Huh? How is beauty--a positive affect--any more requiring of consciousness than is pain or fear? It's obviously adaptive to favor environments and situations that are likely to turn out well for you. Some things are a puzzle, but beauty isn't one of them. I would expect bees to have a beauty-like sense.

With regard to consciousness, while there are a lot of puzzles about details, that in a complex ever-changing environment that you want to synthesize everything you know--which had better be veridical in any case which changes frequently or your instincts will push you in the wrong direction--and use it to coordinately focus attention is not terribly surprising. In an environment that reacts to you, having yourself as part of your model of everything you know is also a pretty obviously helpful thing to do.

So while we might wonder about specific capacities (keeping in mind that any sufficient selective pressure is enough to drive a capability to fixation--it's "whatever works" all the way, with whatever randomly comes along for the ride), consciousness-like-behavior itself is a really obviously useful thing.

As is an affinity for truth, because once you have a veridical synthesizing supervisory capacity, not just a pile of easily-tricked reflexes, of course having actual veracity rather than seems-superficially-like-this be of positive affect will help you out.

Anyway, you do get a lot of silly stuff said about consciousness, including by scientists who ought to know better, and philosophers who probably also ought to know better. But it's not much of an evolutionary puzzle. That qualia have the quality that they do might be a bit of a philosophical or psychological puzzle, but not an evolutionary puzzle.