The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (41 page)

There is no clear line between fashion and art, between ornamenting our bodies and beautifying our lives. Body-painting, jewelry, and clothing were probably the first art forms, since they are the most common across cultures. Nor is there a clear line between art and craft—as William Morris argued when founding the Arts and Crafts movement in Victorian England. Fine art may be strictly useless in pragmatic terms, while good design merely makes beautiful that which is already useful. When we address the evolution of human art, we need to explain both the aesthetic made useless and the useful made aesthetic. We shall see that even apparently pragmatic tools like
Homo erectus
handaxes may have evolved in part through sexual selection as displays of manual skill.

In this chapter I take a bottom-up approach to analyzing the evolutionary origins of art, ornamentation, and aesthetics. This makes it easier to trace the adaptive function of these seemingly useless biological luxuries. As we have seen, most of the visual ornamentation in nature is a product of sexual selection. The peacock's tail is a natural work of art evolved through the aesthetic preferences of peahens. We have also seen that some of our bodily organs, including hair, faces, breasts, buttocks, penises, and muscles, evolved partly as visual ornaments. It seems reasonable to ask how far we can get with the simplest possible hypothesis for art: that it evolved, at least originally, to attract sexual partners by playing upon their senses and displaying one's fitness. To see how this idea could work, let's consider an example of sexual selection for art in another animal species.

Bowerbirds

Human ornamentation is distinctive because most of it is made consciously with our hands rather than grown unconsciously on our bodies. However, this does not mean that its original adaptive function was different. One of the very few other animals that spend significant time and energy constructing purely aesthetic displays beyond their own bodies are the male bowerbirds of

Australia and New Guinea. Their displays are obvious products of female sexual choice.

Each of the 18 existing species constructs a different style of nest. They are constructed only by males, and only for courtship. Each male constructs his nest by himself, then tries to attract females to copulate with him inside it. Males that build superior bowers can mate up to ten times a day with different females. Once inseminated, the females go off, build their own small cup-shaped nests, lay their eggs, and raise their offspring by themselves with no male support, rather like Picasso's mistresses. By contrast, the male nests are enormous, sometimes large enough for David Attenborough to crawl inside. The golden bowerbird of northern Australia, though only nine inches long, builds a sort of roofed gazebo up to nine feet high. A hut built by a human male to similar proportions would top 70 feet and weigh several tons.

Males of most species decorate their bowers with mosses, ferns, orchids, snail shells, berries and bark. They fly around searching for the most brilliantly colored natural objects, bring them back to their bowers, and arrange them carefully in clusters of uniform color. When the orchids and berries lose their color, the males replace them with fresh material. Males often try to steal ornaments, especially blue feathers, from the bowers of other males. They also try to destroy the bowers of rivals. The strength to defend their delicate work is a precondition of their artistry. Females appear to favor bowers that are sturdy, symmetrical, and well-ornamented with color.

Regent and Satin Bowerbirds go an astonishing step further in their decorative efforts. They construct avenue-shaped bowers consisting of a walkway flanked by two long walls. Then they use bluish regurgitated fruit residues to paint the inner walls of their bowers, sometimes using a wad of leaves or bark held in the beak. This bower-painting is one of the few examples of tool use by birds under natural conditions. Presumably the females have favored the best male painters for many generations.

Sexual selection for ornamental bower-building has not replaced sexual selection for the more usual kinds of display

Males of many bowerbird species are much more brightly colored than females, and they dance in front of the bowers when females arrive. They also sing, producing guttural wheezes and cries, and good imitations of the songs of other bird species. However, male bowerbirds are not nearly as spectacular as their relatives, the birds-of-paradise, the most gorgeous animals in the world. Somehow, having evolved from a drab crow-like form, the female ancestors of the bowerbirds and birds-of-paradise developed an incredible aesthetic sense. In the birds-of-paradise, their sexual choices resulted in an efflorescence of plumage in 40 species. In the bowerbirds, they resulted in a proliferation of ornamental nests in 18 species.

