Darwin vs. the Art Critic: Evolutionary Psychology’s Challenge to Aesthetics
Presented by Jeremy Beahan, Adjunct Instructor of Aesthetics & Philosophy, Kendall College of Art & Design
About the Speaker
Fundamentalist raised and educated, Jeremy Beahan graduated from Grace Bible College and Cornerstone University with a dual degree in social studies and religious education. While training for ministry Jeremy underwent a dramatic de-conversion as a culmination to many years of questioning. Today Jeremy works to promote critical thinking and skeptical inquiry in his local community – he has been an active member of the Freethought Association (now CFI Michigan) since 2002. When not hiking on Michigan’s beautiful trails and beaches Jeremy teaches college classes in Philosophy, World Religions, Biblical Literature, Aesthetics, and Critical Thinking at Kendall College of Art and Design/Ferris State University. Jeremy is also a co-host and producer for the Reasonable Doubts podcast providing a skeptical guide to religion with a focus on counter-apologetics.
About the Event
Summary with Commentary for the 252nd meeting of CFI- Michigan, held on May 14, 2008 in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
This summary writer wishes to thank JW for filling in so ably in doing the previous meeting summary (#251) — Austin Dacey’s presentation. I had a prior special family commitment that evening so was unable to attend and take notes for that meeting.
Our next meeting will be held on May 28 and will be on the topic: Evolution Now: A Message of Moral Responsibility. It will be presented by Karel Rogers, PhD, retired Professor of Biology and former Department Chair of Biology at Grand Valley State University.
The topic for this meeting was Darwin vs. the Art Critic: Evolutionary Psychology’s Challenge to Aesthetics. This was presented by our own Jeremy Beahan; long time member of the Freethought Association and now CFI- Michigan. Jeremy is an Adjunct Instructor of Aesthetics and Philosophy at Kendall College of Art & Design in Grand Rapids. He and his wife, Jennifer- who is our Assistant Director, live in we affectionately call the Freethought Commune in GR He also co-produces the Reasonable Doubts podcast. Check our website for more information on this highly popular podcast.
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then why do we argue about which musician lays down the best tracks; which director has the best body of work; which playwright is the greatest? Most philosophers abandoned the attempt to find an objective standard by which to judge the value of art. There simply did not appear to be any universally held aesthetic values. And if any could be found, what could possibly be the origin of them? New insights from evolutionary psychology are shedding light on these questions; challenging long held views of aesthetics in the meantime.
Jeremy began with a couple disclaimers, given with his trademark dry sense of humor. He both took responsibility for all that he would say that evening but simultaneously denied any responsibility for all that was said that evening. He did not hold himself out as an expert on the subject of his presentation but drew heavily upon sources from professionals in the field; any errors, however, should not be attributed to those whose work he drew from. He is employed by Kendall College of Art & Design but did not represent the institution during his presentation. His remarks were his own but shaped by his independent reading and research. A book that Beahan highlighted was Denis Dutton’s Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology that deals with how we have come to respond to the aesthetic features in our environments. Another excellent book by Steven Pinker was mentioned: The Blank Slate. Despite the title, Pinker argues against the tabula rasa concept, favoring the more enlightened understanding that we come prepackaged with propensities to respond to certain patterns in astonishingly universal ways, as shaped by our ancestry, including the deep ancestry of evolutionary timeframes where not just phenotypic characteristics were forged in our hominid lineage but also cultural and psychological evolutionary qualities. These qualities, as pertaining to tastes and the values we assign works of art, Beahan presented under the title: Aesthetic Universals.
Jeremy introduced the term axiology into his presentation. This is the study of the nature of values and value judgments and may be used in both the study of ethics and aesthetics; ethics is all about values and aesthetic judgments and determinations are made on responses to universal values held cross- culturally. Before he ventured too far into his talk, Jeremy wanted to clarify some issues, including the misunderstanding of what aesthetics is and is not. One thing that it is not, is the critique of artwork. It isn’t concerned with all that is pretty. One may, in fact, talk about aesthetics at length without even mentioning the subject of art! When investigating the underlying universal values shared in virtually all cultures as these apply to the appreciation of the arts, however, we may turn to the deep philosophical discourses on the subject from the likes of Hume, Kant and other great philosophical thinkers.
In David Hume’s 1757 essay: Of the Standards of Taste, he argues that the general principles of taste are uniform in human nature, noting that we enjoy the same works of art as the ancients and that this appreciation knows no boundaries of culture or time. He thought of this as constant common human nature. Immanuel Kant agreed and incorporated these ideas in his theory of beauty in his Critique of Judgment, where he asserted that humans possess a sensus communis- or a shared human sense.
