Fittest and Fairest: Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

Abigail Zitin

ELH, Volume 82, Number 3, Fall 2015, pp. 845-868 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2015.0031

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/592455

Access provided at 24 Jul 2019 22:31 GMT from Southern Indiana, Univ of
FITTEST AND FAIREST: AESTHETICS AND
ADAPTATION BEFORE DARWIN

by abigail zitin

One feature of recent debate about literary Darwinism is an unstated

assumption about what it means for humanistic disciplines to stay
current: namely, that they make use of new ideas and technologies as
methods for analyzing and interpreting old objects. Darwinian evolu-
tion is, of course, hardly a new idea, and attempts to incorporate its
insights into the humanities and social sciences extend back into the
nineteenth century. It is not my purpose, at present, to narrate the
progression of Darwinian approaches to the study of human culture,
from sociobiology to evolutionary psychology and evocriticism. What
I want to remark upon, instead, is the way in which caution on
the part of humanists about the adoption of evolution as a critical
method gets framed as a kind of proleptic and willful resistance to the
eventual (and inevitable) unfolding of a consilient understanding of
culture—specifically, of the arts. Blakey Vermeule offers a measured
defense of such caution in her comparison of the evolutionary critical
paradigm to the psychoanalytic criticism of a bygone moment. “As a
theory,” Vermeule writes, “psychoanalysis is undeniably rich. As a story
about the mind, however, it is laughable. Evolutionary psychology
has a different problem. As a story about the mind it is true; more
details are emerging all the time to buttress its central claims. Yet its
relevance to the kinds of art objects that humans make is not in the
least obvious.”1 The proponents of evolutionary psychology proffer it
to literary criticism because it is the sharpest available tool; it is new
(relatively speaking), and it is true. How then, argue its exasperated
advocates, can it not be useful?
Its utility can fail for reasons of relevance, as Vermeule suggests;
more specifically, that failed relevance can be a function of scale, as
suggested in the essay by Jonathan Kramnick to which Vermeule is
responding, so that the central tenets of evolutionary theory don’t help
us understand particular texts in new or rewarding ways. Kramnick
also criticizes the substance of evocriticism as a partial enterprise
that selectively promotes only some aspects of evolutionary theory to
construct its explanatory apparatus, and on an incorrect or outdated

ELH 82 (2015) 845–868 © 2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 845
basis at that.2 In what follows, I draw on an older but still trenchant criti-
cism of evolutionary psychology to evaluate the tendency for aesthetic
theorists to support their claims on adaptive grounds. Obviously, the
concept of adaptation predates that of natural selection. On the most
general level, to claim that something is adaptive is to claim that it is
purposive; it is a means to some end. A persistent theoretical weakness
in evolutionary psychology has been the teleology of its interpretive
model, a necessary methodological strategy whereby it extrapolates
means (more specifically, selective pressures and the adaptations to
which they give rise) from ends (observable features of organisms).3
In this essay, I will show how a similar kind of teleology marked and
marred aesthetic theory as it took shape in British moral philosophy of
the early eighteenth century, focusing on the work of a practitioner–
theorist whose work challenged the developing consensus around the
study of beauty.
My essay examines what looks at first like a convergence between
eighteenth-century aesthetics and evolutionary psychology. In his
1753 treatise The Analysis of Beauty, William Hogarth proposes that a
serpentine “line of beauty” is the formal principle by which we can settle
the problem of taste. His illustration of a series of corsets is supposed to
prove the allure of the serpentine line by locating the well-modulated
curve in the female torso, a proof constructed from the assumed but
unstated perspective of male heterosexual desire. In correlating his
claims with sexual desire, Hogarth appears to anticipate both the logic
and the conclusions of recent research in the evolutionary psychology
of mate selection. Instead, Hogarth’s seemingly determinist aesthetics
evinces skepticism about the motives and consequences of aesthetic
theories framed so as to answer adaptive questions. Specifically,
he objects to the way in which such theories relate the perception
of beauty to sexual reproduction, the end by which it is ostensibly
determined. Hogarth’s Analysis stands out because its motivation is
not apologetic; it is not an attempt to justify a mode of experience
whose purpose is elusive, but rather an effort to do justice to that very
elusiveness by considering aesthetic perception as an end in itself. The
first part of my essay works to establish the apparent correspondence
between Hogarth’s line of beauty and a well-known adaptive argument
correlating female sexual attractiveness with the contours of the body.
Having established this similarity, I broaden my view to consider where
Hogarth’s Analysis fits into a history of ideas about beauty and fitness
in the eighteenth century. In the essay’s second half, I argue that the
sexual determinism characteristic of evolutionary psychology finds

846 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

its true intellectual ancestor not in Hogarth’s aesthetics but rather in
the tradition of moral sense philosophy whose tautological account
of beauty he finds unsatisfactory. The essay concludes by indicating
how Hogarth’s orientation toward artistic practice inflects his aesthetic
theory—specifically, how approaching aesthetics from a practitioner’s
perspective might dislodge the sexual determinism of more instru-
mental (which is also to say, adaptive) accounts of the beautiful.

******

In the early 1990s, Devendra Singh advanced the hypothesis that

the reproductive fate of the human species rests squarely on a woman’s
hips—or, more precisely, on the factor by which her waist is smaller
than her hips. Singh zeroed in on female girth from the standpoint of
evolutionary theory, asking if it can be demonstrated that humans have
recourse to adaptive criteria when we choose sex partners—that is,
do we mate with an eye to optimizing our chances of conceiving and
nurturing offspring? Reasoning that “the validity of the evolutionary
explanation for mate selection” among humans holds only if a woman’s
appearance is reliably keyed to her reproductive fitness, Singh and
other evolutionary psychologists call into question “the almost universal
belief that attractiveness not only varies greatly among societies but also
that it varies over time within a given society.”4 Seeking, therefore, a
constant amidst the demonstrably various ideals and images of fashion-
able bodies and faces, Singh noticed the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), an
age- and sex-linked metric that “abundant evidence now shows” to be

an accurate indicator of women’s reproductive status. Women with a

lower ratio show earlier pubertal endocrine activity. Married women
with a higher ratio have more difficulty becoming pregnant, and those
who do become pregnant do so at a later age than women with a lower
ratio. The waist-to-hip ratio is also an accurate indication of long-term
health status. Diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart problems,
previous stroke, and gallbladder disorders have been shown to be linked
with the distribution of fat, as reflected by the ratio, rather than with
the total proportion of body fat.5

WHR fits both of Singh’s criteria for proving “the adaptive significance”
of “female physical attractiveness,” namely, “that (a) variation in bodily
features constituting attractiveness are correlated with variation in
reproductive potential and success, and (b) males possess mechanisms
to detect such features.”6

