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Tenoke comments on How subjective is attractiveness? - LessWrong
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Just putting this out there - beauty is in fact completely subjective, and there is no universal standard nor can there be one, HOWEVER, it seems to us like beauty is objective because humans are really genetically (and socially) similar to each other. This gives rise to preferences that are shared by large groups, and the illusion that the things which many people consider attractive are objectively beautiful.
Yes, I meant "subjective" in a colloquial sense (the way people use it in day to day conversation) rather than a philosophical sense.
It seems possible to me that there are standards of beauty that would cut across many different species of intelligent life (including extraterrestrials) out of virtue of there being similar evolutionary pressures across contexts: for example, I could imagine aliens typically viewing aliens with symmetric features as being more attractive than aliens with asymmetric features. But yes, it's in principal possible for an entity's conceptions of beauty to be completely orthogonal to those of humans.
Has anyone investigated this in non-human animals here on earth?
(... I realise that I have no idea how commonly, and how strongly, visual "attractiveness" is relevant to mating of non-human animals at all. Clearly at least sometimes it's at least quite relevant (consider, e.g., peacocks), but beyond that I'm pretty clueless. If you're reading this and know much more, please educate me!)