The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (40 page)

that has little relevance in modern evolutionary theory or behavior genetics.

Some archeologists have argued that art only emerged 35,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic period, when the first cave paintings and Venus figurines were made in Europe. They follow archeologist John Pfeiffer's suggestion that this period marks a "creative explosion" when human art, language, burial ceremonies, religion, and creativity first emerged. This is a remarkably Eurocentric view. The Aborigines colonized Australia at least 50,000 years ago, and have apparently been making paintings on rock ever since. If art were an invention of the upper Paleolithic 35,000 years ago in Europe, how could art be a human universal? There is evidence from Africa of red ocher being used for body ornamentation over 100,000 years ago. This is about the latest possible time that art could have evolved, since it is around the time that modern
Homo sapiens
spread out from Africa. Had it evolved later, it is unclear how it could have become universal across human groups.

The Functions of Art

The aesthetic has often been defined in opposition to the pragmatic. If we view art as something that transcends our immediate material needs, it looks hard to explain in an evolutionary way. Selection is usually assumed to favor behaviors that promote survival, but almost no art theorist has ever proposed that art directly promotes survival. It costs too much time and energy and does too little. This problem was recognized very early in evolutionary theorizing about art. In his 1897 book
The Beginnings of Art,
Ernst Grosse commented on art's wastefulness, claiming that natural selection would "long ago have rejected the peoples which wasted their force in so purposeless a way, in favor of other peoples of practical talents; and art could not possibly have been developed so highly and richly as it has been." He struggled, like many after him, to find a hidden survival function for art.

To Darwin, high cost, apparent uselessness, and manifest beauty usually indicated that a behavior had a hidden courtship

function. But to most art theorists, art's high cost and apparent uselessness has usually implied that a Darwinian approach is inappropriate, that art is uniquely exempt from selection's cost-cutting frugality. This has led to a large number of rather weak theories of art's biological functions. I shall briefly consider their difficulties before attempting to bring art back into the evolutionary framework.

Art for Arts Sake

Ever since the German Romanticism of Schiller and Goethe in the early 19th century, many have viewed art as a Utopian escape from reality, a zone of selfless self-expression, a higher plane of being where genius sprouts lotus-like above the petty concerns of

the world. This Romantic view opposes art to nature, but also opposes art to popular culture, art to market commodity, art to

social convention, art to decoration, and art to practical design. It has often presented the artist as a male genius shunning the female temptresses that would sap the vital fluids that sustain his creativity. Thus, artistic success has also been seen as opposed to sexual reproduction.

Perhaps it is not surprising that many modern artists have adopted the ideology of these German philosophers. Romanti-

cism makes excellent status-boosting rhetoric for artists. It presents

them as simultaneously overcoming their instincts, avoiding banality, striving against capitalism, rebelling against society, and

transcending the ornamental. The genius's need to shun sexual temptation also provides a ready excuse for avoiding sleeping with one's less attractive admirers. But this Romantic view makes no attempt to offer a scientific analysis of art—indeed, it actively rejects the possibility.

The kernel of truth in the Romantic view is that art is pleasurable to make and to look at, and this pleasure can seem a sufficient reason for art's existence. Its pleasure-giving power can seem to justify art despite its apparent uselessness. But from a Darwinian perspective, pleasure is usually an indication of biological significance. Subjectively, everything an animal does

may appear to be done simply to experience pleasure or avoid pain. If we did not understand that animals need energy, we might say that they eat for the pleasure of eating. But we do understand that they need energy so we say instead that they have evolved a mechanism called hunger that makes it feel pleasurable to eat. The Romantic view of art fails to take this step, to ask why we evolved a motivational system that makes it pleasurable to make and see good art. Pleasure explains nothing; it is what needs explaining.

Social Solidarity, Cultural Identity, and
Religious Power

Many anthropologists view art, like ritual, religion, music, and dance, as a social glue that holds groups together. This hypothesis dates back to the early 20th century and the "functionalist" views of Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Talcott Parsons. For them, a behavior's function meant its function in sustaining social order and cultural stability, rather than its function in propagating an individual's genes. The social functions postulated for art were usually along the lines of "expressing cultural identity," "reflecting cultural values," "merging the individual into the collective," "sustaining social cohesion," "creating a collective consciousness," and "socializing the young." It is not easy to be sure what any of these phrases really means, and in any case these putative social functions are not easy to relate to legitimate biological functions in evolution.

Primate groups work perfectly well without any of these mechanisms. Chimpanzees don't need to express their cultural identities or create a collective consciousness in order to live in groups. They need only a few social instincts to form dominance hierarchies, make peace after quarrels, and remember their relationships. Humans do not seem any worse at these things than chimpanzees, so there seems no reason why we should need art or ritual to help us "bond" into groups. Human groups may be larger than chimpanzee groups, but Robin Dunbar has argued convincingly that language is the principal way in which humans

manage the more complex social relationships within our larger groups.

The view that art conveys cultural values and socializes the young seems plausible at first glance. It could be called the propaganda theory of art. The trouble with propaganda is that it is usually produced only by large institutions that can pay propagandists. In small prehistoric bands, who would have any incentive to spend the time and energy producing group propaganda? It would be an altruistic act in the technical biological sense: a behavior with high costs to the individual and diffuse benefits to the group. Such altruism is not usually favored by evolution. As we shall see in the chapters on morality and language, evolution can sometimes favor group-benefiting behaviors, if individuals can attain higher social and sexual status for producing them. But such opportunities are relatively rare, and one would have to show that art is well designed as a propaganda tool to create norms and ideals that benefit the group. Language is surely a much more efficient tool for telling people what to do and what not to do. The best commands are imperative sentences, not works of art.

