Art as an evolutionary product

[turoldus]

fter 40 or 50 years of this nonsense, we have to ask ourselves why the arts are universal and why other aspects of the human personality are universal. This simply has got to be the wave of the future. The notion that art is purely socially constructed, indeed, the human personality is socially constructed has to make way for something more complex...Why can't we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia for economic or cultural determinism and cut to the chase to where humanity actually is. The reality of the human situation is that we are biologically determined entities that live in a culture.

THE REALITY OF THE HUMAN SITUATION [2.19.09]
A Talk With Denis Dutton
Introduction By Steven Pinker

INTRODUCTION
By Steven Pinker

Denis Dutton is a visionary. He was among the first (together with our own John Brockman) to realize that a website could be a forum for cutting-edge ideas, not just a way to sell things or entertain the bored. Today Arts and Letters Daily is the web site that I try the hardest not to visit, because it is more addictive than crack cocaine. He started one of the first print-on-demand services for out-of-print scholarly books. He saw that philosophy and literature had much to say to each other, and started a deep and lively scholarly journal to move that dialogue along. He saw that pompous and empty prose in the humanities had become an impediment to thinking, and initiated the Bad Academic Writing contest to expose it.

And now he is changing the direction of aesthetics. Many people believe that this consilience between the arts, humanities, and sciences represents the future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism. Denis has written the first draft of this agenda. He has defended a universal definition of art—something that many theorists assumed was simply impossible. And he has advanced a theory that aesthetics have a universal basis in human psychology, ultimately to be illuminated by the processes of evolution. His ideas in this area are not meant to be definitive, but they lay out testable hypotheses, and point to many fields that can be brought to bear on our understanding of art. I see this as part of a larger movement of consilience, in which (to take a few examples), ideas from auditory cognition will provide insight into music, phonology will help illuminate poetics, semantics and pragmatics will advance our understanding of fiction, and moral psychology will be brought to bear on jurisprudence and philosophy. And in his various roles, Denis Dutton will be there when it happens.

Obviously the idea that some things may not to have some intrinsic truth behind is unsufferable to Pinker and his Edge pals. Judging from this abstract, however, their understanding of art is just as poor as their understanding of religion.

[humphreyclarke]

I was reading a deceptively scholarly looking article the other day which said that art was an evolutionary by-product (fair enough). It then went on to document this just so story in which a caveman decided to stay home and paint a picture on the wall of his hovel. this brought him the attention of women and he was therefore able to breed and spread his artistic genes to the next generation. So there you have it. I can't draw for toffee so my ancestors must have decided to go hunting instead.

Pinker thinks that literature has an evolutionary function as it allows us to rehearse certain scenarios and plan how we would act in those circumstances. So obviously the reason I read so many books about the napoleonic wars is because my biological senses are telling me theres a slim chance I might be teleported through a wormhole and end up in Napoleon's Armee du Nord. I do think there's some truth in there somewhere but I cna't help coming away thinking the whole thing is a bit silly.

[jamierobertson]

"'Natural Selection secondary to reproductive advantage' of the Gaps"... does that count as a Darwinist fallacy?

[James Hannam]

There is little doubt the evolutionary psychology has far more to fear from its supporters than its critics. I think it is a good idea, in general, but with so many silly examples crowding out the sensible science, it is sinking fast.

Best wishes

James

[humphreyclarke]

I should have mentioned, although I said I can't draw for toffee I did get a B in my art GCSE. That was back in 1998; so due to the chronic 'grade inflation' we have in this country my B is probably worth an A+++ now.

[turoldus]

www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/6301/

Dutton is at his best when dealing less with the scientific speculations, interesting though they are, than with the threat to art posed by its relativist grave-diggers. Chief among these are the educated barbarians, the critics who view culture, and the attendant concepts of beauty and value, as essentially socially constructed. Dutton’s opposing perspective – that in fact they are grounded in a universal human nature – gives his critique a sharpness and consistency. So, to those anthropologists who insist on the incommensurability of different cultures, Dutton appeals to the simple fact that Koreans can love Chopin just as Americans can appreciate Cervantes: ‘The whole idea that art worlds are monadically sealed off from one another is daft.’

