How did Beauty Evolve?

Draft

I'll first attempt to formulate the problem here.

• Evolution of living things can be explained through third-person descriptions
• Beauty is entirely a first-person phenomenon
• Creatures adapt by growing features that increases the chances of surviving and reproducing
• We say that bees are attracted to flowers because they're beautiful. This helps the flowers spread their pollen, and thus beauty has a purpose. But we didn't need beauty for that - a mere instinctual pull towards flowers would have worked just the same.
• Counter-point: Is beauty just that? an instinctual pull towards something? Isn't it more correct to say that beauty causes the pull instead of it being the pull itself?

It's as thought beauty is just one among several kinds of pull inducers. Hunger is another example. Pain is yet another. All of these experiences pull the creature into doing something it wouldn't have otherwise done. Except we can build robot dogs whose internal architecture mechanically keeps track of energy levels and alerts its EAT_FOOD submodule when its supposed to be "hungry". Instead of this unconscious processing, which should have worked just as well, we have a conscious feeling of hunger. Which is a kind of a pain. Beauty is a kind of pleasure.

Maybe it's more fundamental. Conscious creatures are fully, almost entirely, controlled by its pain-pleasure calculations. It keeps following pleasure and keeps avoiding pains. The smarter it is, the more forethought it has on how to avoid the worst pains and get bigger pleasure, through abstract long-term planning. That's why we lift in the gym and abstain from eating delicious cakes. We conceptualised pleasure and pain, and we use cognition to derive actions that distribute it to our preference across time.

Does this explain beauty in any way? I don't think so, no.