Prospects for an evolutionary perspective on aesthetic emotions
late uncorrected draft of a paper published in Jerrold
Levinson & Jenefer Robinson, ed., Art, Mind, and Cognitive Science: special issue of Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62/2 (2004): 109-118.
Ronald de Sousa
University of Toronto
sousa@chass.utoronto.ca
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~sousa
ABSTRACT:
Recent writing on the biology of art has sought
to
make good on the hypothesis that art is not merely a product of social
practice but rather a bona fide biological adaptation. But what
exactly
does that mean? In the narrowest sense, an adaptation is what
Ruth
Millikan calls a proper function. But the process of natural
selection
also yields exaptations and spandrels. These last can still be viewed
as
having "functions" in the sense associated with Robert Cummins's
"analytical"
view of functions, but they are not proper functions. In the work
of Ellen Dissayanake and Frederick Turner, the claim made for the
biological
origins of art seems to insist that art must be an adaptation in the
strongest
sense. This is undoubtedly unnecessarily strong, and makes excessive
demands
on the representational aspect of art. More promising is the
recent
work, by Ramachandran and Hirstein (JCS 1999), which suggests that some
aesthetic emotions may derive from the exercise of brain modules
dedicated
to the construction of (in particular visual) representation.
"The first duty in life is to be as
artificial
as possible."
Oscar Wilde.
My aim in this essay is to throw some light on what
might
be meant by the claim that art is a "biological
adaptation".Oscar Wilde.
Questions
about the biological origin and function of art and beauty are
inevitably
highly speculative. But I believe it can be useful to clarify the
kinds of selection mechanisms that might be involved.
Accordingly,
I shall sample the claims about the function of art and beauty made in
the recent scientific and philosophical literature, and ask how the
mechanisms
we understand to be involved in natural selection might relate to such
functions.
I
begin with a parable intended to illustrate the range of questions
raised
by my enquiry.
1.
The Parable of the Pebble.
There
was once a man who found on the beach a pebble, the shape of which
struck
him as amazingly like a human face. Wondering at this
serendipitous
effect of millions of years of random friction against stones and
water,
the man took it home and treasured it. Every time he looked at it he
wondered
at the haunting wonder of its accidental beauty.
One
day, however, a guest noticed it and said: "Oh, I see you got one of
Nick's
rejects. Did you find it on the beach? Nick is that hippy
sculptor
who carves souvenirs for tourists. This looks like one of the
failures
he sometimes dumps on the beach....."
Now
the pebble was nothing but the charmless reject of a mediocre
craftsman.
All the strange and wonderful beauty the man had so much admired was
gone.
Whether
you believe, with Hume, that the actual world shows evident signs of
being
a botched effort, or whether you take, with Leibniz, the more gloomy
view
that this is the best of all possible worlds, the thought that it has
been
intentionally contrived seems, as in the case of the wrought pebble, a
sad disappointment next to the wonder of a universe unfolding according
to the laws of chance and necessity. Yet paradoxically when looking at
the gifts of nature even the most skeptical too often find themselves
looking
for purpose. We will see this in at least some of the
speculations
the question of the "function" of art has prompted.
But
the parable suggests a number of other morals:
·It
illustrates the fact that our aesthetic attitude to an object may be
radically
different depending on whether the object is thought to be a product of
"nature" or an artifact.
·In
doing so, it reminds us of the two faces of the aesthetic: on the one
hand,
the aesthetic question concerns the origin and nature of our sense of beauty.
On the other hand, it raises the question of the origin and nature of
the
impulse to create art. The two may seem inseparable, just
as speaking seems inseparable from understanding. But the appearance of
inseparability can be misleading, as the variety of types of aphasia
shows.
Neurologically, it turns out that capacities that we think of as merely
aspects of the same thing can be controlled by entirely different
mechanisms.
(FIG
1:)
So it might be with art and beauty: this is an eventuality that needs
to
be kept in mind even though, at the level of generality appropriate to
the present discussion, I will ignore it. I shall here speak
metonymically
of "art" to refer indiscriminately to the sense of beauty, the
emotional
response to art, and the urge to create it.
