The Biological Roots of Aesthetics and Art

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.