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Comment by changoplatanero | Hacker News Reader

The question in my mind is why is something that evolved to be beautiful to insects also beautiful to humans.

You are probably thinking backward. I am not an expert in evolutionary biology but the beauty of flowers is something which has helped them survive. Flowers themselves didn't decide to be beautiful or they don't even know that they are beautiful. Remember that evolution is blind. It is just that their beauty was in the eyes of beholders and those beholders helped them survive.

Unless the post you are replying to has been heavily edited, I am at a loss to see how you could find in it either an assumption or implication that flowers themselves decided to be beautiful or that they know they are beautiful.

One could challenge whether it is appropriate to say flowers are beautiful to insects, though clearly that is intended to be read as attractive, which, empirically, they are (nor do you seem to dispute the proposition that they evolved to be that way), and there's no prima facie reason for their scent and appearance to invoke pleasure in most humans.

My (lack of?) understanding is that early humans and some of our later pre-human ancestors were big insect eaters.

Finding flowers beautiful makes sense, but I was recently in the desert and I found that landscape beautiful. That feels more confusing?

My similarly limited understanding tells me that there are a few aspects to this:

- We've evolved to find our natural habitat (which is very variable) pleasing, as that's an evolutionary advantage compared to constantly feeling uneasy.

- We are attracted to places that are different to the ones we live in, so we keep exploring and spreading.

- There's also a learned component - even if we understand that a landscape isn't habitable for us (like the desert), we're conditioned to finding it beautiful, as this is the cultural consensus.

I feel there is something of a false dichotomy between being pleased and being uneasy, as I suspect that indifference would be equally effective. We, like many other animals, have mechanisms to become indifferent to those aspects of our environment which are commonplace and neither useful nor harmful to us. While some curiosity towards novelty is arguably beneficial, a lack of caution is demonstrably dangerous.

If our aesthetic response to flowers was a direct consequence of evolutionary pressure, we would expect to find the flowers of plants having edible tubers or fruit to be especially attractive, and those of poisonous plants to be repulsive.

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