·The
parable draws attention to the question of the universality of
aesthetic
taste. Specifically, my own (tendentious) interpretation of
it rests on a commonplace about the aesthetic sense: namely that it
tends
to privilege surprise along with order: so that order is valued more
highly
when it arises where it is least expected. Later I shall consider
some more detailed and sophisticated hypotheses that have been offered
in the literature about the "laws of beauty".
2.
Adaptations, exaptations, or spandrels?
The
claim that art has a biological function might be meant in at least
four
senses, corresponding to four distinct meanings of "function":
(i)"Cummins
functions": The most intuitively straightforward sense of
‘the
function of i in system S is F'
is that by doing F,
i contributes to the
overall goal of S. (Cummins
1975) Thus the heart's pumping action contributes to the overall goal
of
the circulatory system, i.e. roughly to distribute nutrients and remove
waste from all parts of an organism. But the simplicity of this
characterization
is only apparent. For it is unhelpful in practice unless we can
specify
just what the system S and its "overall goal" are. In the present
case, the question would be: if art has a function, what is the system
to which it contributes? Is it individual health? individual
happiness?
group harmony? social and technological progress? A case could be made
for each of these and more; but none is self-evidently biological.
No doubt we shall be tempted to bring in "survival of the
fittest".
But this expression is a misleading one. Actually no organism ever
survives:
the
best I can hope for is to pass on half of my genes. (But my genes
aren't
me,
and their purposes may be deeply alien to mine.) We therefore
need
to specify the relevant "system" as a type rather than a token
organism:
for types do get reproduced; tokens at best only get copied. The
Cummins-function
of art, then, would be consist in whatever contribution it makes to
the fitness of a certain type of organism. But this
interpretation
of the notion of function is still relative to a stipulation of the
"system”
in which we are interested. Cummins-functions are
interest-relative.
(ii)The
aetiological concept: "proper function." A genuinely objective
specification
of function requires that we define (though not necessarily discover) intrinsic
functions, functions that are not interest-relative. This is
precisely
what Ruth Millikan's notion of proper function is designed to
do.
(Millikan 1984; 1989). This requires an objective way of
distinguishing
the proper function of an organ or part from its mere
side-effects.
The heart doesn't only pump the blood: it also produces rhythmic
sounds.
But intuitively only the former is its function: the sounds it makes
are
merely side-effects. Proper functions as those effects that have
aided the reproduction of ancestral organisms of which effects of that
type were present. A slightly more precise formulation is due to Paul
Griffiths:
Where
i is a trait of systems of type S, a proper function of i in Ss is F
iff
a selective explanation of the current non-zero proportion of Ss with i
must cite F as a component in the fitness conferred by i.
(Griffiths
1998, 442)
In
terms of this concept, the claim that art has a function amounts to
saying
that our ancestors happened on a mutation, endowing them with what for
simplicity we may call the "art gene", which caused them to leave more
offspring than those who were stuck with the old artless alleles.
For
later reference, it is important to note that if Fis
a proper function of i, it by no means follows that it is
universal.
On the contrary, as Millikan stresses with reference to the example of
spermatozoa, F
(in this case the fertilization of an
ovum) can be the proper function
of an item i,despite
the fact that only one time in millions doesi
accomplish F.
(iii)Exaptations,
a term coined by (Gould and Vrba 1982), are features that originally
have
one function but which are shaped by new selection pressures to serve
novel
functions. Examples are plentiful in evolution. A particularly
striking
one concerns the small bones in our middle ear: "Now used for
hearing,
two of these bones (the malleus and incus) were originally part of the
lower jaw of our reptilian ancestors, who used them for chewing."
(Ramachandran and Blakeslee 1998, 210) (FIG2)
(iv)
"Spandrels". Exaptations focused attention
on the haphazard
nature of evolution—its capacity opportunistically to change direction
and hijack an organ selected for one function and turn it to novel use.
But there are also cases where side-effects of an existing functions
never
were subjected to selective pressure. Strictly speaking these are not
adaptations
at all. They may nevertheless come to be valued, but they had no part
in
promoting the reproduction of their ancestors. To single out such
cases, (Gould and Lewontin 1979) adapted the architectural term for the
roughly triangular areas resulting from the design of fan-vaulted
ceilings.