Later, however, the blank slate notion took hold, which contended that we are born ready and receptive for culture to write upon our consciousness, informing our tastes and preferences. Each individual’s unique cultural heritage and suite of experiences gave that individual his own unique perspective; those within the same cultural milieu tended to share more subjective aesthetic values than those from other cultures, in this formulation. It culminated in cultural constructionism, which considered art to be purely a determined product of culture, and had the viewpoint that there were as many kinds of artistic values as there were cultures.
Evolutionary psychology considers the psychological and cultural life of humans in terms of their genetic inheritance as an evolved species, with survival and reproduction being driving forces behind the universally shared artistic values. Our mental capacities, inclinations and desires, then, are adaptations developed in the last two million years since the Pleistocene era, and developed fully 10,000 years ago, at the beginning of the Holocene- the time when cities and agriculture first emerged. Writing and more advanced tool use was coming into being then too. The brain itself, however, has changed very little since that time, so we behave and interpret our environment much as we did during our distant ancestor’s time—using the same basic toolkit.
Evolutionary psychology posits the existence of innate interests, capacities and tastes, laid down through the processes of natural and sexual selection. The metaphor that Jeremy used for our brain, derived from his research, was that of the Swiss army knife. In this view, the mind is a set of tools and capacities specifically adapted to tasks and interests developed in the Pleistocene but that still hold sway today and interpret reproductive fitness, the interpretation of hierarchy and status, an acute interest in sexual pairings among our fellow humans, and both the use of art and interpretation of it. These adaptations were formed for small hunter- gatherer groups that our ancestors lived in for 100,000 generations before modern civilization began. It is this long period of adaptation (what is often referred to as our environment of evolutionary adaptation) that influences our tastes and interests today more than the relatively brief period of modernity that we now experience.
One tool in our Swiss army knife brain that developed then that has become part and parcel to what it is to be human is our language use with universal syntactic rules. This summary writer adds that Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, shared with his readers how children who are born into an adult group that uses a pidgin form of communication will instinctively develop it into a full blown language, complete with this innate sense of grammar and syntax. This occurs even with deaf children- who generate a true sign language out of the non-linguistically based gestures that they are exposed to.
We also developed kinship systems that include a wide range of patterns seen throughout cultures, including the universal incest taboo. Also certain phobias that made sense in our environment of evolutionary adaptation in the past but have little practical use now abide with us today. What aided survival then is what we come pre-packaged with now, even though our environment has changed drastically. We also have a strong sense of enhancing our own genetic legacy by use of everything from nepotism to allo-parents (for the latter, this writer recommends S. Hrdy’s book: Mother Nature). Our innate sense of justice, fairness, and the implementation of consequences for breaking away from the norms of the society were first developed during the long period of time where we existed in small bands. I include one example of our moral sense and ideas of justice as given to us by our ancestral past in the following:
Selected thoughts from pur previous presente,r Austin Dacey, in his book The Secular Conscience; Prometheus Books; pages 130-131. He writes of Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser’s large (several thousand subjects from more than one hundred countries), cross- cultural study of people’s judgments about hypothetical moral dilemmas involving the permissibility of killing another person. The subjects were from a wide variety of cultures, backgrounds and demographics and included children prior to an age where school might impact their moral attitudes. Three striking effects were found: The first was that the effects of demographic and cultural variables on the pattern of moral judgments are insignificant. Second, it was found that there is a dissociation between judgment and justification for moral verdicts of right and wrong. And finally, there are three principles that appear to unconsciously guide people’s judgments, when consequences are held constant. These include: people tend to judge intended harm more harshly than foreseeable harm. Harm that is the result of action is deemed worse that harm arising from inaction. And harm from physical contact is felt to be more egregious than harm occurring from no contact.
Hauser contends that these results indicate a shared moral grammar, as he termed it, which shapes the moral reasoning of all normal human beings. This is a set of universal assumptions embedded in our psychology. As with the underlying syntactical structure we find in all human languages (see Pinker and Chomsky as well), this moral grammar was in all likelihood shaped by natural selection among our distant ancestors.
