Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (24 page)

Maybe the evolutionary origins of art are a moot question, because there simply is no such thing as “art” as a unitary phenomenon. The whole concept of art as a cross-cultural human universal could conceivably be bogus, if the very notion of “the arts” is a Western creation, one that simply does not translate to other societies, whose standards and traditions are vastly different. Clearly, what we call the arts occur in many manifestations—painting, music, poetry, dance, etc.—just as it is obvious that there are superficial differences in the actual forms of art practiced in different cultures.

Indeed, the human enterprise is so diverse that efforts to identify common patterns across different cultures are bound to evoke what is sometimes called the “Pago-Pago problem,” as follows: An anthropology symposium has just heard a detailed account of, say, marriage practices in nearly a hundred different and unrelated societies, with the suggestion that the activity in question qualifies as a cross-cultural universal, whereupon someone stands up in the back of the auditorium and announces triumphantly, “That’s not the way they do things in Pago-Pago … .”

In fact, there are more than enough commonalities—use of color for decoration, of sound to constitute music, of stories to hold the attention and feed the imagination of listeners, and so
forth—across cultures for us to be justified in calling all of them “art,” differing in detail but not in overall pattern. In fact, the very argument that Balinese art is different from Inuit art, from ancient Grecian pot ornamentation or the latest electronic installation at New York’s MoMA, itself presupposes that there is something that in all these cases fits under the rubric of art!

Although I argued earlier that an evolutionary look at religion need not necessarily diminish the latter’s claim to legitimacy or “truth,” in fact, we all know that to some extent it does just this. What about an evolutionary look at art? The likelihood is that it will have a similar effect, but less intensely, since religion makes claims as to existential truth, whereas art always presupposes that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s just that to a remarkable degree—and one that cultural relativists have a hard time accepting—even the most diverse human eyes evince similar inclinations.

Moreover, there is enough commonality among the different manifestations of art to justify combining them in a single chapter. One potential way to approach this vast canvas would be to divide the subject along traditional disciplinary lines and to separately consider music, visual art, sculpture, dance, literature and stories, etc., examining in turn various hypotheses for the evolution of each. But there is sufficient overlap when it comes to explanatory hypotheses to justify a more conceptual approach and to examine the possible adaptive significance of the arts by focusing on each hypothesis in turn, slicing the pie in this way rather than by artistic category.

Granted, next, that art exists—that, like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s celebrated account of pornography (“I may not be able to define it, but I know it when I see it”), art is a genuine and identifiable phenomenon, even if somewhat ineffable—another way to discount the intent of this chapter would be to argue for strict cultural determinism, the possibility that we needn’t concern ourselves with evolutionary hypotheses for the arts because such activities aren’t, strictly speaking, “biological” at all. Rather, maybe asking why people engage in art is like asking why they speak French versus Chinese. The answer, of course, is that some people speak French and others speak Chinese depending on the language they are exposed to, which in turn depends on the culture in which they are raised.

Much the same is true of the arts. Take music. American teenagers are likely to listen to rap, or acid rock, or country ’n western, or blues, or Gregorian chants, or Bach chorales, or Broadway show tunes, or just about anything, depending on who they are, where they grow up, who their friends and parents are, and so forth. Ditto for Sudanese teenagers, Greenlanders, etc. Culture is determinative, just as someone’s cultural experiences determine whether she speaks French or Chinese.

But it’s not quite so simple. After all, whether a French or Chinese speaker, or something else, everyone who is biologically normal speaks one language or another. We clearly have a species-wide predisposition for language, something for which our shared biology is doubtless responsible, although the specifics of which language—or even, which dialect—are determined by local, culturally bound experiences. “Why French?” and “Why Chinese?” are therefore not interesting evolutionary questions, since the answer is obviously a function of individual learning and culture, not biology. “Why language?” however, is another matter.

By the same token, we can discount the claim that because the arts are culture bound, and in that sense culturally determined, they are not also part of human biology. The
details
of music, visual representation, dance, storytelling, and so forth are without question culture bound and thus culturally determined, but it is a notable fact that even people who argue that what constitutes “art” in New York differs from “art” in New Guinea agree that something we can call “art” exists in both places. Standards of beauty vary, but around the world, people find things they consider beautiful, and these things aren’t limited to practical matters, such as a “beautifully” sharp knife or a nice warm hat.

Art has a number of features that indicate its deep biological roots. There is, for example, no human society that does not have some form of art, and, moreover, it assumes the same major forms (music, dance, and creation of visual designs, story, and verse) in all of them. Everywhere, art evokes deep feelings, just as it develops early and reliably in all normal individuals, although the quality of creation or performance generally improves with practice and training. If the arts were literally “culture bound,” we would expect them to vary much more dramatically than they do from one culture to another, and also to be absent from some societies.

“The evolution of
Homo sapiens
in the past million years,” writes Denis Dutton,

is not just a history of how we came to have acute color vision, a taste for sweets, and an upright gait. It is also a story of how we became a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences with which to amuse, shock, titillate, and enrapture ourselves, from children’s games to the quartets of Beethoven, from firelit caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens.
²

Worldwide, people create, admire, and value things and even concepts (songs, stories, poems, etc.) that are of no immediate practical import. That is to say, they make art. And they started doing so very long ago: The earliest cave art—from Chauvet in France—is believed to date from about 30,000
BC
.

