{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.024930747922437674, 'fraction_numerical': 0.002770083102493075, 'mean_word_length': 5.572727272727272, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Fittest and Fairest: Aesthetics and Adaptation Before Darwin

Explaining the phenomenon of the beautiful with reference to adaptive criteria has a history that extends back farther than Darwin’s theory of evolution. This essay compares eighteenth-century moral sense philosophy with the hypotheses about human nature that guide evolutionary psychology at the turn of the 21st century, concluding that adaptive questions about beauty yield instrumental answers--answers that artificially limit the scope of aesthetic inquiry. By contrast, William Hogarth, a skeptic about adaptive aesthetics, offers an alternative set of questions (and answers) about our experience of the beautiful: not what it’s for, but what it’s like.