One Leaf, Seven Leaflets....

Between the title of this post and the titles of the individual photos (viewed by clicking on each photo), my head is full of thoughts stimulated therefrom most of which address the theme introduced yesterday. I'll try to put these into a coherent essay by this evening. Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the photos.
I'm a little late getting back to this. In fact, it's now August 4, and I already posted a photo today and my mind is racing ahead to new topics. However, first, this - typed from a rough draft I penned last night.
Can science study aesthetics? I assume we humans evolved from earlier types who had no sense of past-present-future, could not "plan ahead," and had no sense of beautiful-ugly. However, they must have had some sense of safe-dangerous or we wouldn't be here today. Most discussions of aesthetics I've come across assume the brain we have now. I am interested in how we got this brain in the first place. I wonder if the emergence of an aesthetic sense in our evolution increased our survival potential, that is, was a product of natural selection, or was it an accidental by-product of the development of some other trait(s). I heard religion discussed in similar terms. Does/did it have survival value? One could amass evidence today of the opposite. It could be, like the appendix, on the way out.
One of my biology heroes, E. O. Wilson, writes of biophilia, what he believes is an evolved inclination of humans to feel a strong connection with all other life. He believes this is a natural tendency which we must cultivate in order to save ourselves. If this sense exists, cultural habits can certainly over-ride it.
As a child, I was influenced by my culture's (and especially my parents') perceptions of wild nature. Examples; deer and buuny rabbit = good; snakes = bad; robins = good; blue jays = bad. As a biologist specializing in natural history I've overcome these biases and see all species as integral parts of the same "web of life" I belong to. But, as a developing artist/photographer who now spends more time with among artists than biologists, I am revisiting ideas about beauty-utility in the context of human evolution. Some people (arachnophiliacs?) love my close-up photos of spiders while serious arachnophobes can't stand to look at them. I can't help but ask "Why?" In my natural history training, I gradually came to see some kind of beauty in every living and natural non-living thing. To see the beauty of butterflies and peacocks was easy. Spiders and rattlesnakes took some effort. Now I see a huge difference in the art of people with or without some biology background. This intrigues me. I think you know where my bias lies.
[To be continued on next post about Ringneck Snakes.]