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 The research Singh conducted first took on the premise that ideals
of beauty are forever in flux. Among those who decried the extremity of
a late twentieth-century Western vogue for female thinness, “proof was
to be found on the canvases of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens,
whose depictions of what are sometimes described as ‘voluptuous’
women are said to prove—do they not?—that attractiveness is socially
constructed.”7 Evaluating the very images of “fashion models, Playboy
centerfolds, Miss America contestants, and famous film actresses” used
in previous studies to establish a profound shift in preference away from
Rubens and toward Twiggy, Singh proved that the WHR of the female
subjects depicted remained remarkably consistent despite changing
fashions in overall body composition (plump, muscular, bony) or breast
size.8 This conclusion, however, did not constitute proof of criterion
(b)—that men noticed or appreciated WHR when they noticed and
appreciated Playboy centerfolds.
Singh then designed an experiment using male undergraduates as
subjects. Presented with an array of twelve line drawings of women
identical but for their body weight and WHR, each subject was asked
to rank all twelve from most to least attractive. In the study, the images
were scrambled and presented to the subjects in random sequences;
in the figure accompanying Singh’s article, however, their systematic
arrangement reveals the logic according to which they were designed
(Figure 1). The first row depicts underweight figures, the second,
“normal weight,” and the third, overweight, while the columns depict
“four levels of WHR (.7, .8, .9, and 1.0)” keyed to each weight class,
“created by varying the line drawing representing the waist.”9 The
results were stark. “In both underweight and normal weight categories,
subjects strictly rank ordered figures for attractiveness as a function
of WHR. . . . None of the figures in the overweight category was
ranked as attractive, although figures with lower WHR were ranked
as more attractive than figures with higher WHR.”10 Even taking into
account what appear to be cultural biases against heavier women’s
bodies, in other words, Singh’s data showed a strong preference for
an hourglass figure.

848 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

Figure 1. Waist-to-Hip Ratio (Devendra Singh, “Adaptive Significance of Female
Physical Attractiveness: Role of Waist-to-Hip Ratio,” Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 65 [August 1993]: 298)

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 Compare to Singh’s lineup of maillot-clad blondes an illustration
published 240 years earlier, a detail from one of the engravings Hogarth
made to accompany The Analysis of Beauty (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Stays (The Analysis of Beauty, Plate 1 [detail])

Here, too, we have a lineup of female forms emphasizing the

waist, though in this case propriety dictates the mere suggestion of
the body by the undergarments in which it is sheathed. (Hogarth
comments with only mild prurience on his use of visual metonymy:
“[T]he whole stay, when put close together behind, is truly a shell of
well-varied contents.”)11 The array of corsets is itself part of a series,
the fullest elaboration of what begins as a more or less mathematical
illustration of that which Hogarth considers his great discovery, the
“line of beauty” (Figure 3). As he puts it, “[T]he constant use made of
lines by mathematicians, as well as painters, in describing things upon
paper, hath establish’d a conception of them, as if actually existing on
the real forms themselves. This likewise we suppose.” Hogarth’s line
of beauty is an s-curve or “waving line, which is a line more produc-
tive of beauty than any of the former [straight lines, circular lines, and
. . . lines partly straight, and partly circular], as in flowers, and other
forms of the ornamental kind: for which reason we shall call it the
line of beauty” (AB, 41).12
By placing the line of beauty in a series, Hogarth is concerned to
indicate its superior proportionality to other similar but not identical
lines. Though he doesn’t use the term, what he illustrates is a ratio—
the ratio of the curved segments of the line to the straight portion
that connects them:

Though all sorts of waving-lines are ornamental, when properly applied;

yet, strictly speaking, there is but one precise line, properly to be called
the line of beauty, which in the scale of them [Figure 3] is number 4:
the lines 5, 6, 7, by their bulging too much in their curvature becoming
gross and clumsy; and, on the contrary, 3, 2, 1, as they straighten,
becoming mean and poor; as will appear in the next figure [Figure 4]
where they are applied to the legs of chairs.

850 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

 Figure 4. Chair Legs (AB, Plate 1 [detail])

Figure 3. Lines

A still more perfect idea of the effects of the precise waving-line,

and of those lines that deviate from it, may be conceived by the row of
stays, figure [2], where number 4 is composed of precise waving-lines,
and is therefore the best shaped stay. Every whale-bone of a good stay
must be made to bend in this manner.13 (AB, 48)

Lines solidify into chair legs, which, in turn, soften into flesh (or rather,
harden into whalebone). Hogarth’s point is that his “one precise line,”
no matter the medium in which it is realized, constitutes the best
available formal approximation of visual appeal. Lacking a cadre of
undergraduates to test out his conclusions, Hogarth provides a virtual
analogue to Singh’s scientific method by invoking the law of averages.
Situated between three progressively straighter forms and three that
are progressively more voluptuous, the line of beauty represents, by
default, the happy medium. (For his part, Hogarth criticizes Rubens
for lacking “the delicacy we see in the best Italian masters; . . . he
rather charged his contours in general with too bold and S-like swell-
ings” [AB, 5].)
The similarity between Hogarth’s and Singh’s respective visual trib-
utes to the hourglass figure need not be regarded as anything more than
a coincidence or (more likely) a commonplace. That said, Hogarth’s
argument, offered in passing, for why the line of beauty maps onto a
nipped-in waist bears further scrutiny with reference to the latter-day
doctrine of evolutionary psychology. Of his seven stays, Hogarth writes,

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 [T]he numbers 5, 6, 7, and 3, 2, 1, are deviations into stiffness and
meanness on one hand, and clumsiness and deformity on the other.
. . . It may be worth our notice however, that the stay, number 2,
would better fit a well-shaped man than number 4; and that number
4, would better fit a well-form’d woman, than number 2; and when
on considering them, merely as to their forms, and comparing them
together as you would do two vases, it has been shewn by our principles,
how much finer and more beautiful number 4 is, than number 2: does
not this our determination enhance the merit of these principles, as
it proves at the same time how much the form of a woman’s body
surpasses in beauty that of a man? (AB, 49)

This is Hogarth at his most deterministic—and his is, assuredly, a

gendered determinism. In a nice bit of circular reasoning, he observes
that the stay he’s drawn based on his “one precise line” has a feminine
look to it. By virtue of his deduction of the serpentine line, this stay
must be judged more beautiful than its more masculine counterpart,
“considering them, merely as to their forms.” This consideration
“proves” women’s bodies to be more beautiful than men’s just to the
extent that it proves Hogarth’s initial observation—that the corset
“composed of precise waving-lines,” number 4, would better fit a
woman than a man.14
The reasoning that promotes WHR as the paradigm for female
attractiveness may be less circular than Hogarth’s, but it is similarly
deterministic. Evolutionary psychology presses into service the basic
tenets of evolutionary theory, namely, natural and sexual selection, in
accounting for aspects of human behavior that might otherwise be
explained with reference to social or cultural forces. The underlying
assumption is that such forces are comparatively weak—that, “given
the glacially slow pace of human evolution, [the Pleistocene] epoch
accounts for all of the significant evolution of the modern human
brain.” Accordingly, evolutionary psychology “seems to suggest that
we are now essentially what we were one hundred thousand years
ago.”15 Moreover, it suggests a purposive continuity between what we
were then and what we are now; if some feature of human psychology
has endured, it must be because it serves some persistent function.
In order to understand beauty adaptively, therefore, evolutionary
psychology proposes that certain elements of physical attractiveness
correlate to attributes in a mating partner that are preferential for
bearing or rearing offspring—that organisms are hardwired, so to
speak, to find some shapes or textures more beautiful than others.16 In
intimating the visual manifestation of the adaptive argument, namely,