The bowerbirds create the closest thing to human art in a non-human species. Their art is a product of sexual selection through female choice. The males contribute nothing but their genes when breeding, and their art serves no survival or parental function outside courtship. The bowers' large size, symmetric form, and bright colors may reflect female sensory biases. However, the bowers also have high costs that make them good fitness indicators. It takes time, energy, and skill to construct the enormous bower, to gather the ornaments, to replace them when they fade, to defend them against theft and vandalism by rivals, and to attract female attention to them by singing and dancing. During the breeding season, males spend virtually all day, every day, building and maintaining their bowers.

If you could interview a male Satin Bowerbird for
Artforum
magazine, he might say something like "I find this implacable urge for self-expression, for playing with color and form for then-own sake, quite inexplicable. I cannot remember when I first developed this raging thirst to present richly saturated color-

fields within a monumental yet minimalist stage-set, but I feel connected to something beyond myself when I indulge these

passions. When I see a beautiful orchid high in a tree, I simply must have it for my own. When I see a single shell out of place in my creation, I must put it right. Birds-of-paradise may grow lovely feathers, but there is no aesthetic mind at work there, only

a body's brute instinct. It is a happy coincidence that females sometimes come to my gallery openings and appreciate my work, but it would be an insult to suggest that I create in order to procreate. We live in a post-Freudian, post-modernist era in which crude sexual meta-narratives are no longer credible as explanations of our artistic impulses."

Fortunately, bowerbirds cannot talk, so we are free to use sexual selection to explain their work, without them begging to differ. With human artists things are rather different. They usually view their drive to artistic self-expression not as something that demands an evolutionary explanation, but as an alternative to any such explanation. They resist a "biologically reductionist" view of art. Or they buy into a simplistic Freudian view of art as sublimated sexuality, as when Picasso repeated Renoir's quip that he painted with his penis. My sexual choice theory, however, is neither biologically nor psychologically reductionist. It views our aesthetic preferences and artistic abilities as complex psychological adaptations in their own right, not as side-effects of a sex drive. Bowerbirds have evolved instincts to construct bowers that are distinct from the instinct to copulate once a female approves of the bower. We humans have evolved instincts to create ornaments and works of art that are distinct from the sexual instincts behind copulatory courtship. Yet both types of instinct may have evolved through sexual selection.

Ornamentation and the Extended Phenotype

The bowerbirds show the evolutionary continuity between body ornamentation and art. They happen to construct their courtship displays out of twigs and orchids instead of growing them from feathers like their cousins, the birds-of-paradise. We happen to apply colored patterns to rock or canvas. Biologists no longer draw a boundary around the body and assume that anything beyond the body is beyond the reach of evolution. In
The Extended Phenotype
, Richard Dawkins argued that genes are often selected for effects that spread outside the body into the environment. It is meaningful to talk about genes for a spider's web, a termite's

mound, and a beaver's dam. Some genes even reach into the brains of other individuals to influence their behavior for the genes' own benefit. All sexual ornaments do that, by reaching into the mate choice systems of other individuals. At the biochemical level, genes only make proteins, but at the level of evolutionary functions they can construct eyes, organize brains, activate behaviors, build bowers, and create status hierarchies. Whereas an organism's "phenotype" is just its body, its "extended phenotype" is the total reach of its genes into the environment.

In this extended-phenotype view, bipedalism freed our hands for making not just tools, but sexual ornaments and works of art. Some of our ornaments are worn on the body, while others may be quite distant, connected to us only by memory and reputation. We ornament the skin directly with ocher, other pigments, tattoos, or scars. We apply makeup to the face. We braid, dye, or cut our hair. We drape the body with jewelry and clothing. We even borrow the sexual ornamentation of other species, killing birds for their feathers, mammals for their hides, and plants for their flowers. At a greater distance, we ornament our residences, be they caves, huts, or palaces. We make our useful objects with as much style and ornament as we can afford, and make useless objects with purely aesthetic appeal.

