Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (25 page)

trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons.
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The problem, of course, is that strawberry cheesecake does not enhance our fitness—but we like it anyhow, because it unconsciously reminds us of things that do.

Pinker also espouses another explanation for maladaptive human enterprises, not so much the arts alone as philosophy and, to some extent, religion. Begin once again with the assumption that the mind evolved for one reason and one reason only: to promote the evolutionary success of the body—and thus the genes—that produced it. Doing so would have required the ability to ask and answer questions, nearly all of them practical: where to get
food, how to avoid enemies, how to impress a mate, how to care for your children, what to do when a hyena growls, etc.

But having provided us with a questing organ, namely, our brain, evolution may have outfitted us with more horsepower than we really need. More accurately, it may have provided us with a device that sometimes turns its attention to things that evolution didn’t have—in a sense—“in mind.” And so, we worry about the meaning of meaning, we ask questions in the realm of metaphysics, and we spend time and energy calculating pi to a gazillion decimal places. This is somewhat like the famous answer to the question, “Why climb Mt. Everest?”—“Because it is there.” Because our brains are there, we sometimes use them in ways that sometimes are a sheer waste of time. But because we have such large brains—for perfectly good biological reasons—we are bound not only to assemble those “Sunday afternoon projects of dubious adaptive value” but also to enjoy doing so.

Devotees of the arts (and not merely those with an evolutionary sweet tooth) have long had their hands full explaining “what good” are opera, poetry, ballet, and so forth. How dispiriting to be told that—at least in terms of their evolutionary pedigree—such activities have no function at all! And so, not surprisingly, Pinker’s cheesecake hypothesis has not generated much enthusiasm from those who create art for a living, and even less so from critics and scholars who devote themselves to understanding and evaluating music, poetry, literature, and the like. It may well be hard on the ego to spend one’s professional life interpreting the creative work of others, and harder yet to be told that the whole enterprise is fundamentally derivative and irrelevant to what is “real.” (Interestingly, however, it doesn’t seem to be the case that pastry and dessert chefs feel themselves inferior to those who cook the main course.)

Perhaps the cheesecake hypothesis works best when it comes to cheesecake, but not necessarily for art.

On the other hand, cheesecake for the mind may offer the benefit that it is comparatively risk-free—which is hardly the case for such a high-cholesterol confection as, well, cheesecake! As Pinker sees it, engagement with the arts might well be “a way of figuring out how to get at the pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver little jolts of pleasure without the inconvenience of wringing
bona fide fitness increments from a harsh world.”—like pornography, which, after all, is safer sex than the real thing. Maybe the arts are similarly derivative substitutes for “the real thing,” which—like pornography—evidently does the job sufficiently well for enough people to be commercially successful. Less dramatically, but perhaps more accurately: Although we often think of them as expensive, sometimes ridiculously so, maybe the arts are actually an evolutionary bargain, providing cheap and low-risk thrills in place of the real thing.

It is undoubtedly easier and less risky to experience a love affair via Jane Austen or Hollywood—that is to say, vicariously—than to experience reality, with all its tribulations.
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Literature, painting, sculpture, theater, and movies offer a simulacrum, an opportunity to enter into what appear to be genuine experiences but are actually removed from the real thing. Via the arts we can go through all sorts of exciting or instructive events but in the safety and security of our own home, theater seat, and so forth.

Anthropologist and scholar of aesthetics Eckart Voland proposes that we consider the situation of a moth circling a lantern at night. Presumably, the moth is enjoying herself, or at least, meeting certain deep-seated needs for visual stimulation of a particular type. Voland’s analogy leads him to propose a variant on Pinker’s cheesecake: that we, too, are moths, who “succeeded in inventing a lantern in order to have fun circling it.”
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Maybe so, but almost certainly, there’s more to it.

At one point, for example, in Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary
, Emma has just expressed her infatuation with Rodolphe (one of her extramarital lovers), using a series of amorous clichés. There follows a brief journey inside Rodophe’s head, in which he devalues Emma’s expressions of love as “exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections” and the “emptiest of metaphors.” Rodolphe, it turns out, is as intellectually shallow as Emma, and, as Flaubert points out, he therefore fails to appreciate that “none of us can
ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.”
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In this beautiful and oft-quoted passage, Flaubert may have hit on something biologically profound. Language is a marvelous attribute, but for most of us, most of the time, it is indeed a “cracked kettle,” inadequate to express our needs, ideas, or sorrows. Perhaps this is one reason that human beings have invented the arts, as a way of going beyond the mundane, quotidian expressions and achievements of daily, functional life and attempting to satisfy our need, on occasion, “to move the stars to pity.” We achieve this via poetry, song, painting, and dance, the various human expressions that—when done especially well—have the power to literally take one’s breath away. Bequeathed a large brain and questing mind (likely for relatively mundane, fitness-enhancing adaptive reasons), it is entirely possible that we find ourselves frustrated by glimpsing the contrast between the depth of what we can detect within ourselves and the “cracked kettle” of our limited capacities.

If so, then it is delightfully incongruous that Flaubert’s celebrated description of the inadequacy of language is itself a notable example of language transcending itself, that is to say, of becoming art.
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Here is yet another way of saying nearly the same thing, but a bit less highfalutin: If not cheesecake, or candlelight, or an effort to get something extra out of our demanding but cracked kettles, perhaps the arts are spandrels. A spandrel is an obscure architectural term that has achieved currency among evolutionary biologists thanks to a now-classic article by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin titled “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Paradigm.”
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A spandrel is a roughly triangular space necessarily created when a rectangular structure is superimposed on an arch. Spandrels aren’t especially interesting or important in their own right, but they have taken on particular meaning in the evolutionary literature
ever since Gould and Lewontin used them as metaphors by which to criticize what they saw as excessive “adaptationism” among their biologist colleagues.

