Beauty

Here's something I've been wondering about for the past few days: why do we find flowers to be beautiful? They don't address any of our basic needs in life - they are not edible, they don't keep us warm, they are darn near useless in a fight, and they don't contribute to the furtherance of the species (except as part of courting, which role they can only play because we find them pleasing ... a circular argument).

This question came to me when I was looking at a photograph of a cat and a flower. The cat was completely ignoring the flower, and I realised that to the cat, the flower was probably not a thing of beauty at all (assuming cats make aesthetic judgements, which seems plausible if not probable - they certainly form attachments to people and objects). So I started wondering why I thought (as I did) that the flower was a beautiful thing.