A Darwinian Theory of Beauty, or TED Does Its Best RSA

You have undoubt­ed­ly seen one, if not many, of RSA’s catchy videos dur­ing the past year. They fea­ture the words of thought lead­ers accom­pa­nied by the fast-mov­ing ani­ma­tion of Andrew Park. Along the way, we have fea­tured RSA talks by Daniel Pink, Sir Ken Robin­son, and Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich, among oth­ers.

The RSA videos have always struck me as a good alter­na­tive, or per­haps com­ple­ment, to the more well-known TED videos. TED devel­oped its style of pre­sen­ta­tion – speak­ers pre­sent­ing on a live stage in a crisp 18 min­utes (or less). Then RSA rolled out its dis­tinc­tive ani­mat­ed videos. And now this: TED has Andrew Park ani­mate Denis Dut­ton’s talk – A Dar­win­ian The­o­ry of Beau­ty – in RSA style. Intrigu­ing talk. But a strange move on TED’s part. Hope­ful­ly, it’s just a one-off, and not a jump-the-shark moment…