The cathedral of San Marco contains many spandrels, all of them beautifully decorated. Gould and Lewontin pointed out that these spandrels were not produced to provide a venue for artistic display; rather, they are simply necessitated by structural geometry. Once there, however, they provided an opportunity for elaborate decoration. For Gould and Lewontin, if the interior of San Marco cathedral were an organism, it would not be legitimate to consider its spandrels to be adaptations “designed” by natural selection as ways of displaying visual art. Rather, they exist for other, purely structural reasons. By the same token, the arts could be spandrels, and nothing more, bearing the same relationship to the large human brain and its questing, restless mind that the spandrels of San Marcos bear to architectural necessity.

Maybe so. Bear in mind, however, that cheesecake, once invented and enjoying popularity—even if “unadaptive” and thus somehow biologically illegitimate—lends itself to various adaptive variations and modifications. There is good cheesecake and, well, cheesy cheesecake, rich and creamy, mouthwatering confections and dry, crummy, poorly made junk food. Undoubtedly, our appreciation for art is much more complex (involving much more nuance) than simple enjoyment of cheesecake, but then, gourmets in general and cheesecake mavens in particular would probably argue that there is lots of nuance in a discerning evaluation of cheesecake, too!

Once spandrels exist, they are almost literally blank canvases upon which human ingenuity and creative imagination can work. And from this point on, they can be subject to the pulls and pushes, the shaping and configuring of selection, no less than if they had been originally evolved for a particular purpose.

In his book
The Art Instinct
, Denis Dutton deploys a helpful and nonartsy automotive metaphor, beginning with the uncontroversial observation that cars aren’t designed to produce heat. Heat is generally unwanted, occurring as an unavoidable (“nonadaptive”) spandrel-like by-product of internal combustion engines. Moreover, the presence of so much internally generated heat actually threatens to be
mal
adaptive, necessitating an elaborate cooling
system of radiators, hoses, water pumps, etc. At the same time, all that unwanted heat can actually turn out to be useful after all, in running a car’s heater on a cold day. The cooling system of a car is thus an adaptation, designed to make the best of a bad situation (too much heat), and the car’s heater is also an adaptation, making the best of a problem by incorporating a design that provides warmth for the car’s occupants.

Analogously, it is altogether possible that the arts are not an adaptation in themselves, but are incidental by-products of big brains or, as we’ll see, perhaps deriving from the need for social cooperation, mother–infant coordination, and so forth—but once they exist, like the heat in an auto engine, the next step could well have been to employ them, adaptively, to serve additional useful ends. If so, then we shouldn’t necessarily expect the arts to have just one adaptive role (more on this later).

Another way of looking at this is to distinguish between evolutionary origins of a trait and those pressures responsible for maintaining and shaping it. The cheesecake and spandrel hypotheses suggest that the arts may have originated as a kind of evolutionary afterthought, a necessity analogous to the fact that heavy objects sink and light ones float, and not a product of direct selection at all. Nonetheless, it should be emphasized that this does not render the arts—once they appeared—any less subject to selective pressures than baroque cathedral decorators were indifferent to the use they made of spandrels. If the arts emerged simply because we have big brains, just as spandrels emerged simply because that’s what happens when you impose a straight ceiling above a rounded arch, they still must have experienced some sort of evolutionary momentum to become so widespread and elaborately developed.

A similar explanation applies to what might be dubbed the “boredom hypothesis,” which goes like this. Evidence from modern hunter-gatherers suggests quite strongly that rather than their lives being a grim concatenation of desperate efforts to stay alive (and reproduce), the “primitive” lifestyle actually may have been the “original affluent society.”
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Thus, the Kung people of the Kalahari average only about 20 hours of obvious work per week. Maybe what we call the arts developed as a means whereby our ancient ancestors whiled away the hours when they had nothing more pressing to do—essentially relieving the boredom by singing,
dancing, telling stories, and so forth. The payoff would be amplified insofar as people who did this were less likely to endanger themselves by doing something potentially dangerous, like wandering aimlessly about and possibly blundering into a hungry sabre tooth.

I find this notion less than persuasive, however, simply because it doesn’t explain why the arts as we know them, for all their diversity, nonetheless exist in discrete forms (music, dance, painting, sculpture, stories) in all cultures, and—more specifically—why people find these activities suitable and satisfying alternatives to boredom. In a sense, it posits spandrels but on a different canvas: of unobligated time rather than architectural space. It doesn’t come to grips with the question of why the arts as such have evidently achieved such significant evolutionary momentum.

Let’s look at some possible sources of that “momentum.”

One likely prospect involves the social role of the arts. True, the solitary, struggling artist is something of a cultural icon, but one that is pretty much limited to Western society, and to the last century or so at that. Although it is notoriously difficult to compose, or to write, paint, sculpt, or otherwise spin creative gold out of cerebral straw with an audience literally breathing down one’s neck, the reality is that overwhelmingly, even if art is typically
made
in solitary splendor, it is
performed
and
experienced
with others.

But why?

For some intriguing research that speaks to this question, consider work by evolutionary psychologists Sebastian Kirschner and Michael Tomasello.
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Their report, titled “Joint Music Making Promotes Prosocial Behavior in 4-Year-Old Children,” strongly suggests that music fosters social bonding and group cohesion. Four-year-old children were induced to make music together—dancing and singing—and were then matched with other 4-year-olds who had been given similar levels of physical activity and linguistic interaction, but without the shared music making. Members of the two groups were then exposed to identical opportunities to help
each other in a staged event in which the children had been trying to transfer marbles from one location to another, but in all cases the devices were rigged so that one child literally lost her marbles.