The spandrels of San Marco frame beautiful mosaics, but (Gould assumes)
they were not originally meant to frame designs. (FIG
3) [from Glossary
of Medieval Art and Architecture] They were just
necessary
consequence of other architectural decisions, and architects were
forced
to make the best of them.
In
evolution, spandrels are characteristics that find a use for
which
they were never selected. A toy devised by Elliott Sober
illustrates
the distinction on which this point rests, between selection
for
some trait, and that trait's merely
being selected. (Sober 1984,
99) (FIG
4)
In
the toy, the green balls are selected, i.e. got to the bottom. But
their
colour plays no part in the causal explanation of that fact. They got
there
because they are the smallest. Small size is what the apparatus has selected
for. Their colour just happens to be associated with their
size,
so green ones were indeed selected, but not selected for.
So
it might be with various human capacities. Two examples that come
to mind are higher mathematics and female orgasm. In both cases,
the argument that these are "spandrels" rests on an important
truism
and a methodological principle about natural selection. The truism
is that a gene cannot be selected for unless it has phenotypic
consequences
that are "visible" to natural selection. The methodological
principle
is one of parsimony: we shouldn't assume that something is a
result
of adaptation if it can be satisfactorily accounted for in terms of
non-selective
aspects of its causal history, e.g. as a side-effect. In both the
cases in question, the probability is that they could not have been
reinforced
by selection because they never surfaced as such in the phenotype. In
the
case of the female orgasm, the anthropologist Frances Burton found that
the female macaques on Gibraltar were capable of orgasm, but
that
it took twenty minutes of vigorous stimulation to produce it.
Copulations
in the wild, however, never last more than a minute and would probably
endanger the lives of the participants considerably if they did.[1]
So the truism argues that selection for female orgasm couldn't have
taken
place. Furthermore, given the homology of penis and clitoris,
there
is no more mystery about the capacity for orgasm to be produced by
stimulation
of the latter as of the former: thus parsimony dictates that we don't
need
an adaptive explanation any more than we need one for the presence of
male
nipples. Such capacities are spandrels: Cummins-functions that lack the
appropriate aetiology to be proper functions.
3.
Does it matter if art is a spandrel?
In
the light of these distinctions we can refineour
question. One could ask a number of questions about the
"function"
of art in the welfare of individuals, education, societies, and so
forth.[2]
But questions about the biological function of art seem to be aimed at
the difference that art made to evolution, not to its present uses.
Does
art have a proper function? is it an exaptation? Or is it merely a
spandrel?
Recall
one of the morals of my opening parable: the feeling induced by the
idea
that something is an artifact is quite different from the one likely to
be inspired by a "natural" object. But in the cases in question the
objects
are all "natural objects"; at the same time they are also all crucially
like "products of design" in that special way that applies, if only by
analogy, to the products of natural selection. Much of the discussion
that
follows will consist in attempting to reconcile the intuitions prompted
by these conflicting considerations.
Let
us begin with Helen Dissayanake, who has argued in a number of very
stimulating
books and articles (Dissanayake 1992; 1999; 2000) that art is an
adaptation
in the strongest sense of having (multiple) proper functions. She
contrasts
this view with the more common thesis that art rides on the back of a
number
of other adaptations. Here is one list she offers of adaptations of
which
art has been held to be a spandrel:
"communication,
play, display,and, exploration and curiosity, amusement and pleasure,
creativity
and innovation, transformation , the joy of recognition and discovery,
the satisfaction of a need for order and unity, the resolution of
tension,
the emotion of wonder, the urge to explain, and the instinct for
workmanship"
(Dissanayake 1992, 27); cf. also (Dissanayake 2000).
All
are plausible enough, but she finds them dissatisfying because she is
keen
to show that the arts are themselves an adaptation, not a "mere"
spandrel.
She seems to think that if art is to be vindicated as really
valuable,
it must be selected for in its own right. She wants to show how "art
could
have arisen and persisted, not as an epiphenomenon of other behavior
but
as a positive and primary motivation in its own right".
