Does our sense of beauty serve any purpose?

There is a loosely organized meetup near where I live that tackles philosophical questions. One question that will be addressed at a forthcoming meeting is whether our aesthetic sense has any evolutionary value. The following TED talk was suggested as background material.

If you do not wish to take the 15 minutes to go through the talk, the gist of it is that there are two evolutionary mechanisms – natural selection and sexual selection. A commonly cited example of the latter is the tail of the peacock, which has no practical value and is in fact a hindrance, but which is believed to act as a way for the male to advertise his fitness to peahens. Duton argues that our sense of beauty evolved as a way for males to strut their stuff.

There may be some truth in this, but I don’t think it is anywhere near the whole story. It seems to me that art is just an extreme example of our desire to create order. For example, the narrative form of novels, plays, movies and television shows plays into our love of stories. We like things with a beginning, middle and end. We all use stories in describing our lives.

We may be the only creatures that appreciate beauty, but we are not the only ones that respond to it. Flowers did not evolve their shapes and colors so that they could be put in vases and grown in gardens. There is a good evolutionary advantage for a flower to be able to distinguish itself so that it is easily recognizable by pollinators.

There is much more to say on this, but as what I have already written is a bit long, I will stop to get your reaction.