In her books What Is Art For? and Homo Aestheticus, anthropologist
Ellen Dissanayake made one of the first serious attempts to
analyze art as a human adaptation that must have evolved for an
evolutionary purpose. She argued that human art shows three
important features as a biological adaptation. First, it is ubiquitous
across all human groups. Every culture creates and responds to
clothing, carving, decorating and image-making. Second, the arts
are sources of pleasure for both the artist and the viewer, and
evolution tends to make pleasurable those behaviors that are
adaptive. Finally, artistic production entails effort, and effort is
rarely expended without some adaptive rationale. Art is
ubiquitous, and costly, so is unlikely to be a biological accident.
Art fits most of the other criteria that evolutionary psychology
has developed for distinguishing genuine human adaptations
from non-adaptations. It is relatively fun and easy to learn. Given
access to materials, children's painting and drawing abilities
unfold spontaneously along a standard series of developmental
stages. Humans are much better at producing and judging art
than is any artificial intelligence program or any other primate. Of
course, just as our universal human capacity for language allows
us to learn distinct languages in different cultures, our universal
capacity for art allows us to learn different techniques and styles
of aesthetic display in different cultures. Like most human mental
adaptations, the ability to produce and appreciate art is not
present at birth. Very little of our psychology is "innate" in this
sense, because human babies do not have to do very much. Our
genetically evolved adaptations emerge when they are needed to
deal with particular stages of survival and reproduction. They
do not appear at birth just so psychologists can conveniently
distinguish the evolved from the cultural. Beards have evolved,
but they grow only after puberty, so are they "innate"? Is
menopause "innate"? "Innateness" is a relatively useless concept that has little relevance in modern evolutionary theory or
behavior genetics.
Some archeologists have argued that art only emerged 35,000
years ago in the Upper Paleolithic period, when the first cave
paintings and Venus figurines were made in Europe. They follow
archeologist John Pfeiffer's suggestion that this period marks a
"creative explosion" when human art, language, burial ceremonies,
religion, and creativity first emerged. This is a remarkably
Eurocentric view. The Aborigines colonized Australia at least
50,000 years ago, and have apparently been making paintings on
rock ever since. If art were an invention of the upper Paleolithic
35,000 years ago in Europe, how could art be a human universal?
There is evidence from Africa of red ocher being used for body
ornamentation over 100,000 years ago. This is about the latest
possible time that art could have evolved, since it is around the
time that modern Homo sapiens spread out from Africa. Had it
evolved later, it is unclear how it could have become universal
across human groups.
Ellen Dissanayake made one of the first serious attempts to
analyze art as a human adaptation that must have evolved for an
evolutionary purpose. She argued that human art shows three
important features as a biological adaptation. First, it is ubiquitous
across all human groups. Every culture creates and responds to
clothing, carving, decorating and image-making. Second, the arts
are sources of pleasure for both the artist and the viewer, and
evolution tends to make pleasurable those behaviors that are
adaptive. Finally, artistic production entails effort, and effort is
rarely expended without some adaptive rationale. Art is
ubiquitous, and costly, so is unlikely to be a biological accident.
Art fits most of the other criteria that evolutionary psychology
has developed for distinguishing genuine human adaptations
from non-adaptations. It is relatively fun and easy to learn. Given
access to materials, children's painting and drawing abilities
unfold spontaneously along a standard series of developmental
stages. Humans are much better at producing and judging art
than is any artificial intelligence program or any other primate. Of
course, just as our universal human capacity for language allows
us to learn distinct languages in different cultures, our universal
capacity for art allows us to learn different techniques and styles
of aesthetic display in different cultures. Like most human mental
adaptations, the ability to produce and appreciate art is not
present at birth. Very little of our psychology is "innate" in this
sense, because human babies do not have to do very much. Our
genetically evolved adaptations emerge when they are needed to
deal with particular stages of survival and reproduction. They
do not appear at birth just so psychologists can conveniently
distinguish the evolved from the cultural. Beards have evolved,
but they grow only after puberty, so are they "innate"? Is
menopause "innate"? "Innateness" is a relatively useless concept that has little relevance in modern evolutionary theory or
behavior genetics.
Some archeologists have argued that art only emerged 35,000
years ago in the Upper Paleolithic period, when the first cave
paintings and Venus figurines were made in Europe. They follow
archeologist John Pfeiffer's suggestion that this period marks a
"creative explosion" when human art, language, burial ceremonies,
religion, and creativity first emerged. This is a remarkably
Eurocentric view. The Aborigines colonized Australia at least
50,000 years ago, and have apparently been making paintings on
rock ever since. If art were an invention of the upper Paleolithic
35,000 years ago in Europe, how could art be a human universal?
There is evidence from Africa of red ocher being used for body
ornamentation over 100,000 years ago. This is about the latest
possible time that art could have evolved, since it is around the
time that modern Homo sapiens spread out from Africa. Had it
evolved later, it is unclear how it could have become universal
across human groups.
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