Darwin began to see these changes as the flickering evidence of desire, of pleasure, in the long chronicle of natural selection. While he, however, was keen to recognize not only the possibility but the likelihood that other species appreciate arbitrary beauty—and that it impacts both their decision to mate and the evolutionary record—some contemporaries and successors found the idea to be improbable if not fully absurd. That other species could both perceive and prefer beauty apart from the machinations of natural selection was rejected on two counts: one, that only humans were capable of
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