Hauser’s research has been used to explain why the distinction between causing and allowing feels so natural and right to us, despite being morally indefensible upon reflection. He believes that this is because our moral intuitions evolved to serve the reproductive interests of our ancient ancestors, who are thought to have lived in small bands of fewer than two hundred individuals. But while these patterns evolved naturally and were successful enough as adaptations for those small groups of ancient peoples, they do not necessarily point us in the right direction today. I would add that evolutionary adaptation does not occur with morality as the driving force, which is why the ancient tribes in the Bible and the gods they concocted for themselves cannot be considered the last word on morality, simply because their practices lent some degree of success to them, as adaptive strategies, in their time and place and level of enlightenment. Later in Jeremy’s presentation, he spoke of rape and other nasty behaviors by humans (and even some other non-human animals) that emerges naturally as one of many reproductive strategies or struggles for dominance and control. That it occurs naturally—that it IS—does not make it right morally—something that OUGHT to be. The failure to distinguish between what is and what ought to be—feeling that anything that occurs naturally is automatically justified- is called by philosophers the Naturalistic Fallacy.
There is much more that could be said about societal ordering, gender roles, relationship issues, etc., but for the purposes of Jeremy’s central topic in his presentation, we shall continue to explore art and aesthetics from the vantage point of evolutionary psychology. All cultures produce art. Not all cultures produce paintings, or other specific forms of art; and different populations employ different media and show some stylistically different portrayals of their environments, typically. But themes and intrinsic values abide throughout the different places and times that art is created. Artwork that resonates with people often provides intense pleasure and is imbued with the capacity to elicit a strong emotional response. Evolutionary psychology maintains that intense experiences of avoidance, revulsion, pain, pleasure, fear, love, respect, etc., all have adaptive relevance. Now, our lifestyle is one where fatty and energy- rich foods are in abundance, resulting in masses of people having a tendency toward obesity and other health concerns. But our desire for fatty and sweet foods abides because it was a survival adaptation back when foods containing fats and sugars were scarce and acquiring a strong urge for procuring them meant better fitness from an evolutionary standpoint. The same holds true with our sensation of sexual pleasure and the universal revulsion we have over the smell of rotting meat; those without such a keen avoidance mechanism in our past, consumed meat filled with deadly organisms and failed to reproduce as effectively as those who were innately repelled by the tell-tale smell.
Our Pleistocene inheritance causes us to respond as we do to the comportment of others, the environment, landscapes, love of listening to narratives with identifiable themes- including imaginary ones filled with dangers and overcoming romantic obstacles, and our keen interest in problem solving, communal activity and displays of skills and virtuosity. This, again, leads us to art. Art gives the practitioner problems to solve and presents obstacles to overcome; storytelling with complex narratives that our minds, evolved to keep track of detailed social contracts and liaisons and power struggles, are especially adept at finding concordance and affinity with.
The landscapes that modern people enjoy appreciate and respond to the world over are filled with the things that our ancestors had to contend with and adapt to, such as large mammals (what our ancestors preyed upon and fled from and eventually domesticated- in some instances at least- see Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel for thoughts on what large mammals could be domesticated and which ones could not and what that meant to the collections of humans surrounded by these different sorts of animals as to their relative dominance over other groups. The rhino, for instance COULD have been an amazing battle animal if it lent itself to domestication; the horse lent enormous warfare advantage to those who first shared their environment with them and were, therefore, able to domesticate the equines.) Other universals are the colors blue and green, with blue being the most adored hue, then greens following just behind; of course these signify water and foliage. Depictions of water and trees themselves are highly prized and responded to in art. Also images of women and children (progeny and producers of progeny), and historical figures (status, dominance, skilled individuals, leaders, etc.) are sought after in pictures that are deemed attractive.
Jeremy talked about the Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid studies on environmental preferences, where they incorporated all these themes and elements into a single perfect picture to resonate with the most people. The painting combined such improbable juxtapositionings as George Washington and hippos, along with water, trees, lots of blues and greens, women and children, and so on. While this example may be a rather oddball assortment, what we see more conventionally in our popular art—the images that are the inexpensive and ubiquitous in our lives—is given to us in the form of calendar art, which incorporates many of these themes. Think of the most popular calendar art content: landscapes, well- known figures, women displaying an abundance of sexually receptive characteristics and markers for successful offspring production, large mammals, easy to interpret subject matter, etc.