852 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

that hourglass figures on women convey a coded message about the
reproductive felicity of the objects of male sexual desire, Hogarth seems
to anticipate the conclusions of evolutionary psychology, yoking together
in an emphatically deterministic relation beauty, sexual attraction, and
the female midsection. But such sexual determinism provides an inad-
equate rubric through which to read The Analysis of Beauty; indeed,
it yields a misunderstanding of Hogarth’s theory of beauty. Framing
beauty in relation to the biology of sex does not exhaust Hogarth’s
rhetorical agenda, however captivating discussions (and illustrations)
like the one of the stays may be to his readers.17 But if evolutionary
psychology gives us only a partial template, an imperfect analogue, for
understanding Hogarth, then why invoke it at all?
As I hope to indicate, evolutionary psychology reprises some aspects
of the early eighteenth-century debates out of which aesthetics as a
subject (let alone a field) of inquiry first arose. Philosophical investi-
gation of beauty had many tributary influences, but one of the most
important in the British context was the so-called moral sense theory
associated with Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury.
Moral sense philosophy and post-Darwinian sociobiology share a rejec-
tion of radical skepticism and, as a consequence of this, encounter
versions of the same central interpretive problem: the need to ratio-
nalize apparently contrapurposive attributes and behaviors. Shaftesbury
and his followers responded from a deist position to what they saw as
skeptical nihilism. Without a deep source of providential order in the
universe, they reason, manifestations of goodness or beauty would be
vanishingly arbitrary. That the world is merely flawed cannot be taken
to indicate the absence of divine order; instead, it is the expectation
of order, the absence of utter chaos, that indicates an intelligence
transcending human knowledge.
Evolutionary psychology refutes skepticism with an appeal to human
rather than “divine nature.”18 A debt to the Enlightenment is evident,
for instance, in Steven Pinker’s programmatic 2002 defense of evolu-
tionary psychology, titled The Blank Slate, an explicit reference to the
image of the mind John Locke formulated in his Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1690). Pinker mounts an emphatic campaign
against the apparently not-yet-vanquished founding doctrine of empiri-
cism, specifically, against its central claim that the human mind is a
tabula rasa, devoid of innate ideas.19 His subtitle, The Modern Denial
of Human Nature, suggests how evolutionary psychology might find
common ground with eighteenth-century moral sense philosophy, even
in the face of the obvious intervening difference: Darwin’s formulation

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of the principle of natural selection, which would seem to invalidate
the providentialism of deist arguments. But evolutionary psychology’s
methodological fatalism bears comparison with Shaftesbury’s belief in
a divine nature; the evolutionary theorist must proceed in her inves-
tigations of natural phenomena “as if they were designed for some
purpose,” despite knowing full well that natural selection “has no mind
and no mind’s eye.”20 For evolutionary psychology, the tabula rasa is
as much of a mistake as intelligent design. Understanding behavior as
hardwired (however metaphorically) requires a robust recuperation of
“human nature” as presocial—given rather than constructed, or, more
precisely, constructed over such a long span of time that it becomes,
in effect, given.
According to Ronald Paulson, The Analysis of Beauty is Lockean,
which is to say, “grounded on observation. As an empirical theory
its real source is in his native England, in Locke’s Essay Concerning
Human Understanding” and in the tradition Locke inaugurated.21 On
this view, Hogarth’s empiricism is part of a broader repudiation of
Shaftesbury and the moral sense tradition; Paulson sees Shaftesbury
as a primary target of Hogarth’s criticism in the Analysis. I will return
to the several different aspects of this criticism at the end of the essay,
but on the issue of skepticism, Hogarth does line up behind Locke.
Not content with what strike him as Shaftesbury’s vague received ideas
about beauty, Hogarth exhorts his readers “to see with our own eyes”
(AB, 18), rejecting the deist tendency to elevate the consensus of elites
to a principle of morals. Hogarth’s skepticism is more political than
epistemological in its underlying motives; the injunction “to see with
our own eyes” is a backhanded reproach to aristocratic connoisseurs,
“those who have already had a more fashionable introduction into the
mysteries of the arts of painting, and sculpture” (AB, 17–18). However
politically motivated it may have been, his rejection of deism puts
him in the empiricist camp—an alignment that matters in regard to
the way that moral sense philosophy develops its central interpretive
problem out of its rejection of skepticism.
If, as evolutionary psychologists and deist philosophers variously
propose, it is naïve to deny any foundation for knowledge in either
nature or providence, then such foundational principles must have
considerable explanatory reach, extending to phenomena that might
appear superfluous or even detrimental to the presupposed order of
things. The threat of superfluity is what introduces aesthetics into
this epistemological dilemma. The problem posed by beauty for both
Enlightenment philosophers and their Darwinist descendants involves

854 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

its apparent purposelessness—even its counterproductivity—in what
is taken to be a rationally ordered universe. Of course, whether the
source of such order is an infinitely wise deity or a blind and amoral
principle—natural selection—remains the cardinal point of divergence
between the two. Nevertheless, beauty becomes an important test case,
by way of analogy, for the moral philosophical problem of benevolence
conceived along similar lines.
Benevolence was the central problem for eighteenth-century moral
philosophy, just as beauty—in the form of conspicuous display, which
might expose an organism to increased risk of predation—remains
vexing for evolutionary theory. Without some kind of inner moral
compass, empiricism can provide no reason why one would ever
perform an action that doesn’t confer a calculable advantage over
others. Shaftesbury grounds his argument in the observation that no
one finds self-interest admirable as a motive for action in the way that
we do virtue; therefore, benevolent actions motivated by self-interest
cannot be counted as virtuous. Instead, we must have an innate admira-
tion of virtue—a taste for goodness—if we are to be capable of acting
against our own interests, for the good of others, as we demonstrably
are. Benevolence matters for evolutionary psychology in the similar
sense that it seems to defy a simple cost-benefit explanation of animal
behavior; benevolent actions seem to incur an inexplicable cost to the
actor who performs them. Like their evolutionary-behaviorist succes-
sors, moral sense philosophers ask, “What’s the rational justification for
altruism—that is, disinterested action for the benefit of others—when
it runs contrary to an individual’s interests?” Or more broadly, “What’s
the rational justification for any aspect of an organism’s appearance or
behavior, any expenditure of resources, that threatens that individual’s
immediate prospects for survival or flourishing?”22
It was Shaftesbury who first described the problem of benevolence
in relation to species. In An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit,
first published in 1699, Shaftesbury seeks to reconcile the apparently
competing demands of the good of the individual and “the interest
of a species or common nature.” Naming as instances of the latter
“natural affection, parental kindness, zeal for posterity, concern for the
propagation and nurture of the young, love of fellowship and company,
compassion, [and] mutual succour,” Shaftesbury observes the risks
that individuals incur to themselves in the name of the perpetuation
of their species:

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 There being allowed therefore in a creature such affections as these
towards the common nature or system of the kind, together with those
other which regard the private nature or self-system, it will appear that
in following the first of these affections, the creature must on many
occasions contradict and go against the latter. How else should the
species be preserved?23

In the second half of the treatise, he undertakes to prove that it is in

one’s personal interest to act virtuously, appearances to the contrary
notwithstanding, because conscience—moral self-reflection—repays
vice with the misery of guilt.24 The role of beauty in Shaftesbury’s
writings roughly corresponds to that of moral action (that which
conscience evaluates, just as taste evaluates beauty); in aesthetics as
in ethics, our perceptive and emotive faculties anticipate the work of
reason, which can in turn explain away any apparent affronts to taste
or justice with reference to a grander and less immediately apparent
design for the good.25
The terms of the analogy between beauty and benevolence were less
explicit, though, in an influential and roughly contemporary articula-
tion of the thesis that beauty’s purpose was successful mating. In his
1712 series of Spectator papers grouped under the informal title “The
Pleasures of the Imagination,” Joseph Addison anticipated Darwinian
thought by treating reproductive success as an organizing principle
in his discussion of the apparently gratuitous features that compose
animal (including human) beauty. Lacking the central adaptationist
concept of sexual selection, Addison nevertheless credits animal beauty
with a sorting function, placing at the boundary between species a
phenomenon evolutionary theory would reallocate as a feature of
intraspecies mating competition: “Thus we see that every different
Species of sensible Creatures has its different Notions of Beauty, and
that each of them is most affected with the Beauties of its own kind.
This is no where more remarkable than in Birds of the same Shape and
Proportion, where we often see the Male determined in his Courtship
by the single Grain or Tincture of a Feather, and never discovering
any charms but in the colour of its species.”26 Rather than noting how
the “Tincture of a Feather” might elevate the mating prospects of one
particular bird—in canonical evolutionary theory, it is the decorated
male who is the object rather than the subject of choice—over another
individual of the same species, Addison instead imagines an animal
kingdom in which beauty, seemingly in excess of the basic require-
ments of sustenance, and irrationally so, distinguishes one species
from another, allowing each to recognize its own kind in a quick and

856 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

determinate cognitive operation. Hence, discussing the final cause of
the pleasure taken in beauty, which is to say, its ultimate purpose and
justification, Addison settles on species disambiguation as a mark of a
divinely ordained natural order. “The Supreme Author of our Being”

has made every thing that is beautiful in our own Species pleasant,
that all Creatures might be tempted to multiply their Kind, and fill the
World, with Inhabitants; for ’tis very remarkable that wherever Nature
is crost in the Production of a Monster (the Result of any unnatural
Mixture) the Breed is incapable of propagating its Likeness, and of
founding a new Order of Creatures; so that unless all Animals were
allured by the Beauty of their own Species, Generation would be at
an end, and the Earth unpeopled.27

Beauty has divine sanction, which is also to say, intelligible purpose

and rational justification—even if, ultimately, it can only be justified
with reference to “sensible Creatures” whose perception of beauty is
limited by having been fashioned in their own image.
This restriction of beauty to the mere recognition of likeness begins
to show the limitations of Addison’s theory. Further comparison with
evolutionary psychology brings the methodological source of the
problem into view. Turning back to research on waist-to-hip ratio, it
bears noting that Singh frames his inquiry as an endeavor to provide
an adaptive explanation not for beauty but, rather, for mate selection.
Mate selection involves not beauty per se but sexual attractiveness,
which has a considerably narrower scope; if beauty is at stake at all,
it is a very particular category, the beauty of one’s own kind.28 This is
precisely the category restriction that Addison performs, except that
he does not seem to mind the implied alteration to the object of his
inquiry: beauty writ large. So rhetorically gratifying is the identifica-
tion of beauty’s ultimate purpose with the maintenance of an orderly
zoosphere that Addison rather lamely accounts for “every thing that is
beautiful in all other Objects” as the considerate gesture of a supreme
being “to add Supernumerary Ornaments to the Universe and make
it more agreeable to the Imagination.”29
In granting pride of place to the kind of beauty (sexual attractive-
ness) that yields a satisfying account of beauty’s purpose, Addison’s
teleological reasoning tips over into tautology. For any sufficiently
complicated adaptationist theory, by contrast, the consideration of
sexual attractiveness (rather than beauty full stop) follows from a
central focus on reproductive efficiency.30 Adaptationist theories of
beauty depart from their moral-sense forebears in that their determinist

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tendencies derive from, rather than close off, their working hypotheses.
Whereas for Addison and his contemporaries, a species-sorting function
is invoked to endow beauty with significance, for evolutionary theory,
beauty is significant just to the extent that it correlates with “reproduc-
tive potential.” In other words, Addison’s end-directed logic requires
that the question “What is beauty?” give way to the question “What
is beauty for?”; a Darwinian approach starts with the latter question,
and its answer (reproduction) defines the scope of the former.
In this way, evolutionary theories of animal behavior can claim an
approach to solving a problem about which the moral sense theorists
remain agnostic. Namely, what’s the rationale behind the particular
qualities identified as beautiful within a given system of preferences?
Why, for instance, are smoothness and symmetry commonly identified
as aesthetically pleasing rather than their opposites? Or why, in the
evolutionary case, does there seem to exist a human male preference for
large hips and a small waist in female mating partners rather than the
reverse? Addison is explicit about the futility of such questions, noting,
in a skeptical Lockean vein, that “there is not perhaps any real Beauty
or Deformity more in one piece of Matter than another, because we
might have been so made, that whatsoever now appears loathsom to us,
might have shewn it self agreeable.”31 But whereas Addison pronounces
it impossible “to trace out the several necessary and efficient Causes
from whence the Pleasure or Displeasure arises,” he declares that
“Final Causes lye more bare and open to our Observation, as there
are often a great Variety that belong to the same Effect.”32 That is,
Addison considers himself equipped to inquire into the rationale for
beauty’s very existence, just not its content. Evolutionary psychology,
by contrast, asking always whether and how a feature aids or hinders
species survival, sees in beauty’s particular features an index to repro-
ductive fitness; we like a small waist-to-hip ratio, the theory goes,
because women so proportioned are healthier, younger, and less likely
to be pregnant than their apple-shaped counterparts.
A theory uniting Addison’s observations on beauty with a moral
sense vindication of benevolence based on Shaftesbury’s turn-of-the-
century writings did not appear until 1725, with Francis Hutcheson’s An
Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. Because
Hutcheson’s aim was to establish an analogy between the two ideas
cited in his title, benevolence provides the coordinates for his discus-
sion of beauty, much as fitness organizes the study of beauty in evolu-
tionary psychology. Following Addison’s teleology, Hutcheson brackets
the question of beauty’s particular features, but precisely because he

