Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (27 page)

There are many manifestations of the social coordination hypothesis. But at least one humanist, Denis Dutton, is having none of it. Dutton is one of a small but increasingly influential group of academics: humanists who have been enthralled by evolution and have bucked their peers in making a case for the role of biology in understanding the arts. In his book
The Art Instinct
, Dutton makes the curious claim that the arts are primarily solitary rather than social. In support, he cites Leo Tolstoy’s essay “What Is Art?” a very funny account of the arguments and competition deriving from an opera rehearsal. To be sure, the arts can generate controversy and competition, but so can just about anything. Tolstoy’s hilarious description hardly counts as significant evidence that the arts are somehow antisocial. Similarly, the fact that many of the arts are enjoyed in solitude—reading literature alone at home, listening to a CD of the Missa Solemnis—doesn’t mean that stories and chorales originally evolved to be experienced this way.

These days people often listen to their iPods when no one else is around, and presumably they have long hummed to themselves as well. But most of us rarely sing when alone, just as we don’t typically laugh when by ourselves. From songs to symphonies, music may be created—in the sense of first originated—in private,
but music
making
, in terms of its performance and enjoyment, is nearly always a public, social event. Even when people listen to music alone, the likelihood is that they are engaging in a kind of substitute sociality, whether or not they sing along (which, significantly, they often do). It is hard to imagine our prehistoric ancestors plugging in their iPods or MP3 players and luxuriating to Stone Age music in solitary Pleistocene splendor … and not just because there were no such gizmos then. Moreover, although people admittedly experience most of the arts in solitude, their experience is nearly always more intense when they sway, clap, stamp, cry, laugh, or simply watch and listen
together
.

Reading and writing, those most solitary of artistic experiences, are also exceedingly recent, and even after their invention perhaps 8,000 years ago, the great majority of people were illiterate, consuming their “literature” by listening to bards and storytellers. Modern museum-goers, walking by themselves, privately plugged into their informational guided cassettes, individually keyed to particular paintings or sculpture, are similarly novel in the human evolutionary experience; for millennia, visual art, like theater or dance, was a collaborative enterprise, experienced in public, not private. Contrary to Professor Dutton’s confident assertion, the arts have long been and currently
are
essentially social.

But as we are about to see, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the arts evolved in the service of group coordination. There are other possibilities.

1
. Dutton, D. (2009).
The art instinct
. New York: Bloomsbury.

2
. Dutton, D. (2009).
The art instinct
. New York: Bloomsbury.

3
. Boyd, B. (2009).
On the origin of stories: Evolution, cognition, and fiction
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

4
. Pinker, S. (2002).
The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature
. New York: Viking.

5
. Voland, E. (2003). Aesthetic preferences in the world of artifacts: Adaptations for the evaluation of honest signals? In E. Voland & K. Grammer (Eds.),
Evolutionary aesthetics
. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

6
. Flaubert, G. (2010).
Madame Bovary
. (L. Davis, Transl.). New York: Viking.

7
. Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist paradigm.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 205,
581–598.

8
. Sahlins, M. (1972).
Stone age economics.
Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction.

9
. Kirschner, S., & Tomasello, M. (2010). Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children.
Evolution and Human Behavior, 31,
354–364.

10
. Conard, N. J., Malina, M., & Munzel, S. C. (2009). New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany.
Nature, 460,
737–740.

11
. Dissanayake, E. (2000). Antecedents of the temporal arts in early mother-infant interaction. In N. Wallin, B. Merker, & S. Brown (Eds.),
The origins of music.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

12
. Dissanayake, E. (2000).
Art and intimacy: How the arts began
. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

13
. Fernald, A. (1989). Intonation and communicative intent in mothers’ speech to infants: Is the melody the message?
Child Development, 60,
1497–1510.

14
. McNeill, W. H. (1982).
The pursuit of power
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

15
. McNeill, W. (1995).
Keeping together in time: Dance and drill in human history
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

16
. Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J., Hood, W. R., & Sherif, C. W. (1961).
Intergroup conflict and cooperation: The robbers cave experiment
. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Book Exchange.

17
. Merker, B. (2000). Synchronous chorusing and human origins. In N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, & S. Brown (Eds.),
The origins of music
. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

18
. Hagen, E., & Bryant, G. (2003). Music and dance as a coalition signaling system.
Human Nature, 14,
21–51.

19
. Lakin, J. L., Jeffries, V. E., Cheng, C. M., & Chartrand, T. L. (2003). The chameleon effect as social glue: Evidence for the evolutionary significance of nonconscious mimicry.
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 27,
145–162.

C
HAPTER
S
IX
Art II: Play, Practice, and
Sex (Again)

P
ERHAPS ART EVOLVED BECAUSE
it provided an adaptive payoff via learning, something that benefited individuals regardless of its impact on the larger social group. After all, the arts offer abundant opportunities for instruction. John Dryden maintained that theater in particular offers “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” Revisiting our earlier and perhaps overly negative discussion of art as providing vicarious, pornography-like opportunities for “cheap thrills,” maybe the emphasis should be less on the arts as procurer of subjective pleasures and more on how they provide palatable opportunities for adaptive information gathering, whether boring or dangerous or in between.

Art—particularly literature—can be useful in providing not just “teachable moments,” but also “teachable narratives,” stories that have genuine substance while offering prolonged connection as
we work our way through them. Such instructive narratives aren’t necessarily as simplistic and iconic as “What might happen if I kill my father and marry my mother?” or “What are my options if Uncle Claude kills Dad and then marries Mom?” Rather, things can be at least somewhat more subtle: how to navigate a boring marriage to an even more boring country doctor, and what is likely to transpire if you have an affair? Beyond narratives of personal drama or historical scope (such as Napoleon’s invasion of Russia), imaginative stories—especially if they are not too imaginative, that is, if they retain the key quality of believability—can provide lessons that help us navigate the ordinary daily dramas that constitute a normal life.

Nor is the potential payoff of art limited to learning about our personal lives; it might help us explore the real world more generally. “Art opens up new dimensions of possibility space,” according to Bryan Boyd, “and populates it with imaginative particulars.” Or, as Lewis Mumford once suggested, “If man had not encountered dragons and hippogriffs in dreams, he might not have conceived of atoms.” Maybe so, but isn’t it equally likely that we have often been misled by our imagination, deluded into believing in dragons and hippogriffs, along with ogres, saints, demons, dragons, gods, gremlins, trolls, and fairies? When dealing with the real world, which is notably intransigent, a case can be made that the human imagination needs not so much wings as lead weights. We must be anchored in reality, if only because when it comes to the harsh truths of evolutionary success or failure, that’s precisely where we find ourselves.

This, in turn, makes it all the more puzzling that when it comes to literature and its verbal companion, storytelling, people across the globe prefer fiction to nonfiction. One might expect, by contrast, that people would react with disdain and disgust to stories that are known to be untrue! After all, we have little use for dull knives, unpalatable food, ships that don’t float, or houses that fall down—that is, things that don’t meet the stern tests presented by reality. And yet, it’s not quite true that we lower our standards when it comes to fiction,
so long as it is acknowledged for what it is
.

John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, two leaders in the new discipline of evolutionary psychology, note that “It appears as if humans have evolved specialized cognitive machinery that allows us to
enter and participate in imagined worlds.”
¹
They call it “decoupled cognition,” the quality—if not unique among
Homo sapiens
, then without doubt unusually developed in our species—of knowingly playing “make-believe.” Children do it all the time; adults, too, in the guise of fiction in particular, and the arts in general.

Aristotle, in his
Poetics
, argued that people have an innate tendency to imitate, thereby creating representations of the real world:

For it is an instinct of human beings from childhood to engage in mimesis (indeed, this distinguishes them from other animals: man is the most mimetic of all, and it is through mimesis that he develops his earliest understanding), and equally natural that everyone enjoys mimetic objects. A common occurrence indicates this: we enjoy contemplating the most precise images of things whose actual sight is painful to us, such as forms of the vilest animals and of corpses.

But positing an “instinct” for mimesis no more explains its existence than does the claim that people engage in art simply because they have an art instinct.
ⁱ
In his book
Creative Evolution
, French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that the key to evolution—and to consciousness—was possession of an
élan vital
, to which biologist Julian Huxley responded that this helped explain the nature of life about as much as we illuminate the nature of a railway engine by pointing to its “
élan locomotif
.” (A few centuries earlier, in Molière’s
The Imaginary Invalid
, we learned similarly, from a quack doctor, that opium causes sleep by virtue of its “soporific power.”) The biologically relevant question is, “Why are people moved to imitate aspects of the real world?” Such imitation, even when undertaken seriously, has an unmistakably playful component.

Human beings are the most playful of animals, and in his book
On the Origin of Stories
, Brian Boyd argues for play as the keystone adaptive payoff of the arts. Art, he points out, inspires cognitive processing of complex information patterns and is therefore good for us; moreover, it does so in a context that—for all its
seriousness—is nonetheless one step removed from the real world, thereby allowing a greater margin for error while giving free rein to imagination and experimentation.

Dogs use their characteristic “play-bow” (head, shoulders, and front legs down, rear legs and back elevated) to indicate that what is to follow is “cognitively decoupled” from other, more serious acts. People use “once upon a time.” Boyd points out that “in play we act as if within quotation marks,” and that

we can define art as cognitive play with pattern. Just as play refines behavioral options over time by being self-rewarding, so art increases cognitive skills, repertoires, and sensitivities. A work of art acts like a playground for the mind, a swing or a slide or a merry-go-round of visual or aural or social pattern. The more often and the more exuberantly animals play, the more they hone skills, widen repertoires, and sharpen sensitivities. Play therefore has evolved to be highly self-rewarding. Through the compulsiveness of play, animals incrementally alter muscle tone and neural wiring, strengthen and increase the processing speed of synaptic pathways, and improve their capacity and potential for performance in later, less forgiving circumstances.