(Dissanayake
1999, 33). And again:
Western
modernity might view the arts as "useless," but biologists, using the
evolutionarily
salient criteria of universality, energy investment, and pleasure,
would
have to concede that engaging with the arts—like eating, sleeping, sex,
socializing, and parenting—is a fundamental and essential part of human
nature." (Dissanayake 1999, 29)
In short, on her
view,
if the arts are taken seriously, we must think of them as
a)
having genuine proper functions, not just being spandrels or
exaptations.
b)
universal; and
c)
being "an essential part of human nature", apparently by virtue of
being
genetically innate.
All
three of these ideas are questionable.
a)
Actually it is likely that the majority of adaptations have their roots
in original exaptations, serendipitous hijackings of features developed
for other reasons. That is one of the beauties of evolution, which, as
François Jacob memorably remarked, consist essentially in bricolage.
[Sp. ¿"chafallada"?]
Bricolage suits exaptations particularly
well, but spandrels may be just as valuable for the life of an
organism.
And if "having a function" is taken in the Cummins sense, then nothing
follows about whether it was selected for. What we value may well be
the
result of pure chance; indeed, as my parable illustrates, a product of
pure chance may be more valuable than one of design.
b)
As we saw a moment ago with the example of spermatozoa, universality is
irrelevant to the genuineness of functions. It could be that art
does indeed have a proper function, but that it seldom fulfills it.
c)
What innateness means isn't that clear. It is a concept often used for
divergent and often sometimes politically charged effect in
psychology
and biology, and some have recently argued that it is "irretrievably
confused"
(Griffiths 2002; cf. Godfrey-Smith 2002). In particular, one
can't
really insist on universality as a mark of the innate, since some
traits—such
as eye colour—are innate if anything is, but far from universal. (In
fact,
no non-trivial characteristic is ever universal in biology.) As
for
whether universality entails innateness, consider this thought
experiment.
According to British Council figures, English language is spoken by
about
a quarter of the people alive today. Imagine that some day it becomes
universal.
Obviously that will not mean it's been selected for in the biological
sense.
Nor would it mean it's "essential" to human nature, if that means that
anyone who didn't speak English wouldn't really be human.
The
example returns us to the normative character of the notion of
function.
When Dissayanake says "universal", "essential", "innate", she
doesn't
really mean any of those things literally. Rather, she means
something
that is rather well captured by the notion of "proper function": namely
that art (1) is a good thing, and (2) that some of the ways in
which
it is a good thing have contributed to the dissemination of heritable
dispositions
to artistic appreciation and production. But remembering
that f can
be the proper function of i even though i very
seldom
performs f, the
claim that art has a proper function should not by itself be taken to
imply
anything much about its frequency.
4.
But what is art anyway?
Before
proceeding to look at some specific explanatory hypotheses, we should
take
a moment to sketch what sort of thing is in question when we speak of
art.
Here we could do worse than to follow the guidance of (Abrams 1953),
who
distinguishes four kinds of theories of art, classified in terms of
their
emphasis on one of the four elements that are typically related in a
work
of art: the universe, the author, the audience,
and
the work itself. Although Abrams thinks of this as a
classification
of theories, we can as well think of it as a classification of types
of art, in so far as each type of art is partly conditioned by the
prevalent assumptions about the point of art.
·Mimetic
theories stress the idea of representation, and thus focus on the
universe
outside the author; mimetic art is what we think of as conventional,
representational
art.
·Pragmatic
theories stress the effect of the work on its audience.
"Pragmatic"
art, then, is the kind Plato approved of: providing it was successful
in
improving its audience.[3]
·Expressive
theories shift the focus to the artist. The paramount value becomes
sincerity.
Expressive art could be thought of as a variant of the mimetic, with a
change in the object imitated. For the expressive theory of art asks
simply
that one be true to oneself, as opposed to the outside world:.
·Finally
Objective
theories focus on the work of art itself. Typical objective art
is
modernist art, focused, like Aristotle's god, on the contemplation of
its
own contemplation.
