beauty

[Gordon Fitch]

> > >> But isn't beauty a function of class anyway?
> > 
> > >Of evolution.
> > 
> > Don't be silly.

Carrol Cox:
> The simple response probably to such silliness is that beauty isn't a
> trait, & only traits are inheritable. What we call beauty would be a
> more or less random assemblage of traits evolved quite independently of
> their relation ship to "beauty."
> ....

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

More precisely, as a self-appointed pseudo-intellectual, the
best sort, I would look for _beauty_ in the form of various
inherited, genetically-specified functions in the nervous
systems of beauty-beholders which are refined by experience,
culture, and other teachers, very much like language but
much more fundamental -- even insects appreciate beauty.
That's why plants grow flowers for them.

-- Gordon