“There are good reasons to suspect that we may need biology as well as culture to explain art,” according to Brian Boyd, professor of English at the University of Auckland:

(1) it is universal in human societies; (2) it has persisted over several thousand generations; (3) despite the vast number of actual and possible combinations of behavior in all known human societies, art has the same major forms (music and dance, the manual creation of visual design, story and verse) in all; (4) it often involves high costs in time, energy and resources; (5) it stirs strong emotions, which are evolved indicators that something matters to an organism; (6) it develops reliably in all normal humans without special training, unlike purely cultural products such as reading, writing, or science. The fact that it emerges early in individual development—that young infants respond with special pleasure to lullabies and spontaneously play with colors, shapes, rhythms, sounds, words, and stories—particularly supports evolutionary against nonevolutionary explanations.
³

At the same time there are good reasons to suspect that the biological explanation for art will not be obvious, or easy. Why is this? Simply put, although it is no mystery
that
biology underpins art, it is not at all obvious
why
it does so. Thus, there is no question, for example, that we need biology to understand the universal, cross-cultural human penchant for eating, or for sex. Even though the details of meal preparation and of sexual mores vary widely across cultures, the very existence of eating and of sex are
hardly mysteries: The former is necessary for physical sustenance, and the latter, for reproduction. Not so for art.

“Poetry,” as W. H. Auden once noted, “makes nothing happen.” Eating and copulating make lots of things happen, things that obviously contribute to fitness. But poetry, painting, music, dance, literature, sculpture, and the like? They seem to be gratuitous addons, indulgences that are as rococo and baroque as, well, rococo architecture or baroque music.

Such things seem irrelevant to biological success and, indeed, downright silly and frivolous. Worse yet, a case can be made that they are actually
disadvantageous
, liabilities to a creature that presumably has been honed and pruned by natural selection to do only things that contribute to its reproductive success—or at least, not to do things that get in the way. Yet around the world, people not only dance, sing, write poetry, tell stories, and so forth, but they also typically invest in such activities with great consequence; their artistic achievements are among the things about which human beings are most proud.

“Why do we pursue the trivial and futile,” asks evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, “and experience them as sublime?” Even if we experienced them as neutral or barely noticed them, the real question is,
Why do we engage in such activities at all?
Wouldn’t natural selection favor the Philistines, who, being indifferent or even antagonistic to the arts, spent their time and energy on more obviously productive pursuits? Assuming that Wallace was wrong, and the arts do not owe their existence to divine patronage, the evolutionarily obvious answer is that somehow the arts are biologically productive. But how?

One possibility is that although the arts derive from natural causes—that is, evolution—they have not been directly selected for as such.

After all, there is much in the natural world that people admire, in ways comparable to their admiration for art: a lovely sunset, for example, or the play of moonlight on water, or the perfect
symmetry of a spider’s web. But, as Dutton points out, “The spider’s web that glistens in the morning dew was dictated by a genetic code in the spider’s tiny brain. The web may be a lovely sight to our eyes, but its beauty is a mere by-product of a spider’s way of enjoying breakfast.” The web-spinning spider is a masterpiece of evolution, but to count as art, a thing must be generated out of intent and not be the result of sheer instinct, which just happens to have produced—to an observing human—a coincidentally pleasing outcome. Early in the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp took things a step further and introduced a new wrinkle into conceptions of art when he developed the concept of
objets trouvés
(“found objects”), which aren’t created by the artist, but rather, simply discovered and designated “art.” Most famous, or infamous, is Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a urinal that he called art and that art lovers and art scholars have wrestled with, unsuccessfully, for nearly a century.

Another equally controversial take on the role of intention in art suggests that the arts—even when produced with more foresight and conscious creativity than is presumably mustered by the artiest arachnid—are nonetheless an accidental result of selection acting with a distinctly nonartistic goal.

Thus, for Steven Pinker, as for most evolutionary biologists, the human mind is not biologically driven to make art any more than is a web-spinning spider. Rather, the mind is an organ designed by natural selection for “causal and probabilistic reasoning about plants, animals, objects, and people. It is driven by goal states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such as food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge.” We have accordingly been outfitted with a mental toolbox that accomplishes these goals. And here is Pinker’s key point: “That toolbox, however, can be used to assemble Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptive value”—like music, painting, etc.

Among those things the brain does is (1) bring about conditions and situations that enhance our fitness (or rather, that have done so in the environments we experienced in the past) and also (2) register pleasure and satisfaction when these conditions and situations are achieved, as a way of getting us to do those things. For example: The structure of our mind and its connection with the rest of the body facilitates our obtaining food, not least by
generating the sensation we call “hunger,” which motivates us to eat and, if necessary, to hunt, gather, cook, and so forth, and which then cause us to feel good after we’ve eaten. But things can get tricky. We can find ways to achieve number 2 without any connection to number 1.

Pinker’s favorite example is strawberry cheesecake, which provides the sensation of sweetness (indicative of ripe fruit), plus a creamy texture (characteristic of fats). It isn’t good for us—that is, it isn’t adaptive—but many people are drawn to it nonetheless, because it mimics sensations that were adaptive for most of our evolutionary past. For Pinker, the arts are “cheesecake for the mind.” Applied to music in particular, the “cheesecake hypothesis” states that music is “a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.” During our long Pleistocene childhood, these were fitness-enhancing experiences, and so, we have evolved to respond favorably to them.

Accordingly, the widespread fondness for strawberry cheesecake derives not from direct selection for such a preference, but rather because selection has favored the existence of genes that predispose us to generate central nervous system receptors that respond with