![]() The problem in this treatment involves the fourth option, the idea that art is a culturally transmitted technology. If technology, spandrel and adaptation exhaust the logical space of possibilities, as I believe they do, it looks as if something has gone wrong. 46)Īs Davies finds in the course of the book that none of the three remaining options handles all the data well, at the end he reaches a somewhat negative conclusion: I am reluctant to endorse views that treat biology and culture as separate domains with very little causal interaction between them, and some such separation is presumed in this view. intend here to discount the negative fourth option - that there is no explanatory relation between art, the aesthetic, and evolution. He is also quick to set aside his fourth option: Having laid out these options, Davies immediately sets aside the third, the "vestige" hypothesis, because art has too powerful a role in our lives for this view to be likely. This "negative" fourth hypothesis is not negative in general, but only about the connection between art and biological evolution this view is that art is instead a culturally transmitted technology. Many behaviors - the making of fire and the wearing of clothing, for example - are widespread because they are culturally passed down for their usefulness, not because we are genetically programmed to express them. The relation between evolved adaptations and art behaviors might be so distant and thin that it would be misleading to claim an interesting or explanatorily fruitful link between them. Examples of vestiges in humans are the appendix, which played a role in digestion for a distant herbivore ancestor, and the coccyx, which is the remnant of a tail.Ī fourth possibility is provided by the negative hypothesis - that there is no significant connection between art and evolution. Or third, they might be vestiges, that is, currently non-functional features that were functional either in the species' earlier development or for a precursor species from whom they were inherited. Examples of spandrels are the navel and the redness of blood. Second, they might be by-products or spandrels, that is, adventitious side-effects of adaptations without adaptive significance in themselves. Examples of adaptations are the oxygen-fixing qualities of blood and development of feathers in birds. What might art be? What are the options? As Davies sees it, there are four main possibilities for our art-related behaviors:įirst, they might be adaptations, that is, transmissible capacities that increased the fitness of those who displayed them so that their possessors parented more extensive and far-reaching lineages. So I'll make some critical comments about his set-up, and then outline the positive view. This view seems to do a fairly good job with the data Davies puts on the table, and while he is careful and fair-minded in laying out the options, he sets up the landscape in a way that makes the resources of a view like this harder to see. The result is a view of art based on gene-culture coevolution. ![]() I arrive at this view by combining elements of two theories that Davies discusses and rejects - the theories of Aniruddh Patel and Ellen Dissanayake - and modifying them with the aid of other ideas emphasized in recent evolutionary theory. ![]() ![]() The main thing I'll do in this review is describe a combination of ideas that I see as a reasonably promising sketch of the evolution of artistic behaviors. It also makes rich connections to questions about other human aesthetic responses - our appreciation of landscapes and animals. ![]() Stephen Davies's book is a clear, judicious, and valuable treatment of these questions, considering many angles and reaching no firm conclusions. What sort of human product is art? Is it an expression of our biological nature, or a cultural overlay? Does art have a core function, in a strong sense of that term that stems from evolutionary history, or is what we call "art" just a set of practices that people find rewarding for various disparate reasons, and a minor player in the prehistory of our species? ![]()
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