The selection of beauty seems to be built-in feature, not created by social interaction. It seems to reason that it is therefore objective. We add to this the gestalt laws of psychology as they pertain to perception -- which all design and art students learn, and guide designers of every kind every day in their profession, and it seems again that beauty is objective at its root. This draws me to the next question, does this imply that beauty is of divine origin?
Article Preference for attractive faces in human infants extends bey...
Gestalt heuristics do not qualify as laws as they are not predictive enough of behaviour. That said, just because there is a neurological component to the perception of beauty does not imply that social influence is not important. Non of this indicates a divine origin to beauty.
As one who has 8 years of post-secondary training in numerous visual media and well over a decade of professional experience in them, I have *not* found that – if Gestalt Principles are heuristics – that, according to psychology.about.com, they "lead to problems and errors". These principles are taught in every school of art and design around the globe, and used in every form of visual media – painting, graphic design, architecture, videography, cinematography,.... The Gestalt Principles of Perception have not failed to direct the designer to better visual communication. The arts are a form of communication, and cannot be approached as paint-by-numbers. Perhaps this notion is misapplied or the definition of a law is too restrictive. What criteria must something meet to be considered a "law"?
If we define 'beauty' as harmony - as the first Fathers of the Church did - there is objectivity in beauty. This is what an infant recognises.
With respect to facial beauty, maybe we can define it as the craniofacial ratios (including also eye- and face-width (at key points) to face height) that characterise the faces which, by consensus, are rated most attractive. Doing this, there is a strong bias toward childlike proportions for faces of children, girls, and women. Behind the experience of such proportions as beautiful may lie the heritage of some 200 million years of mammalian evolution selecting for approachability (see Farm Fox Experiment), as no infant mammal survives if it and its lactating carer can't approach each other. Due to a genetic-hormonal-developmental cascade that occurs when approachability (also called 'friendly') is selected for (whether naturally or intentionally), skeletal and craniofacial proportions move towards the 'child'. Such 'neoteny' of behavior linked to neoteny of structure typifies many species that can cooperate and whose faces and coloring/marking we experience as beautiful. The strong experience of attraction to and tenderness for beauty (especially of face) may have been guiding mammals toward the cooperative effort of 'caring--cared for' that is a necessity in the nursing period and a bonus in the time after weaning.
So, it seems that all date lead to the same [positive] conclusion.
There is a new kind of beauty that exists in fine structure, and is objective in nature. This is the beauty that was defined and discovered by Christopher Alexander in his master work The Nature of Order.
Alexander C. (2002-2005), The Nature of Order: An essay on the art of building and the nature of the universe, Center for Environmental Structure: Berkeley, CA.
Jiang B. and Sui D. (2014), A new kind of beauty out of the underlying scaling of geographic space, The Professional Geographer, 66(4), 676–686, Preprint: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1303/1303.7303.pdf
Jiang B. (2015), Wholeness as a hierarchical graph to capture the nature of space, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, xx(x), xx-xx, Preprint: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1502/1502.03554.pdf
There is certainly evidence that even newborn infants show a looking preference for faces (male or female) rated as more attractive by adults. However, it is also the case that if we morph together a selection of faces, the resulting 'average' is judged by adults as more attractive than any of the individual faces. This average may be considered a prototype - a better exemplar of a typical face. One prominent account of newborn face processing is that there is a perceptual system that directs attention to face-like stimuli, and the more face-like the stimulus the more it will attract the attention of this system. Thus if we put all this together, it is likely that newborns look more at attractive faces because they approximate more to the prototype and thus maximise attention by the face system.
A simpler account that some favour is that attractive faces are more symmetrical, and thus infants may look preferentially at symmetrical patterns.
Whether any of this indicates anything about beauty I don't know. Maybe beauty has its origins in prototypically? A bit dull maybe?
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