858 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

orients his Inquiry toward the question of virtue, his concentration
on beauty’s final cause better suits his argument. In any case, species
again provides the illustrative framework for his point:

There does not appear to be any necessary Connection, antecedent

to the Constitution of the Author of Nature, between regular Forms,
Actions, Theories, and that sudden sensible Pleasure excited in us upon
observation of them. . . . And possibly, the Deity could have form’d
us so as to have receiv’d no Pleasure from such Objects, or connected
Pleasure to those of a quite contrary nature. We have a tolerable
Presumption of this in the Beauty of various Animals; they give some
small Pleasure indeed to every one who views them, but then every
one seems vastly more delighted with the peculiar Beautys of its own
Species, than with those of a different one, which seldom raise any
desire but among Animals of the same Species with the one admir’d.33

The polymorphism of the animal kingdom, combined with our sexual

attraction only to animals of our own species, persuades Hutcheson
that while beauty might have an ordained purpose in a well-designed
universe, the particular forms it takes remain arbitrary and unpredict-
able. Hewing closely to Addison, Hutcheson concludes that, where
animal beauty is concerned, “the Pleasure is not the necessary result
of the Form it self, otherwise it would equally affect all Apprehensions
in what Species soever.”34
Hogarth has no truck with formal agnosticism of the sort that
Hutcheson espouses. The line of beauty is premised on the idea that
beauty is always “the necessary result of the Form it self,” and the
example of the stays serves Hogarth’s argument as a proto-adaptationist
just-so story rationalizing the formal stipulation of beauty. Unlike
in actual adaptationist arguments or their moral sense forerunners,
however, the formal stipulation Hogarth describes overrides the
imperatives of sex or species. And it is not, as in Addison’s account,
supplementary or ornamental to the plan of a benevolent deity. Hogarth
offers instead a unified theory of form whose principles carry over

to any other objects that may chance to come in our way, either animate
or inanimate; so that we may not only lineally account for the ugliness
of the toad, the hog, the bear, and the spider, which are totally void of
this waving-line, but also for the different degrees of beauty belonging
to those objects that possess it. (AB, 49)

Hogarth expressly denies a species-specific account of beauty-as-recog-

nition—to each (kind) his own—with his unequivocal pronouncement

Abigail Zitin 859

on “the ugliness of the toad, the hog, the bear, and the spider.” Or,
on second thought, one might say that Hogarth’s account of beauty is
entirely species-specific in that he attempts not to locate beauty in the
system of all creation, but merely to define it from the perspective of
the human. His account of beauty is anthropomorphic because he has
the caution to limit his claims to the human perceiver. Either way, this
passage and the short chapter it concludes show Hogarth challenging
the authority of the moral sense philosophers over both the methods
and the outcomes of aesthetic inquiry.35
As an instance of his audacity, it did not go unnoticed. In A Dialogue
on Taste (1755), Allan Ramsay offers a rejoinder to Hogarth’s judg-
ment on toads:

Hogarth owns that his line of beauty and grace is not to be seen in a
toad; which if true, ought to have convinced him, either that there is
no such line, or universal receipt for beauty; or else that he had not
yet hit upon it: since it hardly admits of a doubt, that a blooming she
toad is the most beautiful sight in the creation, to all the crawling
young gentlemen of her acquaintance.36

However facetious in tone, Ramsay’s paean to the “blooming she toad”

rehearses the arguments of the deists that aesthetics is simultaneously
a provision and the manifestation of a divine plan—that beauty and its
perception varies in orderly accordance with the hierarchy of species.
He offers this in service to the broader argument summarized in “the
maxim, that there is no disputing of tastes,” a common retrenchment
in the face of an ongoing debate about the objective validity of judg-
ments of beauty.37
Ramsay’s implicit endorsement of the moral sense account of beauty’s
ends helps to measure the distance between the apparent determinism
of Hogarth’s line (as attested by its miraculous apparition in ladies’
undergarments) and his reticence on the question of beauty’s final
cause. The distinction matters because it indicates the philosophical
nature of Hogarth’s disagreement with moral sense aesthetics. The
Analysis challenges the premise of those claims, asserting not just that
Shaftesbury and his followers produce mistaken accounts of beauty,
but that they do so because they’re asking the wrong questions about
it. Put another way, Hogarth rejects teleology (what is beauty for?) as
an obstacle to the elaboration of aesthetic knowledge (what is beauty
like?). I began with Singh’s WHR hypothesis because it looks in some
ways like an extension of the sexual logic of The Analysis of Beauty.
However, evolutionary psychology actually has a weaker analogue in

860 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

Hogarth’s theory of beauty than it does in the Shaftesburian tradition
of aesthetics that Hogarth chafes against.
When Paulson, for his part, reads Hogarth’s disagreement with
Shaftesbury’s version of moral sense aesthetics primarily in terms of its
politics (the skeptical populist vs. the aristocratic idealist), he misses the
fully philosophical scope of Hogarth’s digression from the developing
consensus of his age. The intervening figure in Paulson’s account is
Bernard Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1724) punctured the
doctrine of disinterest promulgated in the moral sense tradition:
“Whereas for Shaftesbury the coincidence of public and private good
was due to an enlightened benevolence on the part of a Whig aristoc-
racy, to Mandeville it was the result of private self-seeking—and this is
the subtext of desire Hogarth reveals beneath the two illustrative plates
of the Analysis.”38 What sort of desire? Hogarth’s “central example is
the woman who is sexually desired by men.”39 Paulson is content to end
his analysis with Hogarth replacing Shaftesbury’s moral compass (how
do I know what is good? because I feel it to be so, because goodness
is pleasing to me) with something more like a thermometer, taking
the temperature of his own desire in order to define what is beautiful
(implicitly: for him). But this approach highlights Hogarth’s irrever-
ence at the expense of his formalism—the very thing that makes the
Analysis so radical a departure, and so coherent a theory.
The first six chapters of the Analysis introduce Hogarth’s six “funda-
mental principles” of pleasing forms: “The principles I mean, are
fitness, variety, uniformity, simplicity, intricacy, and quantity; —— all
which co-operate in the production of beauty, mutually correcting and
restraining each other occasionally” (AB, 23). Hogarth’s invocation of
mutual restraint here indicates the interdependence of the principles.
Operating as a system of more or less oppositional forces rather than
as a classical hierarchy, no one principle takes precedence over the
others in determining the beauty of a form. However, the six do not
simply break down into three sets of binary opposites; quantity and
fitness stand out as unmatched, though fitness appears at times in an
implied opposition to variety. The mobility of the terms testifies to the
modular, polyvalent quality of Hogarth’s theory. In introducing each
of the principles, Hogarth comments briefly on the need it satisfies
in the human psyche. Among these, the somewhat more protracted
opening to the intricacy chapter is most often cited as characteristic
of The Analysis of Beauty as a whole, not least because it prepares
the ground for the line of beauty.