The Rise and Fall of Sexual Art

The idea that art emerged through sexual selection was fairly common a century ago, and seems to have fallen out of favor through neglect rather than disproof. Darwin viewed human ornamentation and clothing as natural outcomes of sexual selection. In
The Descent of Man
he cited the popularity across tribal peoples of nail colors, eyelid colors, hair dyes, hair cutting and braiding, head shaving, teeth staining, tooth removal, tattooing, scarification, skull deformations, and piercings of the nose, ears, and lips. Darwin observed that "self-adornment, vanity, and the admiration of others, seem to be the commonest motives" for self-ornamentation. He also noted that in most cultures men ornament themselves more than women, as sexual selection theory

would predict. Anticipating the handicap principle, Darwin also stressed the pain costs of aesthetic mutilations such as scarification, and the time costs of acquiring rare pigments for body decoration. Finally, he argued against a cultural explanation of ornamentation, observing that "It is extremely improbable that these practices which are followed by so many distinct nations are due to tradition from any common source." Darwin believed the instinct for self-ornamentation to have evolved through sexual selection as a universal part of human nature, more often expressed by males than by females.

Throughout the late 1800s, Herbert Spencer argued that Darwin's sexual selection process accounts for most of what humans consider beautiful, including bird plumage and song, flowers, human bodies, and the aesthetic features of music, drama, fiction, and poetry. In his 1896 book
Paradoxes,
Max Nordau attributed sexual emotions and artistic productivity to a hypothetical part of the brain he called the generative center. Freud viewed art as sublimated sexuality.

However, these speculations did not lead very far because sexual selection theory was not very well developed at the beginning of the 20th century. By 1908, aesthetic theorist Felix Clay had grown weary of the facile equating of artistic production with reproduction. In
The Origin of the Sense of Beauty,
he complained:

How the pleasure in some stately piece of beautifully proportioned architecture, the thrill produced by solemn music, or the calm sweetness of a summer landscape in the evening, is to be attributed to the feeling of sex only, it is hard to see; they have in common a pleasurable emotion, and that is all. That a very large part of art is directly inspired by erotic motives is perfectly true, and that various forms of art play an important part in love songs and courtship is obvious; but this is so because beauty produced by art has in itself the power of arousing emotion, and is therefore naturally made use of to heighten the total pleasure. That love has provided the opportunity and incentive to innumerable works of art, that it has added to the

pleasure and enjoyment of countless beauties, need not be denied; but we cannot admit that it is due to the sex feeling that rhythm, symmetry, harmony, and beautiful colour are capable of giving us a pleasurable feeling.

In reading some of these century-old works, it is impressive how sophisticated and earnest their use of sexual selection theory was and how favorably they compare to some current theories of art's evolution. Nevertheless, they repeat Freud's cardinal error, as Clay does here, of confusing sexual functions with sexual motivations. Art does not have to be about sex to serve the purposes of attracting a mate—it can be about anything at all, or about nothing, as in the geometric art of Islam, or Donald Judd's stainless-steel minimalist sculpture. As we saw with the bower-birds, a sexually selected instinct for making ornamentation need not have any motivational or emotional connection with a sexually selected desire to copulate. The displayer does not need to keep track of the fact that beautiful displays often lead to successful reproduction. Evolution keeps track for us.

Great Artists of the Pleistocene

If art evolved through sexual choice, better artists must have attracted more sexual partners, or higher-fitness partners. How could that have happened? To appreciate the Pleistocene artist's reproductive advantages, we should not necessarily think of Modigliani's cocaine-fueled quest to have sex with every one of the hundreds of models he painted, or Gauguin's apparent drive to infect every girl in Polynesia with his syphilis. Perhaps it is better to remember how Picasso fathered one child by his first wife Olga Koklova, another by his mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, and two more by his mistress Françoise Gilot. Picasso is not a bad example of the idea that artistic production serves as a fitness indicator. Before dying at age 91 and leaving an estate of $1 billion in 1973, he had produced 14,000 paintings, 34,000 book illustrations, and 100,000 prints and engravings. His tireless energy, prodigious output, and sexual appetite seem to have been