What advantage is there in finding a sunset beautiful?

Red sunsets, as Science Focus puts it, are associated with settled high pressure systems that don’t wash all the dust out of the lower atmosphere, and high pressure tends to mean fine weather.

First Beach, Tanjung Aru Kota Kinabalu

But it would be a stretch to say that our appreciation of sunsets is a genetic weather-forecasting mechanism. Rather, we have evolved an aesthetic sense as part of the wider analytical faculties of our brain.

Man-made rocky beach, off Jalan Pacific Sutera

Far from being skin deep, ‘beauty’ is a shorthand way of measuring the fundamental ‘rightness’ of a thing. In people for example, the attributes we find beautiful generally correlate quite well with physical health or reproductive ability. Instead of evaluating all these different attributes independently, they all get rolled into a single measure: beauty.

Sunset shot near Pacific Sutera

The philosopher Dennis Dutton has suggested that the open rolling plains with occasional trees, that are so often represented in landscape art, are beautiful to us because they resemble the savanna of the Pleistocene epoch, when Homo erectus was first developing an aesthetic sense. Red sunsets would have been a familiar part of these landscapes and in an era when night was the most dangerous time, making sure you were safely back at camp to appreciate the last dying gasp of the day was probably especially important.

The opinion is ScienceFocus' but the images are mine.