As
we look at some of the ideas advanced about the function of art, we
shall
see that some are more appropriate to some types of art and theories of
art.
5.
Some proposed functions of art
Proposed
biological functions of art are legion. In what follows, I will limit
myself
to a sampling of recent suggestion. Like Dissanayake, Frederick
Turner
defends the idea that the sense of beauty is "an adaptation". He gives
this idea two interpretations. One is the plausible one that art
has served our ancestors in navigating the world in practice. The
more ambitious thesis is that art actually reveals to us the deep
structure
of the laws of the universe. Let us start with the more moderate thesis:
"Antiphonal
birdsong, the brilliant shapes and colors of flowers (what more precise
record could there be of the aesthetic preferences of bees?) and the
gorgeous
ritual mating garments of tropical fishes and birds of paradise, all
attest
to a more-than-utilitarian attraction in certain forms of
organization.....Beauty
is an adaptation" (Turner 1999, 119).
Is
this scientific insight or romantic rubbish? In trying to answer this,
I leave aside the question of whether it is reasonable to attribute to
bees the sort of consciousness that would seem to be entailed by the
possession
of "aesthetic preferences".
First,
it would be better to say: beauty is a co-adaptation rather
than
an
adaptation.
It's not as if the bees came with a pre-existing
set of aesthetic preferences, and the flowers had just had to bring
their
colour schemes into line. Nor, presumably, is there any reason to think
it was the other way around. So this leaves open the
question:
Why is it just these colours and shapes that the flowers flaunt
and the bees prefer?
This
question can be given two senses: a strictly causal sense, and
an
information-theoretic
sense. To see this, consider the question:
Why aren't flowers
green? The answer is that they wouldn't be as visible against
the background of green leaves: that is a requirement of the signalling
or informational function of flowers. But why not make leaves a
different
colour? Because, for strictly causal reasons you can't do this:
green is already taken, pre-empted by the chlorophyll essential to
photosynthesis.
That is the causal constraint on the signalling function. So when
we take the existing causal constraint together with the informational
function, we can expect that flowers will be any colour except
green.
Just
which colour each flower will be may depend entirely on chance.
But
the ecology of which the flower is a part is constrained by a
requirement
of
variety. As Darwin first observed in his famous island
finches, niches are formed among differentiating populations by
specialization
or "adaptive radiation": if I can feed on what you ignore, there will
be
that much less to fight about. From the informational point of
view,
it doesn't matter whether you take the roses and I take the lilacs, or
vice-versa. Chance may well rule. Or some pre-existing
slight
difference in perceptual or behavioral bias may make it slightly easier
for you to take the roses.
So
far, there does not seem to be any justification for Turner's claim
that
we are dealing with a "more-than-utilitarian attraction" on the part of
flowers and birds or bees. Colours are entirely functional. That
doesn't
mean that every aspect of it is an adaptation: but that's just what we
expect from the logic of evolution, where chance proposes and natural
selection
(sometimes) disposes. Once the differentiation gets started,
however,
there will be selective pressure for it to proliferate.
6.
Non-standard mechanisms of selection
The
cases considered so far illustrate an important point: that some of the
most important parts of the environment to which organisms must adapt
is
constituted by other organisms that must reciprocally adapt to them.
There
are two variant mechanisms of natural selection that share that
characteristic,
and provide promising models for the evolution of the sense of
beauty.
The first is sexual selection. The other is (one interpretation
of) "Baldwinian selection" which, as I will shortly explain,
can
be thought of as including sexual selection as a special case.
Both
these mechanisms complicate in interesting ways the simplistic idea
that
beauty is an "adaptation".
The
basic mechanism of sexual selection is easy to grasp. The background is
this: (Consider only mammals for simplicity.) Females are
limited
by the number of gestations they have time and resources for. Males can
mate indefinitely often at little cost. Since males and females
must,
by the laws of arithmetic, have the same average number of
offspring,
it follows that the variance in offspring among males is much higher
than
among females. Females must therefore "choose" mates, rather than
the other way around. Now suppose females prefer, say, males with
larger
antlers. Providing large antlers are passed on to offspring, they will
proliferate along with the females' preference. This sets up a
positive
feedback loop, launching a process which can result in an increasingly
burdensome handicap. The Irish Elk may have met with extinction in
precisely
in that way. (FIG
5)
So
much for the mechanism. But what about the original female
preference
that set the mechanism in motion? There are two hypotheses in the
literature (Cronin 1991): the first is that the original preference is
due entirely to chance: Cronin calls it the "good taste" hypothesis.