While the primary sources I investigated and Jeremy’s talk didn’t include this, I would submit too, that popular images that fall outside of the aforementioned subject matter still are informed by an understanding of evolutionary psychology. For instance: cars and motorcycles are common calendar art fare. But the autos shown are not enticing because they will get one from home to the local grocery store to pick up bread, milk and eggs. No—they are fast and powerful—they are extensions of the driver and enhance his (often his) sense of machismo and status. And the vehicles are prized for the skill and craftsmanship that went into their design and creation, just as works of art are. Reds dominate for their sexual and power connotations as well as how they resemble the color of life: blood. There is a sense of danger in fast cars and motorcycles that the owner must master. There is a very real mystique involved in the lore of motorcycles. If the Hell’s Angels had driven Yugos, we never would have that group etched into our collective consciousness, I submit. Special motorized vehicles are expensive to own too, also adding to status. Cars and other fast and costly motorcraft are often referred to as sexy and are seen as enhancing the sex appeal of the driver. It is probably no wonder that even now, in the age of power- assisted vehicles, a greater equity between the sexes, more female independence, and so on, that if one sees a couple in a car, the man is usually driving; as is the case with the motorcycle, where the spot behind the male has an unfortunate designation. There are men, too, who feel emasculated when their big strong canine is weakened or injured; an this extension of their masculinity is, for them, no longer as potent.
The peacock’s tail has been extensively written about in the literature dealing with sexual selection and was presented by Beahan as well. The idea is that a male possessing an enormous and lavish train is displaying its fitness in two ways. One: the more eye spots festooning the tail and the more lush and rich the coloring—as well as great length and extravagance of the encumbering train, the more healthy, robust and fit he is. He is the best candidate for a female to select to produce the highest quality offspring. Females invest so much more time in gestation and rearing of the offspring that their choices must be better informed. For the male- he may simply skip off to his next breeding partner after a very quick expenditure of energy and semen, so his strategy is to spread far and wide; hers: more wisely and with greater discrimination. The other thing that the great burdensome train of the peacock displays to the peahen is that despite this huge handicap, he has the skills to avoid predation and live to grow such a gorgeous train. He must be smart and cunning as well as physically fit. How else could he schlep such a ridiculous mass of heavily adorned feathers around unscathed?
The mind and what is produced by it are akin to the peacock’s tail. Both are far more endowed than is necessary for mere survival. There has to be a sexual component to such an overgrown organ as the brain. Before getting into the cognitive adornments that help ensnare a mate, however, we shall examine some physical displays. Jeremy introduced us to the Wodaabe of Nigeria and Niger. The men of the tribe who seek a mate do so in the Wol festival. This festival involves vigorous dance displays demonstrating endurance, stamina and, no doubt, coordination and artistry. They also make themselves up in what to Western eyes appears somewhat effeminate. The winner, as judged by the physically attractive females who make their selections, gets to sleep with the judges. Over time, this female choice has produced males with features such as the straightest noses, largest eyes, whitest teeth, and who are taller over time, than the men of neighboring tribes who do not participate in this ritual display and mating ceremony.
While this creature was not mentioned in this talk, a non-human animal that produces what may arguably be considered art, is the Bower bird. Interestingly, what it displays to its potential mating partners, is very much in line with what human- produced art indicates. These include the ability to gather and utilize resources, high energy and creativity, intelligence, stamina and drive, etc. We humans have developed a taste for partners who exhibit warm, witty, creative, intelligent, and generous characteristics.
Returning to the peacock train analogy for the human mind: the mind may be seen as a gaudy, over- powered, home entertainment system that developed to help our ancestors attract, amuse, and bed each other. It uses lots of energy and breaks down more easily than a simpler structure, but its value as a reproductive aid—getting one’s genes into the next generation- is inestimable. Besides the visual arts, there are the highly esteemed raconteurs, poets, writers, and orators who display their fitness through extravagant displays of the wordsmith’s trade. Jeremy spoke of how our vocabulary is vastly hypertrophied from what is necessary for survival; certainly if reproductive elements are removed from the picture, anyway. The average human, he noted, has a vocabulary of some 60,000 words, while about 98% of daily speech utilizes a mere 4,000 words! When a virtuosity of wordplay is employed it indicates intelligence and creativity and may be seen as cognitive foreplay. I would add that it is our minds that are our primary sexual organ. I think of the great many other creatures that can derive an enormous amount of information about prospective mates from their sense of smell; rodents, for example, can determine the fitness, approximate age, receptivity to successful mating, and a large number of other indicators of health and other attributes regarding another’s successful breeding capacity, merely by sniffing another rodent. Humans, being less endowed with such a wonderful olfactory sense, go by what we display from the products of our minds. Through writing one may discern another’s hopes, dreams, goals, aspirations, interests ideals, and fears- as well as intellectual capacity, creativity and alertness and response to the environment.