Abigail Zitin 861

 Hogarth needs to specify the mental pleasure that corresponds to
the visual excitement he describes as a “sort of enjoyment in winding
walks, and serpentine rivers, and all sorts of objects, whose forms, as
we shall see hereafter, are composed principally of what, I call, the
waving and serpentine lines” (AB, 33). He chooses to build his analogy
around the notion of pursuit.

The active mind is ever bent to be employ’d. Pursuing is the business

of our lives; and even abstracted from any other view, gives pleasure.
Every arising difficulty, that for a while attends and interrupts the
pursuit, gives a sort of spring to the mind, enhances the pleasure, and
makes what would else be toil and labour, become sport and recreation.
Wherein would consist the joys of hunting, shooting, fishing,
and many other favourite diversions, without the frequent turns and
difficulties, and disappointments, that are daily met with in the pursuit?
—— how joyless does the sportsman return when the hare has not had
fair play? how lively, and in spirits, even when an old cunning one has
baffled, and out-run the dogs!
This love of pursuit, merely as pursuit, is implanted in our natures,
and design’d, no doubt, for necessary, and useful purposes. (AB, 32)

Hogarth is primarily concerned in this passage to establish pursuit

as an end in itself. Note the classic opposition between business and
pleasure in the second sentence, where “pursuing” exhausts the first
category—it “is the business of our lives”—without exhausting its own
potential: “even abstracted from any other view” (and presumably “the
business of our lives” has a determinate, non-abstract goal), pursuit
yields its own pleasure. Note, too, how Hogarth in that sentence
exploits the open-endedness of the present participle, choosing it over
the fully nominal and finite “pursuit.” Ordinarily, one might expect the
fruits of “toil and labour” to stand apart from the mind’s employment,
thereby redeeming its busyness; instead, the terms are reversed, and it
is the “abstracted” activity of “pursuing” that transcends and ultimately
sweetens the end-directed daily grind. The conventional example of the
sportsman lends cultural authority to Hogarth’s aesthetic psychology,
which is further naturalized in the recapitulation of the claim that
pursuit can be abstracted: we have a “love of pursuit, merely as pursuit.”
Paulson traces Hogarth’s discussion of pursuit forward to yet another
axiomatic moment in the Analysis, observing that “in the chapter ‘On
Intricacy,’ Hogarth’s argument moves ineluctably from serpentine
lines to ‘pursuit,’ to ‘love of pursuit,’ and to ‘wanton’ pursuit,” further
specifying that “Hogarth’s pursuit is primarily of desire.”40 Paulson is
referring to Hogarth’s definition of intricacy as “that peculiarity in the

862 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

lines, which compose it, that leads the eye a wanton kind of chace,
and from the pleasure that gives the mind, intitles it to the name of
beautiful” (AB, 33). Paulson is well aware that Hogarth, when he
invokes erotic excitation to specify what aesthetic pleasure feels like,
understands desire as an end in itself: “[I]nterestedness and physical
desire, however, stop short of gratification: they do not spill over into
the sexual act, precisely because the ‘pleasure’ is in the pursuit and not
the fulfillment.”41 He concludes on this basis that Hogarth “explodes
the myth of Shaftesburian (and Hutchesonian) disinterestedness by
advocating interestedness (the pursuit of a woman or fox); but only
in order to distinguish between interestedness and action, knowledge
and possession.”42 According to Paulson, Hogarth’s endorsement of
interestedness, of pursuit without possession, stands opposed to the
ideological mystification of aristocratic prerogative by means of the
rhetoric of disinterestedness.43
But the result—a disempowered desire, cordoned off from action—
leaves us with a strangely emaciated version of Hogarth’s aesthetics.
Emaciated, not emasculated: Paulson is invested in nothing if not the
masculine heterosexual orientation of desire as it surfaces in Hogarth’s
Analysis.44 For this reason, his recognition of the limit Hogarth imposes
on the analogy between aesthetic pleasure and sexual enjoyment seems
in the end to unsettle the Shaftesbury–Hogarth rivalry so central to
his account. If action is the boundary beyond which pleasure ceases to
be aesthetic (because the transitivity of action implies possession, or,
on the analogy with hunting, because this kind of pleasure culminates
in the death of the desired object), then Paulson’s account, curiously,
enlists Hogarth’s celebrated hedonism for what looks more like an
ascetic account of beauty: a renunciation.45 Paulson reads the “love of
pursuit, merely as pursuit” as erotic desire deferred and dilated into a
new kind of pleasure, but of course deferral is always the deferral of
some end: here, sexual gratification figured as appropriation. What’s odd
about Paulson’s figural logic is that the idea he celebrates as a populist
overhaul of civic humanist aesthetics—anti-possessive pursuit—risks
reinstating the dispossession it’s meant to denounce.
By contrast, an account that emphasizes the analogy (rather than
the identity) between the erotic and the aesthetic—which is to say,
their fundamental difference—can also disarticulate the formal from
the sexual (that is, masculine) determination of aesthetic pleasure in
the Analysis, not to mention its sexual politics from its class politics.
Undifferentiated, these overlapping determinisms are responsible for
the treatise’s apparent but, I am arguing, illusory convergence with

