Leonardo's Brain by Shlain Leonard

Author:Shlain, Leonard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Nowhere in the thousands of pages that Leonardo wrote does he ever explicitly offer his personal concept of beauty. Yet, there can be no other subject that consumed Leonardo more. Art critics and subsequent painters had to invent a special art term, Leonardoesque, to convey his unique ability to capture the beauty of the human face and form. He created animals so lifelike they appear ready to step right off the page. And, in the run-up to the Renaissance, no ancient, medieval, or contemporary artist was ever able to re-create with such unerring accuracy the beauty of their natural surroundings. Leonardo’s renderings of rocks, water, clouds, plants, and flowers were exceptionally beautiful. And yet no meaningful hypothesis of why we have an aesthetic sense appears in his voluminous writings.

Natural Selection installed the code in our genome that established beauty as the key criterion associated with sexual attraction, and this extraordinary new aesthetic would be pressed into a new role in our environment. An unusual feature of humanhood made this transition imperative for the survival of the species. The beauty gene was pressed into service to cover another function, because humans wandered away from the template used by practically all other animals: We are explorers.

Endowed with a thirst for exploration, humans are willing to venture far away from what can be considered home. This untethering of humans from an invisible border fence that more or less hems in other creatures has enabled humans to populate the entire globe. There is no environmental niche that humans have not explored or inhabited. Human communities can be found thriving in steamy rain forests, arid deserts, arctic tundras, and air-thin mountain peaks. With the possible exception of rats, there are no other species of mammals that can make that statement.

What makes human wanderlust so extraordinary is how poorly equipped Homo sapiens originally were for a life of trekking. Being the only one of 270 species of primates that have permanently molted any vestige of a thick coat of fur that might keep them warm in the winter, humans were dependent on the availability of resources to fashion garments to serve as a substitute. Author Desmond Morris aptly named our species, and his book, The Naked Ape. He pointed out that if the pelts of all primates were arranged in a line, the one that would stand out from all the others was the one that had no fur. In extreme heat humans need to perspire to control their internal temperature; this requires them to have a constant source of freshwater and salt.

To supplement this extraordinary foray away from the norm of animal behavior, Natural Selection found it necessary to install in these intrepid travelers an instinct that would inform them when they were in an environment that could sustain them. This new instinct was based on aesthetics.

There was a considerable trade-off, however, when Mother Nature enlarged the function of the sexual attraction gene to include natural beauty. Lost in the reverie of observing a beautiful

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