Jeremy provided us with a personal story of a childhood playmate named Jennie who was 13 years old at the time that they became friends. But Jennie did not stay 13 and once she became Jennifer—a young woman- Jeremy no longer had her undivided attention. Other males offered perhaps more athleticism or other qualities that he did not display to the same degree as his competitors for Jennifer’s affection. He thought they had played up the friend thing long enough. So he began writing what he now concedes to have been bad poetry. But poetry displays creativity, intelligence and a head full of ideas that may be artfully arranged into a word bouquet to offer to one’s sweetie. This he did, in the hope of convincing Jennifer that he had his own qualities that were worth paying attention to. He eventually did woo and charm his beloved Jennifer and now they are a happily wedded couple. Poetry is an extravagant use of language and takes an extravagantly endowed brain to produce it—relative to our fellow non-human creatures. Our brains seem to be grown to such tremendous complexity and size to produce that which will ensnare others into being potential reproductive partners.
Art, Jeremy cautioned, does NOT reduce to sex, but the sexual component does, nonetheless, have great explanatory power as to over-abundance, extravagance, and other too-much elements that are seen in art.
Dance, as an art form, displays one’s vigor, grace, dedication to the development of a complex skill and, of course, displays one’s well-honed physique. Musical virtuosity entails a fine mind, investment of great focus and discipline, fine motor coordination, and so on. All the arts provide fitness indicators to others. I submit that a certain rotund Italian male tenor of great renown was seen as sexually attractive by dint of his amazing singing ability. The Great Agnostic, Robert Green Ingersoll, was likewise not possessed of athleticism or any other physical attribute of genrally understood attractiveness—other than a slightly protruding lower lip that some women found alluring- but because of his masterful power of oratory, he had a collection of what his wife called Robert’s Sweethearts who found him particularly magnetic.
An aspect of art that is necessary for it to have appeal for most people is its perceived level of difficulty to produce. The shorthand for this is beauty equals difficulty and high cost. Some of the following will be repeated information, but the artist of merit is generally seen as possessing intelligence, energy, good eye- hand coordination, fine motor skills, creativity, access to rare materials, able to learn and develop complex skills and with sufficient free time in which to create and hone his/her craft.
Art has sex appeal. It is not so much the content, per se, but the act of making and displaying it that counts most for appeal to others. It has to be challenging for the producer to create and just as difficult to fake. As Jeremy noted, one of the greatest slams one can make to one who considers him/herself to be an artist is to label him or her a faker, or to say that the individual’s art lacks authenticity. As an artist (painter) myself, I have a vivid recollection of a mating partner from my salad years who wounded me to the quick when she called me a dauber. This stung far more than if she had used some epithet that had no artistic connotation to it. Cheaters and fakers are greatly despised because they circumvent and exploit the admirable traits displayed by those seen as genuine practitioners of art. They go for the gain without the pain of achieving and painstakingly developing difficult skills. It is all surface with no substance, with it’s superficial allure aimed toward the same goals- though without the sweat equity and genuine possession of true talent.
Jeremy talked to us about another universal besides those collected together by Komar and Melamid. This regards the hip to waist ratio of the female form. This ratio remains virtually the same across cultures and time. The waist may expand, but so long as the hips are pronounced to the same degree in order to maintain that ratio, then it is seen as compelling to the male eye. This relates to what our ancestors would have determined to be a fit breeding partner and now comes down to us as sex appeal. Likewise, when a hyper- feminized female face is composited together—one displaying high eyebrows, a delicate jawline, full lips and so on- this visage is viewed as highly attractive to most males. The explanation is that such a face is produced in nature by high levels of estrogen and low levels of testosterone. Even though we do not make conscious calculations about these levels, our ancestors learned that females displaying such markers were more fertile and this became a standard of attractiveness that is universal. Such females were more sought after and males who sought them out passed along the preferences for such appearances. In other presentations, speakers have noted how faces with good symmetry are seen as more attractive.. There really is no particular reason why this should be an agreed upon good quality or value. But our ancestors found that symmetrical faces indicated that possessors of said had a better resistance to diseases common then. It is better to reproduce with one who may offer this resistance to one’s offspring. Now, with most of these scourges of our past no longer an issue, we still retain this attraction for facial symmetry because it came down to us from our ancestral forebears.