The
other is that the preference is triggered by a genuine advantage that
was
originally signalled by the large antlers: the "good sense"
hypothesis.
Notice that it makes no difference to the efficacy of the actual
mechanism,
but at first sight, at least, it makes the claim that "beauty is an
adaptation"
feel very different. If it is indeed just an accident that sets
off
the sexual selection, the trait in question—the peacock's tail, the
elk's
antlers, the giraffe's neck—may look beautiful to us, but unlike the
flowers'
colour it can't claim to serve any purpose beyond itself. In some
cases where it comes into direct conflict with other selective
pressures,
beauty may be faced with the options of becoming lethal or inverting
its
own standards.
Here
is an example. Elephant tusks are a product of sexual selection. But
the
animals with the largest tusks have been at greatest risk from ivory
hunters.
As a consequence, Steven Jones relates that a third of adults are now
tuskless
(Jones 1999, 78). Tuskless elephants have come up from behind, as it
were,
in the race for sex. One can imagine that in time tusks will have been
bred out of the population altogether. In consequence of the selective
pressure introduced by the ivory hunters, tusked elephants will seldom
survive to leave offspring, and the most successfully breeding females
will be those (if the genetic variance has not bred such genotypes out
altogether) with a positive aversion to tusks. In this way, one will
have
found an evolutionary equivalent to fashion.
Is
that what we mean by beauty? The fact that standards of fashion
are
both changeable and arbitrary doesn't disqualify it, but it does locate
the biological aspect of beauty not in any specific standards, but
rather
in the fact that there are standards, relating to positional
values. These are values that depend not on any intrinsic qualitative
characteristics, but on the current distribution of traits in the
population.
"Evolutionists and art historians agree that fashion is all about
status."
(Ridley 1993, 301). On the other hand, there is evidence that insofar
as
human
beauty is concerned there is a good deal of intersubjective agreement
about
what is beautiful, and that standards change slowly. (Etcoff
1999).
And of course that is just what we would expect, even if beauty is
purely
an effect of coordination on intrinsically arbitrary features, like the
colours of flowers: if it happens at the glacial pace of evolution, it
will seem entirely stable on the scale of social science.
Nevertheless
Turner is not alone in speculating on the specific nature of beauty,
and
in claiming that this can be explained in terms of "good sense" rather
than "good taste." If he is right, we should also expect him to
be
right in predicting that there will be found a "natural classicism" of
taste, together with a general rejection of "modernist and
postmodernist"
taste. And indeed there is an intriguing project which appears to
support this view: the Komar & Melamid Dia project has canvassed
viewers
in many countries including the USA, Portugal (not Spain,
unfortunately)
France and China, and elected on the basis of this research the best
and
least liked pictures. We'll see in a moment some reasons for skepticism
on this point; meanwhile, you can get the flavour of the Komar &
Melamid
site, which can be visited at http://www.diacenter.org/km/index.html,
from
this selection of illustrations showing most and least liked pictures
in
Turkey (FIG
6), Portugal (FIG
7); China (FIG
9): Kenya (FIG
9) and the USA (FIG
10)
Baldwinian
Selection.
Turner
and others have also suggested that art and the sense of beauty have
evolved
under the joint influence of culture and natural selection.
Collaboration
between genes and culture, however, is not the unproblematic thing it
seems.
A cultural pressure for a certain result may take the pressure off
natural
selection rather than act in synergy with it. Consider the relation
between
the incest taboo and biologically conditioned incest avoidance.
Grant,
for the sake of argument, that the bad consequences of incestuous
matings
in the past have selected for a gene making for strong incest
avoidance.