Abigail Zitin 863

evolutionary psychology. My argument points toward a further claim
whose substance I can only begin to indicate here, the claim that
what enables the differentiation of aesthetic from erotic pleasure is a
realignment of action: from Paulson’s notion of “the sexual act” as the
object’s appropriation and therefore extinction, to a less finite concep-
tion of aesthetic activity as, nevertheless, the end—that is, the telos—of
Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty. My emendation of Paulson’s critique
actually takes up another of his central tenets, the reconceptualiza-
tion of eighteenth-century aesthetics “as a poetics of practice.”46 This
reconceptualization confronts the essentially Shaftesburian assump-
tion of the spectator’s as the only point of view that matters with the
mandate to reanimate and inhabit the practitioner’s perspective, the
artist’s understanding of his or her activity as it seeks to represent
beautiful objects or to bring them into being. As I have argued else-
where, Hogarth bases his theory of aesthetic judgment on a theory
of artistic practice rather than the more typical inverse procedure,
in which an artist uses the imagined pleasure of a hypothetical spec-
tator as a guideline to shape her practice. He expects the spectator to
think like an artist not only so that the spectator might appreciate the
artist’s labor in meeting the technical demands of a medium, but more
importantly because he believes that beauty is an attribute of form
and that making is a more searching and subtle way of apprehending
form than mere looking.47 The practitioner’s perspective, attained to
through actual or merely virtual means, involves a nonappropriative
relation to the world outside the subject, a relation that doesn’t have
to rule out gratification because its gratification doesn’t consume the
object but, rather, generates (or regenerates) it. In other words, the
object-relation implied in Hogarth’s Analysis is one of being rather
than having, in which the materialization of the object’s form, however
imperfect or incomplete or hypothetical, suspends possessive subjec-
tivity in the activity of aesthetic practice.
I have drawn on the WHR hypothesis and its theoretical under-
pinnings in order to flesh out a contrast between Hogarth and his
contemporaries, a contrast that should prompt a reappraisal of the
deterministic orientation of his theory of form. The secular teleology
employed in adaptationist studies of human behavior—what I have
referred to as the methodological fatalism of evolutionary theory—has a
distant analogue in the deist teleology of the moral sense philosophers
who are said to have initiated the study of aesthetics.48 Both hold that
beauty exists for a purpose—in the case of evolutionary psychology,
to index and so maximize reproductive potential; for moral sense
philosophy, to manifest and so perpetuate what would now be called
864 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin
intelligent design. Although Hogarth appears to pursue the same logic,
even anticipating the adaptive account of female sexual attractiveness
that psychologists like Singh would formulate more than two centuries
later, he is not, in fact, making a claim about the purpose of beauty.
Rather, he is describing a method for discerning beauty in which
aesthetic pleasure inheres in the pursuit of form.
Rutgers University
notes
1 
Blakey Vermeule, “Wit and Poetry and Pope, or The Handicap Principle,” Critical
Inquiry 38 (2012): 427.
2 
See Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011):
315–47.
3 
See Eric M. Gander, On Our Minds: How Evolutionary Psychology Is Reshaping
the Nature-versus-Nurture Debate (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003), 133.
Glossing Richard Dawkins, Gander explains how although “we may not be able fully
to understand [the works of nature] unless we approach them as if they were designed
for some purpose, the truth is that the ‘blind mechanism of nature’ that Kant refers to
is enough to explain the existence of literally everything in the universe, including life
itself” (99). The theory of evolution positively redefines Kant’s “blind mechanism” as
“the process of natural selection” (99). Arguing against Dawkins’s “Darwinian funda-
mentalism” (102), Stephen Jay Gould exposes the double bind lurking in evolutionary
theory’s predominant explanatory model. Because the process of natural selection is
too slow to be observed in action,
we must therefore study natural selection primarily from its results—that
is, by concentrating on the putative adaptations of organisms. If we can
interpret all relevant attributes of organisms as adaptations for reproductive
success, then we may infer that natural selection has been the cause of
evolutionary change. This strategy of research—the so-called adaptationist
program—is the heart of Darwinian biology and the fervent, singular credo
of the ultra[-Darwinist]s. (Stephen Jay Gould, “More Things in Heaven and
Earth,” in Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology,
ed. Hilary Rose and Steven Rose [New York: Harmony Books, 2000]: 105)
Barbara Herrnstein Smith takes a similarly dim view of “reverse engineering” (133)
as the central interpretive mechanism of evolutionary psychology more specifically, a
procedure she describes thus: “we can explain how [the mind] works only by—and
in—identifying the purpose for which it was ‘designed’ and then, on the basis of other
assumptions, deducing how it must have been engineered to achieve that purpose”
(Scandalous Knowledge: Science, Truth and the Human [Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ.
Press, 2005], 134). She objects “to the unremittingly purposive, rational idiom of evolu-
tionary psychology: ‘genes for,’ ‘designed for,’ natural selection as the ever-ingenious
‘engineer’ of fitness optimizing ‘devices’ and so forth. What is obscured here is the
significance in both classic and contemporary Darwinian theory of historical contingency.
. . . The problem is not the technically imprecise language but the crucial explanatory
oversimplification” (138–39).
4 
Devendra Singh, “Adaptive Significance of Female Physical Attractiveness: Role
of Waist-to-Hip Ratio,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 293.

Abigail Zitin 865

 5 
David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, 2nd ed.
(New York: Basic Books, 2003), 56–57.
6 
Singh, “Adaptive Significance of Female Physical Attractiveness,” 294.
7 
Gander, 178.
8 
Singh, “Adaptive Significance of Female Physical Attractiveness,” 296.
9 
Singh, “Adaptive Significance of Female Physical Attractiveness,” 297.
10 
Singh, “Adaptive Significance of Female Physical Attractiveness,” 298. See also
Singh and Suwardi Luis, “Ethnic and Gender Consensus for the Effect of Waist-to-hip
Ratio on Judgements of Women’s Attractiveness,” Human Nature 6 (1995): 51–65 and
Adrian Furnham, Tina Tan, and Chris McManus, “Waist-to-hip Ratio and Preferences
for Body Shape: A Replication and Extension,” Personality and Individual Differences
22 (1997): 539–49. For a study calling into question the universal validity of Singh’s data,
see Douglas W. Yu and Glenn H. Shepard Jr., “Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?”
Nature 396 (26 November 1998): 321–22.
11 
William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (1753; New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1997), 49. Hereafter abbreviated AB and cited parenthetically by
page number.
12 
Michael Podro further specifies the nature of Hogarth’s principle: the serpentine
line “is sometimes treated by commentators as if it were an eccentric doctrine or
personal signature like Whistler’s butterfly or as it were itself an explanation of the
beauty of form. It is neither. It is a paradigmatic example, the effect of which he sets
out to explain and analyse rather than leave as a mystery” (Depiction [New Haven:
Yale Univ. Press, 1998], 116). In the introduction to his 1997 edition of The Analysis
of Beauty, Paulson notes that the contemporary reaction to the book was, similarly, to
“emphasize, to the exclusion of much else, Hogarth’s fixation on the Line of Beauty”
(Paulson, introduction to AB, xlvi).
13 
Perhaps Hogarth avoids the word ratio because he opposes attempts to generate
beautiful forms from abstract coordinates: “whatever may have been pretended by
some authors, no exact mathematical measurements by lines, can be given for the true
proportion of the human body. . . . As all mathematical schemes are foreign to this
purpose, we will endeavour to root them quite out of our way” (AB, 65). The line of
beauty, as Podro suggests, is best understood as a thought experiment, not as a template.
14 
Such gendering of Hogarth’s formal stipulations recurs at the end of the chapter
that follows:
There is an elegant degree of plumpness peculiar to the skin of the softer
sex, that occasions these delicate dimplings in all their other joints, as well
as these of the fingers; which so perfectly distinguishes them from those
even of a graceful man; and which, assisted by the more soften’d shapes of
the muscles underneath, presents to the eye all the varieties in the whole
figure of the body, with gentler and fewer parts more sweetly connected
together, and with such a fine simplicity as will always give the turn of the
female frame, represented in the Venus, . . . the preference to that of the
Apollo. (AB, 58–59)
15 
Gander, 135.
16 
In John Cartwright’s introductory comment in a textbook chapter entitled “Human
Mate Choice: The Evolutionary Logic of Sexual Desire,” he writes: “To a Darwinian,
the way to proceed on this question is clear enough: our perceptual apparatus will be
designed to respond positively to features that are honest indicators of fitness—for
aesthetics read reproductive potential” (Evolution and Human Behaviour: Darwinian