If art and the appreciation of forms, colors, patterns, types of subject matter, etc. are all individually subjective issues or are culture- specific, then why, Jeremy asked, would there be so many universals to find so easily that span time and location? One example he gave to highlight the commonality of sentiment over musical icons regarded the Beatles. He asked which one was our favorite from the erstwhile Fab Four? The common consensus is John Lennon; the real genius behind the group’s success. If art is such a subjective experience then how is it that we can have a collective general agreement over what constitutes the best from among individuals from the same grouping?
He also juxtaposed Thomas Kincaid with Picasso and Dogs Playing Poker with the Mona Lisa to show that we recognize exemplars of high and low (or lower anyway) art quite readily, without special training. Even those among the general population who actually prefer what is understood to be lower art, recognize it for what it is. They do not confuse their preferences with sound intrinsic quality judgments. As to professionals—those who are well- versed in the subject of art- such as art critics- they also generally follow suit in their essential judgments of the relative quality of works of art. Should not their independent, subjective individualized tastes dictate what they will judge as superior, resulting in as many different opinions as there are critics? Instead, as Jeremy noted, their pronouncements show more nuanced differences of opinion rather than being diametrically opposed.
A great work of art may be termed beautiful but beauty does not exist as a separate component within a subject or image or object. What we respond to has more to do with the skill that it took to produce the work, as well as the degree of creativity shown, use of conventions and innovations, etc. In other words, what the artist did with the raw materials. The painter of beautiful art does not open up a tube of paint labeled beauty and brush it on the canvas liberally. Instead, successful artists tap into what is collectively responded to, and utilize those elements in their works. Generally- speaking, this is an intuitive act, rather than a calculated one.
The food critic may have a highly developed sense of taste but his or her judgments about what is the best dish among a variety of dishes would likely be agreed upon by those among the general public. However good taste is not a bottled ingredient that may be shaken onto- or stirred into- a prepared meal. When ingredients- none of which individually would constitute gastronomic delight- are skillfully combined, however, there will likely be common consent as to its superiority among other dishes that are less well prepared.
One intriguing part of Beahan’s presentation, among many others, was a grouping of different types of landscapes. Adults selected out some preferentially, such as the sylvan forest scene, or mountainous region, as examples. But when small children were asked to choose what they liked the best— those who had not been impinged upon by their cultural upbringing too much yet—they invariably selected the image of…the savanna! It did not matter what sort of environment they were exposed to from birth; it was the picture of the environment of our ancient hominid ancestors that resonated for these tykes. There is an almost goosebump- inducing quality in thinking of this ancient memory that still abides in the minds of our contemporary children.
Another aspect of art- making that has aesthetic value is its exclusivity; not everyone can do it. This denotes a superiority and degree of achievement showing a potentially good genetic endowment on the part of the artist, who may pass these traits down to future progeny. With so-called modern art, there is still a cachet involved in the communication between artist and art- lover. The patron or admirer of more abstracted or non-objective art forms may consider him/herself to be more sophisticated and clever, while bestowing such credentials upon the artist who produces such fare as well. It is not hard to tell where the appellation of the term snob came from in regards to artists and the elites (usually said with derision) for those who patronize the artists who create challenging work to comprehend.
The appreciation of the arts is cut off from the gustatory or sexual pleasures that are more readily and easily associated with reproductive success. Kant referred to this appreciation as a brute feeling; one that engages the higher faculties. But it all flows together; the sense of pleasure derived from seeing great art is tied into the mechanisms of the brain and that brain has come to be adapted and developed as it is through evolution. Evolutionary psychology examines how and why we have come to behave and respond to our environment as we have.
But evolutionary psychology is still rather new with much left to be discovered and with bad ideas being discarded while better ones are added to- and connected with- more established fields of study. Pleistocene considerations are still unable to help us distinguish between calendar art and what is deemed a great masterpiece. A beautifully and skillfully wrought picture of an arid landscape or a depiction of an aged, withered woman may still be highly regarded and recognized as products of enormous virtuosity and talent even while they show us images that we are not primed to respond to positively from our ancestral past. The pin up girl or the lush green meadow scene elicits an easy response and an easy answer as to why we respond to such imagery from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology. As to the examples given above, perhaps it is our deeper feelings about reverence for age or how we are stirred by the technical achievement of the artist that resonates with us when the subject matter itself does not intrinsically call back to our distant ancestors’ adapted tastes.
During the question and answer period, one stalwart member of CFI- Michigan—and an evolutionary biologist- quipped, and I will close this summary with his words: Natural selection is about production. Sexual selection is about marketing.
Synthesized by Charles LaRue
