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C
HAPTER
F
IVE
Art I: Cheesecake, By-Products,
and Groups

P
OOR ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE
! Virtually unknown these days compared to Darwin, Wallace was one of the 19th century’s greatest biologists and perhaps the preeminent field naturalist of all time. Those who have heard of Wallace know him primarily as the codiscoverer, with Darwin, of natural selection. But whereas Darwin had laboriously worked out the details, with copious examples from the living world, over a period of decades, Wallace literally came upon the principle of natural selection in a kind of brainstorm, a moment of epiphany while he lay in a malarial fever at a remote island campsite in what is today Indonesia.

The story has oft been told: Barely recovered from his illness, Wallace sent Darwin a brief manuscript setting out “his” theory, which in turn nudged Darwin to speed up publication of the much lengthier book—
On the Origin of Species
—that Darwin had been perfecting, more or less in private, over many years. Less well known is the fact that Wallace parted intellectual company with Darwin when it came to explaining one particular aspect of one particular species: the mental capacities of
Homo sapiens
. At issue here were the “loftier” functions, those associated with music, poetry, dance,
literature, painting, and sculpture—those activities that we loosely gather together as “higher culture” or, more simply, art.

Both Wallace and Darwin had argued that natural selection doesn’t create adaptations that exceed their demand; in other words, evolution doesn’t make animals or plants any better—that is, any faster, stronger, prettier, or smarter—than they need to be. Natural selection is a rigorous and relentless pruner, eliminating any expenditure of energy or time that doesn’t provide a fitness payoff (which is to say, enhanced reproductive success) that makes up for its cost. In short, there are no free lunches. Evolution does not produce frills, fanciness, or finery for its own sake—rather, only if such traits give their possessors some sort of reproductive advantage. Anything that is gratuitously fancy and expensive, that doesn’t in a sense “pay for itself” in terms of fitness, will not occur; or, if it arises via mutation and random genetic recombination, it will be strenuously selected against.

Using this principle of adaptive parsimony, Wallace felt that the human brain was far more advanced, more capable of feats of gratuitous complexity, than our ancestors could have required. He was struck by the fact, for example, that individuals of the “barbarian races,” exposed to the intellectual extravagances of European civilization, quickly rose to the occasion, becoming fluent in new languages, capable of absorbing the accoutrements of high society and the elaborate refinements of Victorian art, music, literature, and the like.

In 1869, Wallace wrote that “natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average member of our learned societies.” The problem, as Wallace saw it, was that the human brain appears to be “an instrument … developed in advance of the needs of its possessor.” His evidence was the fact that “savages”—given the opportunity—could learn to grasp European music, art, literature, and philosophy, and yet, they didn’t employ these subtleties in their own, natural state.

Clearly, according to Wallace, the capacity to engage in painting, poetry, opera, and so forth, activities that go beyond the necessities of brute survival and reproduction, had arisen without being needed, and therefore, without being selected for. The answer, as Wallace saw it, must be divine intervention. Only a beneficent God could have endowed human beings with such excessive, biologically irrelevant capacities. “The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena,” Wallace concluded, “is that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction, and for a special purpose.”

Darwin was dismayed, and then some. “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child,” he wrote to Wallace in 1869, concerned that his comrade in science had dropped the ball when it came to explaining human nature. Actually, for all his accomplishments, Wallace strayed from science in other respects as well, becoming an ardent believer in spiritualism, séances, and the prospect of communicating via mediums with the dead. But, even allowing for the predictable racism of his time, Wallace had put his finger on a genuine conundrum. Of course, he was not alone, nor was he the first.

“Is it not strange,” asks Benedick, in Shakespeare’s
Much Ado About Nothing
, “that sheep’s guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?” Strange indeed … not that an animal’s intestines can make interesting sounds, but that people are so entranced by particular patterns of vibrations, whether of a string, a membrane, a column of air, or whatever. Although Darwin rejected Wallace’s recourse to divine intervention, he fully acknowledged the puzzle posed by the arts in general and by music (the most abstract art) in particular. As Darwin wrote in
The Descent of Man
, “Since neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”

Similarly mysterious is the fact that we pay rapt attention to stories that we know to be untrue and spend lifetimes and fortunes in possessing and contemplating visual representations of reality or—stranger yet—patterns that clearly don’t look like anything at all, combinations of words or images or structures that serve no obvious purpose whatsoever.

Readers not steeped in evolutionary thinking may be perplexed at this point, not seeing what all the fuss is about. “The arts, for instance, are commonly thought to be good for us in any number of ways,” writes philosopher Denis Dutton,

giving us a sense of well-being or feelings of comfort. Art may help us to see deeper into the human psyche, aid convalescents in hospitals to recover more quickly, or give us a better appreciation of the natural world. It may bind communities together, or alternatively show us the virtues of cultivating our individuality. Art may offer consolation in moments of life crisis, it may soothe the nerves, or it may produce a beneficial psychological catharsis, a purging of emotions that clears the mind or edifies the soul. Even if all of these claims were true, they could not by themselves validate a Darwinian explanation of the arts, unless they could somehow be connected with survival and reproduction. The problem here is a temptation to bask in warm feelings about the arts and then to trip over a stock fallacy of classical logic: “Evolved adaptations are advantageous for our species. The arts are advantageous for our species. Therefore, arts are evolved adaptations.”
¹

In addition to the fact that evolution simply does not operate via the “good of the species,” the problem is that any purported explanation for the arts, if it is to explain how and why the arts evolved, has to be based on a firm biological foundation—which is to say, it must show how the arts contributed, not to happiness, consolation, self-realization, or the greater glory of God, but to fitness. In short, it would have to show how people who create, produce, and enjoy the arts experience higher reproductive success than our more practical-minded Philistine ancestors who kept their spears sharp, their mates faithful, and their offspring well fed, and who didn’t waste time admiring the sunset, never mind laboring to reproduce a simulacrum of it on a cave wall.

How can we explain the evolution of such seemingly irrelevant, unadaptive, yet time- and energy-consuming activities as the arts?

There are several possibilities. Let’s begin with Wallace’s answer: divine intervention. All right, now let’s go on to the next. I don’t mean to be snide (well, maybe I do), but the reality is that a
theological “explanation” of this sort would apply to each of the evolutionary mysteries considered in this book—and indeed, to all phenomena—rendering irrelevant any efforts to uncover naturalistic bases for anything. In his book,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
, philosopher Daniel Dennett introduced two alternative metaphors for explaining the natural world: sky-hooks and cranes. Sky-hooks are anchored—or rather, unanchored—in the clouds. They purport to hold up conceptual structures but are themselves neither stable nor secure.
ⁱ
Cranes, by contrast, rest on hard, empirical, scientific ground, comparatively mundane but supporting their loads via direct connection to solid reality. The present book is a search for cranes.