866 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

Perspectives on Human Nature, 2nd ed. [Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008], 247–8). The
question to which Cartwright refers is “Where does this aesthetic sense come from?”
(247).
17 
Hogarth himself frames his commentary on the stays as a supplementary observa-
tion; recall the phrasing: “it may be worth our notice however. . . . does not this our
determination enhance the merit of these principles?” (AB, 49).
18 
Paulson, introduction to AB, xx.
19 
See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New
York: Viking, 2002).
20 
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals
a Universe without Design (New York: Norton, 1996), 5; quoted in Gander, 99. Gould
notes the paradox in evolutionary theory’s recourse to a virtual or hypothetical argument
from design (the as if in Gander’s gloss), characterizing his opponents’ commitment
to “strict adaptationism—the dream of an underpinning simplicity for an enormously
complex and various world” (108) as, precisely, “theological” (103). By contrast, Gould
reaffirms the “directionless, non-teleological, and materialistic” (106) qualities of natural
selection even as he argues that its explanatory power within evolutionary theory may
be overstated: “the invigoration of modern evolutionary biology with exciting nonse-
lectionist and nonadaptationist data from the three central disciplines of population
genetics, developmental biology and palaeontology . . . makes our premillennial decade
an especially unpropitious time for Darwinian fundamentalism—and seems only to
reconfirm Darwin’s own eminently sensible pluralism” (103).
21 
Paulson, introduction to AB, xii. For additional views of Hogarth as an empiricist in
the tradition of Locke, see Frédéric Ogée, “Aesthetics and Empiricism: The Ideological
Context of Hogarth’s Series of Pictures” and Michel Baridon, “Hogarth the Empiricist,”
in The Dumb Show: Image and Society in the Works of William Hogarth, ed. Ogée
(Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997), 177–89 and 191–202.
22 
Some aspects of evolutionary psychology evince—or explicitly claim—a lineage
from the moral sense philosophers of eighteenth-century Britain. The title of Robert
Wright’s The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York:
Pantheon, 1994) provides one indication of this. See also Robert H. Frank, Passions
Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988).
23 
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue
or Merit in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein
(1711; Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 192.
24 
See Shaftesbury, 208–11.
25 
For a rich account of Shaftesbury’s role in the rise of aesthetics conceived in terms
of the analogy between beauty and benevolence, see Peter Kivy, The Seventh Sense:
Francis Hutcheson and Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2003), 11–23.
26 
Joseph Addison, Spectator 412 (23 June 1712), in Addison and Richard Steele,
The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:542–43.
27 
Addison, Spectator 413 (24 June 1712), 3:545–46.
28 
Theories that define beauty in terms of eros conceive of this restriction in diametri-
cally opposite terms, as an expansion or extrapolation—from sexual attraction to beauty.
We find things beautiful, the argument would go, because they evoke the things we
find sexually attractive; we derive our general (that is, nonsexual) idea of beauty from
a more specialized erotic drive. Elaine Scarry voices one version of this argument
when she describes beauty as giving rise to “the act of replication”: “Beauty brings

Abigail Zitin 867

copies of itself into being.” Invoking Plato and moving rapidly from art (“It makes us
draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people”) to sex (“the generation
is unceasing. Beauty . . . prompts the begetting of children”), Scarry illuminates an
important but uncredited source for Addison’s account (On Beauty and Being Just
[Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1999], 1–2).
29 
Addison, Spectator 413, 3:546.
30 
Even so, the popularization of many of the tenets of evolutionary psychology
often peddles a facile determinism that enshrines certain canons of proportionality
as unerring laws even on the most minute and scientifically unverifiable scale, that
of individual human behavior—so large eyes and a small nose, or alternatively large
hips and a small waist, add up to female fertility, ergo sexual desirability, ergo beauty.
31 
Addison, Spectator 412, 3:542.
32 
Addison, Spectator 413, 3:544–45.
33 
Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,
ed. Wolfgang Leidhold (1725; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 80.
34 
Hutcheson, 80.
35 
He issues this challenge more directly in the preface, calling out those writers on
beauty who “have been bewilder’d in their accounts of it, and obliged so suddenly
to turn into the broad, and more beaten path of moral beauty, in order to extricate
themselves out of the difficulties they seem to have met with” (AB, 1).
36 
Allan Ramsay, A Dialogue on Taste, 2nd ed., The Investigator (London, 1762; repr.
New York: Garland, 1971), 29.
37 
Ramsay, 11.
38 
Paulson, Hogarth, Vol. 3: Art and Politics, 1750–1764 (New Brunswick: Rutgers
Univ. Press, 1993), 75–76.
39 
Paulson, Art and Politics, 75
40 
Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1996), 33.
41 
Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, 44.
42 
Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, 45.
43 
See also John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt:
“The Body of the Public” (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1986).
44 
For instance, Paulson structures his interpretation of the central image of Plate
1 in terms of two paired figures that, according to him, associate beauty with hetero-
sexual desire and beauty’s corruption with homoeroticism. The Venus de Medici and
the Apollo Belvedere are situated so that they can be imagined to gaze at each other
longingly from across the sculpture yard, while the Antinous is ogled and fondled
by the punctilious dancing master who values correctness, foolishly, over grace. See
Paulson, Art and Politics, 105–6.
45 
Paulson writes, for instance: “When the pursuit passes beyond seduction or capture
to possessing or killing, it is no longer within the range of the Beautiful” (The Beautiful,
Novel, and Strange, 44).
46 
Paulson, The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, xix. See also Paulson, Breaking and
Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700–1820 (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ.
Press, 1989).
47 
See Abigail Zitin, “Thinking Like an Artist: Hogarth, Diderot, and the Aesthetics
of Technique,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46 (2013): 555–70.
48 
On the contributions of early moral sense theorists to the development of aesthetics,
see Kivy, The Seventh Sense and Paul Guyer, A History of Modern Aesthetics, 3 vol.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 1:30–34.

868 Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin