Why do we find almost every cat beautiful, but relatively few humans?

Beauty and sexual attractiveness are not the same thing.

Like cats, a person may be beautiful without knowing it.

We find every cat, or almost every cat, to be beautiful. But when it comes to other human beings, beauty is more the exception than the rule. We might walk past hundreds of faces without seeing one that makes us look again.

Yet people try a lot harder than cats, expending considerable time, money, and ingenuity on beautifying themselves. We exercise, diet, dress, moisturize, dye, paint, inject, and sometimes even submit to the surgeon’s scalpel. Cats, meanwhile, do little more than lick themselves.

Are we just an uglier species, like bats or warthogs, or might there be more to it than that?

It may be that our aesthetics are a product of our mind. Bats may not be ugly to other bats, and cats probably don’t think of us as ugly—but do seem to think of us as smelly.

Indeed, bats and cats may be entirely without aesthetic judgment and respond merely to mating signals.

But even if we are the only truly aesthetic animal—as........

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