Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature (30 page)

Interestingly, a similar suggestion was made by Oscar Wilde, a master of aesthetics but a novice when it came to evolutionary biology. Wilde contrasted the practicality of ethics with the luxuriance of aesthetics: “Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, variety and change.”
⁸

The mind’s moonlight reveals unexpected patterns; for example, via language, our great-, great-grandmothers and -grandfathers were able to get, almost literally, into each other’s minds—something that isn’t an option for the nonlinguistic. As a result, and perhaps for the first and only time in biological evolution, thought itself—via sexual selection—became subject to direct adaptive pressure. It is often and correctly stated that the sexiest part of the human body is what resides between the ears. Via language in particular (and, perhaps, the arts in general), mental traits became as apparent to the sexual chooser as a partner’s height, weight, body fat, breast size, or shoulder width. And as a result, we were selected to be simultaneously consumers as well as producers of mental accomplishment. If so, then we also literally created the mental capacities that led to such accomplishments, by selecting as sexual partners individuals with the capacity to accomplish; at the same time, sexual selection would also have been favoring the ability to be astute “art appreciators,” insofar as our ancestors who made good choices would have been rewarded by leaving more descendants.

In addition to the prospect of illuminating the adaptive value of the arts, Miller’s critique of much cognitive psychology is cogent, and perhaps even devastating:

Most experimental psychology views the human mind exclusively as a computer that learns to solve problems, not as an entertainment system that evolved to attract sexual partners. Also, psychology experiments usually test people’s efficiency and consistency when interacting with a computer, not their wit and warmth when interacting with a potential spouse. … But evolution does not care about information processing as such: it cares about fitness.

Miller adroitly brings in Thorstein Veblen and the power of conspicuous consumption as sexual advertisement, asking, “How could mate choice favor a costly, useless ornament over a cheaper, more beneficial ornament?” to which he adds, puckishly, “Why should a man give a woman a useless diamond engagement ring when he could buy her a nice big potato, which she could at least eat?” In a sense, mental quality is also something of a “useless ornament,” except insofar as it is profoundly useful as an indicator of mate quality. And one of the best ways to demonstrate such quality is via language in particular and the arts in general.

But the argument isn’t limited to artistic use of language. In fact, in
Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man
, Darwin ventured a similar hypothesis for the evolution of music, emphasizing its connection to love via courtship:

Music arouses in us various emotions. … It awakens the gentler feelings of tenderness and love, which readily pass into devotion. … All these facts with respect to music and impassioned speech become intelligible to a certain extent, if we may assume that musical tones and rhythm were used by our half-human ancestors, during the season of courtship, when animals of all kinds are excited not only by love, but by the strong passions of jealousy, rivalry, and triumph.

In addition to a possible connection between music and courtship vocalizations (e.g., bird songs), Darwin emphasized its possible relationship to language as well, notably emotion-laden oratory:

The impassioned orator, bard or musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which his half-human ancestors long ago aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their courtship and rivalry.

Among our ancestors, Miller writes, “If an individual made you laugh, sparked your interest, told good stories and made you feel well cared for, then you might have been more disposed to mate.” And today? We take our dates to restaurants where we pay professional chefs to cook them great food, or to concerts or dance clubs where professional musicians excite their auditory systems, or to films where professional actors entertain them with vicarious adventures, or to museums where they admire the works of great painters, and so forth. The chefs, musicians, authors, painters, and actors do not actually get to have sex with our dates. They just get paid. We get the sex if the date goes well. Of course, modern courtship still requires talking, and we still have to look reasonably good, and it is crucially important to demonstrate at least a passing familiarity—ideally, full critical understanding and appreciation—of the performances and productions in question. But at least in the wealthy West, the market economy has shifted much courtship effort from the principals to professionals. To pay the professionals, we have to make money, which means getting a job. The better
one’s education, the better one’s job, the more money one can make, and the better the vicarious courtship one can afford. Consumerism thus turns the tables on ancestral patterns of human courtship, making it a commodity that can be bought and sold.

Miller usefully distinguishes between “top-down” and “bottomup” strategies, the former involving elite culture, created by those few possessing remarkable talent, the latter involving “folk aesthetics,” made by normal people. Interestingly, his fitness display theory of aesthetics works better for folk aesthetics than for its elite counterpart. Folk aesthetics concerns what ordinary people find beautiful or otherwise appealing; elite aesthetics concerns the objects of art that upper crust opinion makers anoint as deserving time and attention. Folk aesthetics deals far more directly with the talent of the artist. Here is Miller’s account:

In response to a landscape painting, folks might say, “Well, it’s a pretty good picture of a cow, but it’s a little smudgy,” while elites might say, “How lovely to see Constable’s ardent brushwork challenging the anodyne banality of the pastoral genre.” The first response seems a natural expression of typical human aesthetic tastes concerning other people’s artistic displays, and the second seems more of a verbal display in its own right.

After pondering this, it is difficult not to sympathize with the “Philistine” assessment of, say, abstract expressionism that shrugs, “My dog could have made that,” or “Looks more like an accident than like art.” Miller touches an important biological chord, whereby works of art are evaluated specifically as indicators of the artist’s talent and skill, rather than by what the work “says.” His approach requires us to cease condescending and ask why most people are so resistant to forms of art that do not reveal, clearly, the competence of the artist. When someone viewing an exhibition of modern art—or better yet, a novel “installation”—responds something like, “This is art? My 3-year-old could do the same,” the irked parent may be labeling himself or herself a Philistine, but is also reflecting a deep truth of human creativity: the degree to which it served to advertise something about the creator, notably his or her talent and skill.

The fact that we admire virtuosity in artistic creations—something often taken for granted—itself speaks to its origin in
sexual selection. As much as some people value
objets trouvé
, or Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades” such as his infamous “Fountain,” the reality is that most people equate good art—and certainly great art—with good (and, when possible, great) talent. We admire a rainbow, but we don’t consider it a work of art—of nature, yes, or of optics, moisture, meteorology, etc., but not of art. For that, human skill must be somewhere, somehow, on display.

Most artists, musicians, writers, etc., do not attribute their creative urges to natural selection in general or to sexual selection in particular. But this does not mean that sexual success has not fundamentally powered the creative, artistic imagination.

Perhaps, then, a more directly relevant animal model of artistic creation isn’t so much the peacock as the bowerbird, a group of species in which, unlike peacocks, the males are relatively nondescript but make up for this by building elaborate structures (bowers), which in some cases are also carefully decorated with flowers, berries, shells, feathers, pieces of scrap metal and glass, etc., all for the purpose of charming females into mating with them. They produce something remarkably similar to human art, entirely as a result of sexual selection acting through female choice.

Satin bowerbirds are among the best-studied species, with a penchant for using their beaks to paint the walls of their bowers with regurgitated fruit glop, especially favoring the color blue. Geoffrey Miller suggests that if one could interview a male satin bowerbird, it might say something like this:

I find this implacable urge for self-expression, for playing with color and form for their 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.

If art is created as a fitness indicator on the part of the artist, this might help explain why it is made, and also why the artist typically takes great pleasure in his or her achievement, often feeling compelled to struggle beyond the likelihood of immediate pecuniary rewards. But it doesn’t answer the sibling question: Why do we find
someone else’s
fitness indicators pleasurable? It is one thing to
produce
art, but why do non-artists enjoy
experiencing
it? Why isn’t the world of art populated entirely by producers, with no consumers?
^v

Answer: Maybe for the same reason that a peahen presumably enjoys looking at a peacock’s tail or the female satin bowerbird responds to the cerulean artistic accomplishments of the male. This is not to say that art is likely to be sexually arousing (although often enough, it is), but that “pleasure” in the experiencing of art needn’t be any different from the pleasure associated with experiencing good food, or rest, or sex. It is an evolutionary mechanism that motivates continued experiencing of whatever is found pleasurable—and in nearly all cases, fitness-enhancing experiences are those that generate pleasure. If so, then it would be surprising if art didn’t generate pleasure, and in fact, if it doesn’t, one can legitimately question whether it qualifies as art.

As mentioned earlier, many scholars of art—even some who have otherwise shown themselves open to evolutionary interpretations—deride the sexual selection hypothesis, just as they resist any implication that the arts have arisen as an evolutionary byproduct. In most cases, it appears that they do not fully understand the process of evolution. Thus, Brian Boyd errs in discarding the by-product hypothesis, claiming that if it were true, “if art offers only illusory benefits, people could live more successfully in cities, could cope better with the strains of urban life,
without
the pleasures
of art: … without music, stories, parades, carnivals, concerts, shows. A bleak civic environment would outdo a vibrant one.” To the contrary, this ignores the adaptive value of big brains and thus the argument that if the arts are a nonadaptive by-product of our having big brains (which might well have evolved to serve the more immediate and practical goals of social coordination, tool use, predicting the actions of others, etc.), then selection, having fostered big brains, would also foster the arts, as an unavoidable consequence. A small-brained human species might well experience a “bleak civic environment,” but it would also have to cope with the various other maladaptive consequences of having small brains.

Surprisingly, Professor Boyd also misunderstands how evolution operates to generate pleasure as the handmaiden of adaptive behavior, erroneously dispensing with the sexual selection hypothesis as follows: “If art had no role to play in human survival, if it were useless in those terms … then we would engage in art overwhelmingly in our fertile years, and only so long as fertile individuals of the opposite sex were among their audience.” Nonsense! This is equivalent to arguing that sex could not possibly be connected to reproduction, because people engage in it when they are not fertile, when postmenopausal, or when using birth control.

Evolution has outfitted our species with a penchant for sexual activity, largely because it contributes to reproductive success (but also for social, bonding reasons too), and as a result, we derive pleasure and satisfaction from sex even when reproduction is not at issue. Ditto for art: Once evolution has endowed us with an appreciation for art as produced by others as well as a penchant for creating it ourselves, there is no more reason for this appreciation and penchant to disappear among people who are nonreproductive than for couples who have elected intentional childlessness to forgo sex.

Boyd goes on to suggest, with equal illogic, that if sexual selection is involved, “An infant’s delight in hearing nursery rhymes or lullabies, a mother’s in crooning them, a grandmother’s pride in weaving designs … anyone’s silent reading of fiction of keen interest in the work of long-dead artists would be impossible to explain.”
To the contrary, images of movie stars retain their appeal even if the people depicted are long dead, just as a peahen finds a peacock’s tail attractive even if its owner might be temporarily unavailable. We can be seduced, similarly, by the music of Mozart or Beethoven, the poetry of Baudelaire or Rimbaud, or the paintings of Cezanne or Picasso without the literal prospect of combining any of their genes with our own.