On the Origins of Beauty: Aesthetics and Method in the Works of Charles Darwin

This essay is an interdisciplinary attempt to reformulate the question of aesthetics in the work of Charles Darwin. There are two simultaneous and interrelated arguments: the question of beauty as an object of scientific study, and the use of beauty in the style of scientific argumentation. By applying techniques of textual analysis the author hopes to illuminate how aesthetic categories had a key role in the development of Darwin's scientific thought. The author analyses how beauty is expressed as a paradox that organises Darwin's aesthetic theory, and claims that Darwin's mature thought elides this paradox by developing an aesthetic logic the author labels as the dialectic of anthropomorphism.