Better still, when it comes to claims such as the anthropologist Lynn M Hart’s contention that Jynoti paintings by Hindu women are not ‘art’ because of their non-Western context of production and use (not for exhibition), Dutton simply outflanks them with a little knowledge. Hart’s problem is that she is comparing the Jyonti paintings with the fine arts as practised in the West. If she turned to look at the domestic and dowry arts of cultures worldwide, she’d find that what she thought was unique was actually as universally intelligible as human languages.

[humphreyclarke]

Dutton believes. The universal preference for a particular type of landscape painting taps into universal innate inclinations formed during the Pleistocene period, ‘the 1.6million years during which modern human beings evolved’. Featuring, amongst other things, water, open spaces of low grasses interspersed with thickets of trees, evidence of animal or bird life, and an opening up to an unimpeded view of the horizon, this predilection for a particular landscape testifies to a primordial memory of the African Savanna

This is pure waffle. Historically the type of landscape painted has owed everything to the contemporary fashion. When landscape painting was established as a genre, it was as a setting for religious activity, much of which took place in rocky arid landscapes. In the east, the preference was for shanshui, or "mountains and water,". Before Constable, the fashion was for idealised classical landscape which were dry and brown textured. The exception was the Dutch who went with the flat, recognisable landscape of the Dutch Republic, which reflected national pride. By the mid 19th century we get to pastoral landscapes with figures enjoying picnics and walks in the countryside. We also get the dramatic landscapes of Turner. The 20th century saw a shift to urban landscapes to highlight the plight of the industrial poor. Not only has the type of landscape depicted changed, but also its content. It has everything to do with changing fashions in art and nothing to do with some memory of the African savanah. What complete crap.

[bjorn]

It is creative crap, though. Which is an art.

I imagine it must stem from tens of thousands of years of just-so-storytelling by the fireside.

[humphreyclarke]

Ok, so I wrote a blog post the other day about how I took up line-dancing in order to find a hobby which socio-biologists would not be able to link to gene-survival. I dropped in a Denis Dutton quote, and lo and behold I have the following comment

humphreyclarke.blogspot.com/2009/03/evolutionary-angst.html

Lovely post -- er, I think. The arts involve an awful lot more than just responding to your genes, though your selected quotes make Pinker and me look like simple-minded aesthetic ideologues.

On the subject of marching and dancing, take a look at Keeping Together in Time by Wm. McNeill. A fascinating historian's account of the subject.

Enjoy the classes!

Denis Dutton
theartinstinct.com

Hmmmmmmm....

[humphreyclarke]

In case anyone is interested, I have been informed by Christopher Schoen that Denis Dutton has commented on a number of blogs which mention his arguments. Chris has been reviewing 'The Art Instinct' on his blog here.

underverse.blogspot.com/

[underverse]

I should mention I was being slightly tongue and cheek. That is, I don't mean to imply anything systematic or conspiratorial on Professor Dutton's part, nor do I want to impugn his character generally. But I do hope he will engage some of the criticisms raised at 3quarksdaily, or quodlibeta, if not at my own blog.

Chris Schoen

[humphreyclarke]

Yes, when I say 'what complete crap!', I of course mean 'I don't find this thesis particularly persuasive'. That said, I haven't even read most of it beyond the bit about the 'hard wired landscape' part. As for the wider thesis, could it be that we have a kind of an art module similar to Pinker's idea of a language instinct which furnishes a universal grammar?. It is presumably a component of our cognitive faculties and must have some kind of evolutionary origin. That said, there have been so many disastrous attempts at 'concilience' between the sciences and the humanities that one has to proceed with a healthy degree of scepticism. The problem you always have is that , since evolution is the only game in town in terms of providing a naturalistic explanation, even simplistic 'adaptationist' theories can be steamrollered through. I think that was the problem Stephen Jay Gould had when critiquing sociobiology.