But imagine that this is complemented by a socially conditioned incest
taboo
so strict that incest simply never occurs. Unless incest
avoidance
has been definitively fixated in the population (which would make the
incest
taboo otiose), we must surely expect that after a few generations the
gene
for incest avoidance, in the absence of continued maintenance by
selection,
will have become less rather than more common. Far from reinforcing one
another, the genetically conditioned avoidance and socially conditioned
taboo will actually undermine one another: A perfectly
effective
genetic disposition would leave no room for the taboo; and conversely,
once a powerful taboo has existed long enough, any easing of the taboo
would then produce a sudden rash of incest, showing that incest
avoidance
has actually been weakened.
This
example shows that one can't take for granted that social and
evolutionary
forces will necessarily make for the same result. Baldwinian selection
is a mechanism that has attracted attention because it appears to mimic
Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics. Just how it is
supposed
to work is somewhat controversial; but here is the most plausible
reconstruction,
derived from (Deacon 1997, 322-334).
(FIG 11
)
It
starts with some innovative form of non-instinctive behaviour, which
causes
a change in the environment. That change, in turn, generates new
selective
pressures that favour genetic dispositions for certain types of
behaviour.
When the behaviour at the end of this loop is of the same type as the
behaviour
at the beginning, we may have something that looks rather like an
episode
of Lamarckian evolution: a particular (group of) organisms’ choosing
a certain mode of behaviour leads to a predisposition for that type of
behaviour to be coded in the genes. It is easy to see why this
process
is sometimes referred to as "niche construction" (Griffiths 2002): it
involves
a feedback loop that begins with some behavioral change, inaugurated,
again,
either by chance or because of some existing selective advantage and
results
in a modification of the environment which in turn favours selection
for
the behaviour in question.
It
is just this "niche creation" aspect that is of interest for the
development
of the sense of beauty. Sexual selection also involves a positive
feedback
loop, in which the hypertrophy of a certain trait (call it B for
beauty)
results from the mate's preference for B. Thus sexual selection is a
special
case of Baldwinian selection. It favours the survival value of B, by
favouring
the predisposition to choose it on the part of potential mates.
This
propagates both B and the disposition to choose it. As we saw,
sexual
selection need not result in any trait that is in the ordinary sense
adaptive,
and that is generally true of other forms of Baldwinian evolution. But
they are of interest in this connection because they could be said to create
beauty, in a way that accounts both for the temptation to call it
"adaptive"
(since once the mechanism has got going, beauty will actually promote
fitness),
and also for the intuition that the whole point of beauty is that it is
gratuitous
(since there was not in the first place any reason to prefer long over
short necks, large over dainty antlers, and so forth.)
Baldwinian
selection, then, including sexual selection as a special case, is well
suited to the explanation of how some capacities will be favoured both
by genetic selection and by cultural change, mutually reinforcing each
other. It's clear that art modifies our environment. Or at least
artifacts do. Did those, in turn, create an environment
sufficiently
different from the previous niche occupied by the population to result
in novel selective pressures? If so, one might surmise that the
capacity
for art will have begun with some random change, but that this event
set
a directional course for a while. In the generally non-directional
pattern
of evolution, this is one of the few patterns that actually constitutes
an exception. Needless to say, no directionality carries a
guarantee
of continuation. At any time, the path could be interrupted in any
number
of ways, including crashing headlong, like the Irish Elk, into a
fatally
maladaptive extreme. While it lasts, however, something like
"beauty"
is being created, and the production of things experienced as beautiful
constitutes art.
At
this level, beauty is essentially the phenomenal trace of a solution to
a coordination game. But Turner offers a far more daring second thesis:
Besides the sort of self-made beauty that is set up by Baldwinian or
sexual
selection, he thinks "the experience of beauty is a recognition of the
deepest tendency or theme of the universe as a whole" (Turner
1999,
124).
Among
the "themes" in question is "self-similarity" or fractal structure, a
feature
found often in nature where the shape of large shapes recurs
indefinitely
many times in smaller parts.
Turner
might find encouragement from a striking study of Jackson Pollock's
drip
paintings.(FIG
12) , which found them to exhibit a chaotic fractal
structure,
constituting "a direct expression of the generic imagery of nature's
scenery".
