the particular conditions of their surroundings.

How does a beaver know to put a log here instead of there? Does he reason, based on an abstract understanding of hydrodynamics, or does it just feel right?

When he regards a dam does he analyze its engineering or just sense its sturdiness or crumminess?

I would suggest that the instinctive sense in play is similar to our senses of beauty, of attractive form. Though an odd notion it's less challenging than the alternative of beavers thinking through the engineering process.

Is the beaver's sense of beauty/harmony in dam design reducible to a surprisingly simple series of parameters? Yes, probably so. But who is to say our aesthetics are not? (We can only analyze human mental processes with our human minds so of course everything about us seems almost infinitely complex... to us.)

When animals chose mates is it anthropomorphism to say they are factoring in elements of what we would call beauty? Our standards of beauty are to some degree evolutionarily delivered and to some degree culturally/experientially derived. Is a bird any different when deciding which songs are more attractive, which shapes of tail-feathers are most desirable?

In some species of bird males build nests and females pick which nest, and thus which mate, they prefer. Do such bird construct the most durable and utilitarian nests? No. The males decorate the nests with pretty things. (In human occupied areas they incorporate colorful strips of plastic and bits of shiny foil.) Are the female birds using a standard of beauty in deciding which nests are most attractive? How could they not be?

When human littering makes shiny, colorful material available the males know to use it because they know the females will like it. The males and females share an aesthetic sense of something. They liked tin-foil a million years before tinfoil existed!

Is it entirely instinctual or, as with humans, a synergism of instinct and culture? When a bird sees females flocking to a foil-decorated nest is he likelier to incorporate some foil in his? I am guessing yes. We know that birds have culture in their songs. They are not born knowing all the tunes. Attractive riffs are invented and become popular. And in some species songs are judged for complexity of innovation.

Birds also have fashion in culture. In "leks" amles line up and females pick the dreamiest male... and almost ALL the females mate with him! The next year a different male is the in-thing but he isn't always the male most like last year's model. This "fashion" craze serves to keep the DNA of the bird population a moving tragets for parasites and viruses, but the birds don't know that. They just know that spiky tails feathers were hot last year but rounded ones are hot this year.

(A sideways example of the unimaginable complexity of the interaction of instinct and environment in birds. Some birds use a magnetic sense to migrate. Others use the stars. At some point somebody noted that navigating by stars is a problem for evolution because the earth's axis has wobbles that take many thousands of years. The sky changes slowly, but far too fast for evolution to have kept up! This requires some study... it turns out that in the nest the baby birds stare fixedly at the sky and come to identify the star that moves least during the night. That identity of that star may change over a hundred thousand years but its relative significance does not. The star that moves the least is (in the northern hemisphere) the north-most star. And from that they can memorize the configuration of stars around it. Some instinct tells them what to do relative to north but they are not born knowing where north is. The are, like humans, born with an instinct for education.)

Much of what we feel and even think is shaped by stuff we just know... a universe of specific perspectives of which we are but dimly aware, since they do not seem like perspectives at all, but rather like right and obvious truths.

That which most separates us from the animals is asking the question what separates us from the animals.

Our every trait lies upon a continuum. Within the range of life on Earth we happen to be, compared to the other animals, at the very end of several continua. But nobody thinks we are at the theoretical end of any continuum, do they? Are better mathematical minds conceivable? Are superior social instincts possible?

When elephants lament a fallen fellow and stack debris over her corpse are they behaving religiously?

On the one hand, no more so then when my cat creates intricate tee-pees of trash over her feces when she 'misses' the litter box.

On the other hand, the first thing we know about humans in any kind of civilization is that the powerful arrange to divert the energies of the people into heaping matter upon their corpse with seemingly no limit on their ambition. (Northern European Cairns, Egyptian pyramids, Meso-American pyramids, American Indian earthworks, Chinese artificial mountains like the source of the terra-cotta warriors)

Were those acts of religion? Were those aesthetically guided constructions?

Ask an elephant.