Many years ago, evolutionary psychologist Nick Humphrey met a family in Turkey with eight children who were unable to walk upright. Due to a genetic disease, they could only get around on all fours. He and his colleagues had traveled to Turkey to study the family and to film them, as an extraordinary example of human development.
The children were young adults by the time Humphrey met them and had difficult lives. The other villagers scorned them, and would throw stones at them and tease them. But they seemed to love each other deeply and to enjoy their daily routines.
The parents had been told by the local imam that the kids’ disabilities were, in fact, a gift from Allah, a test. Read more: “The Harrowing and the Beautiful” The family lived 30 miles from the seaside in the southwest part of Turkey, but had never been to the beach. So Humphrey and his colleagues took them on an excursion.
The kids took a kind of delight in their first experience with the ocean that Humphrey says is difficult to describe. Their mother sat on the sand in her long dress, watching her children running on all fours into the water. She gazed at the waves breaking and the sky and the distant horizon, and she said, “I never knew Allah had made such a beautiful world.” This is where Humphrey’s new book, Why is the World so Beautiful: Our Minds in Search of Nature’s Rhymes, begins.
The book is a fascinating exploration of the role that beauty plays in human psychology and evolution. We also talked about monkey aesthetics and how the rise of AI might influence how we understand beauty. You write in the introduction that you had wanted to read a book called Why Is the World So Beautiful for many years.
The fact of beauty is such an important part of our lives—the beauty of nature as well as the beauty of paintings and music. And yet we have very little explanation of it from an evolutionary point of view. By trade, I’m an evolutionary psychologist.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