A popular variant of the cultural-value idea is the hypothesis that most art during human evolution served a "religious function." Museum collections of art from primitive societies routinely label almost every item a fertility god, an ancestral figure, a fetish, or an altarpiece. Until recently, archeologists routinely described every Late Paleolithic statue of a naked woman as either a "goddess" or a "fertility symbol." Usually, there is no evidence supporting such an interpretation. It would be equally plausible to call them "Paleolithic pornography." The importance of church-commissioned art in European art history may have led archeologists to attribute religious content to most prehistoric art.

In any case, religious functions for art don't make much Darwinian sense. Some anthropologists have suggested that the

Principal function of art during human evolution was to appease gods and dead ancestors, and to put people in touch with animal spirits. In his textbook
The Anthropology of Art,
Robert Layton

claimed that the function of Kalahari sculpture in Africa is "a pragmatic one of manipulating spiritual forces." This overlooks the possibility that gods, ancestral ghosts, and animal spirits may not really exist. If they do not exist, there is no survival or reproductive advantage to be gained from appeasing or contacting them. Some artists may believe that making a certain kind of statue will give them "spiritual powers." Scientifically, we have to take the view that they might be deluded. Their delusion, on its own, is not evolutionarily stable, because it costs them time and energy and the "spiritual powers" probably cannot deliver what is hoped for. However, if an individual's production or possession of a putatively religious object brings them higher social or sexual status, then it can be favored by evolution. A person can spend hours hacking at a piece of wood, making a fetish, and telling people about their extraordinary spiritual powers. If others grant the religiously imaginative individual higher status or reproductive opportunities, such behavior can be sustained by sexual selection.

The same argument applies to art that has the alleged function of curing disease, such as some Navajo sand-paintings. Navajo artists could speculate that the human capacity for making sand-paintings must have evolved through survival selection for curing diseases. If sand-paintings were proven medically effective in double-blind randomized clinical trials, they would have a good argument. But the sand-paintings probably have nothing more than a placebo effect. Like "appeasing the gods," "curing disease" works as an evolutionary explanation only if the trait in question actually does what is claimed.

Evolution is not a cultural relativist that shows equal respect for every ideological system. If an artistic image intended to control spirits or cure disease does not actually improve survival prospects, evolution has no way to favor its production except through sexual selection. Evolutionary psychologists should accept ideologies like religion and traditional medicine as human behavioral phenomena that need explaining somehow. This does not mean that we have to give them any credence as world-views. For scientists, science has epistemological priority.

There are important differences between the social functions of art (which may support religious, political, or military organizations), the conscious individual motivations for producing art (which may include making money, achieving social status, or going to heaven), and the unconscious biological functions of producing art (which must concern survival or reproduction). Darwinian theories of the origins of our capacity for art cannot hope to account for all of the social functions and various forms of art that happen to have emerged in diverse human cultures throughout history Evolutionary psychology tries to answer only a tiny number of questions about human art, such as "What psychological adaptations have evolved for producing and appreciating art?" and "What selection pressures shaped those adaptations?" These are important questions, but they are by no means the only interesting ones. All the other questions about art will remain in the domain of art history and aesthetics, where a Darwinian perspective may offer some illumination, but never a complete explanation. We shall still need cultural, historical, and social explanations to account for the influences of Greek and Indian traditions on Gandhara sculpture, or the way in which Albert Hoffman's serendipitous discovery of LSD in 1943 led to the "happenings" organized by the Fluxus group in the 1960s. As we shall see, the human capacity for art is a particularly flexible and creative endowment, and identifying its evolutionary origins by no means undermines the delights of art history, or limits the range or richness of artistic expression.

A Bottom-Up View of Art

None of the standardly proposed "functions" of art are legitimate evolutionary functions that could actually shape a genetically inherited adaptation. As Steven Pinker has observed,

Many writers have said that the "function" of the arts is to bring the community together, to help us see the world in new ways, to give us a sense of harmony with the cosmos, to allow us to

appreciate the sublime, and so on. All these claims are true, but none is about adaptation in the technical sense . . .

If this is right, then what are we to do? The human capacity for art shows evidence of adaptive design, but its function remains obscure. Perhaps we need a broader view of art, inspired by more biologically relevant examples.

There are two strategies science can take in trying to understand the evolutionary origins of art: top-down or bottom-up. The top-down strategy focuses on the fine arts and their elite world of museums, galleries, auction houses, art history textbooks, and aesthetic theory. The bottom-up strategy surveys the visual ornamentation of other species, of diverse human societies, and of various subcultures within our society. In this broader view, the fine arts are a relatively unpopular and recent manifestation of a universal human instinct for making visual ornamentation. Most scientists, being anxious to display their cultural credentials as members of the educated middle class, feel obligated to take a top-down approach. There is a temptation to display one's familiarity with the canon of Great Art, to counter the stereotype that scientists are so obsessed with truth that they have forgotten beauty. One may even feel obliged to start with a hackneyed example of Italian Renaissance sculpture, as I have done in this chapter.

But what if we step back from the fine arts and ask ourselves what engagement ordinary humans have with visual ornamentation, once they step outside the dim museums of Florence and return to their real lives. Our opportunities to appreciate the fine arts typically arise during vacations and weekend trips to local museums. But visual ornamentation surrounds us every day. We wear clothing and jewelry. We buy the biggest, most beautiful houses we can afford. We decorate our homes with furniture, rugs, prints, and gardens. We drive finely designed, brightly colored automobiles, which we choose for their aesthetic appeal as much as their fuel efficiency. We may even paint the odd watercolor. This sort of everyday aesthetic behavior comes quite naturally, in every human culture and at every moment in history.