Darwinian aesthetics: sexual selection and the biology of beauty

But then another side of the issue comes to the fore. The landscapes that we ordinarily know are not pristine nature, but cultivated landscapes, rural or pastoral, with their towns and cities. Over the centuries, people have worked out their geography with multiple kinds of industry and perception, mixing nature and culture in diverse ways, no doubt some better, some worse. But who is to say that a science-based appreciation is the only right one? 9 Nature as seen by science is just the way we Westerners currently 'constitute' our world—so the phenomenologists may say. There is no reason to think...