(Taylor, Micolich and Jonas 2000, 137). Pollock's drip paintings,
it turns out, share the property of "statistical self-similarity"
characteristic
of natural scenery (p. 140) This means that patterns at different
degrees of magnification, while not identical, "are described by
identical
statistics".(ibid.). One can get a feel for what's involved here
from this illustration, showing, above a 2.5m section of a Pollock
painting,
a 10cm section of snow on the ground and a 50m section of forest .(FIG
13) .
Notice
that there is no question here of Baldwinian selection or of arbitrary
solutions to coordination problems. Instead the claim is that the
very workings of our aesthetic sense are favoured by natural selection
because they mirror and thus contribute to our knowledge of the deep
structure
of the world, which Turner argues exhibits, besides a preponderance of
fractal structures or "self-similarity", a number of other wholly
general
features. The complete list is the following: (Turner 1999,
126-127):
·Unity
in multiplicity
·Complexity
within simplicity
·Generativeness
and creativity
·Rhythmicity
·Symmetry
·Hierarchical
organization,
·Self-similarity.
This
is, to be sure, an impressive list. But it's not clear that Turner is
in
a position to claim that these seven features are in the world, as
opposed being features that our brains happen to be good at using to
make
sense of the world. In the sixth Meditation, Descartes
warned
that the representations of the senses might be fulfilling their
natural
purpose without necessarily giving us any information about the
world
as it is: "the proper purpose of the sensory perceptions given me by
nature
is simply to inform the mind of what is beneficial or harmful.... But I
misuse them by treating them as reliable touchstones ... about the
essential
nature of the bodies located outside us.....''. (Descartes 1641/1986,
83)
It's not clear that the apparent constancy of the world's forms
reflects
more than precisely the methods favoured of our brains.
7.
Art's functions in the brain: Ramachandran
A
more modest but still powerful hypothesis is—in the words of (Myin
2000,
45) that "given that both the brain and the artist are in the same
business
of representation, perhaps the overt representing of the artist is
highly
constrained by how the brain represents the visual world
internally."
This
is the avenue pursued by (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999). Their
claim is not to show that art reveals the ontological structure of the
world, but rather to explore that other "deep structure" of beauty that
reflects the way the brain constructs a representation of the
world.
Prominent
among their "laws of beauty", are the peak shift principle and
the
principle of perceptual grouping.
I
begin with the latter, because while it is reminiscent of Turner's
principle
of "unity in multiplicity", its significance stands in interesting
contradiction
to Turner's claim of ontological representation. Instead of resting on
some claim about nature intrinsic "unity in diversity", it
focuses
on how we perceive unity in diversity, or what
neuropsychologists
call the binding problem. It also stresses the emotional
concomitants
of the exercise of very specific mechanisms responsible for
constructing
an object out of the data presented to the senses. Here are two
examples of images that at first sight look like a meaningless jumble
but
can be seen as coherent pictures. The integration and recognition, most
people find, are intrinsically pleasurable.
(FIG14:)
Another
whole "genre" which supports his argument is to be found in the
computer-generated
elaborations on Bela Julesz's discovery that random dots appropriately
displaced generate three-dimensional images without any further cues[4]
(Julesz 1971). Here are two example that don't employ random
dots,
but generate a nice effect: (FIG
15); (FIG
16).
The
striking fact about these examples is that they generate distinct
aesthetic
pleasure, despite the utter triviality of their subject matter. The
pleasure
is taken
merely in the fact that a coherent three-dimensional form appears.
Watching someone coming to see the three-dimensional form in these
pictures
is quite instructive: they commonly give out very strong literal
expressions of the "Aha! experience."
This
sort of process, as opposed to the others I have surveyed, no longer
puts
any
direct premium on representation. Instead it deals with the
tools
and mechanisms
of representation. Hence, pace Turner's
commitment to "natural classicism", it would lead us to expect that
people
can take pleasure in all kinds of "abstract" art, insofar as these play
on the capacities of the brain that are involved in the immensely
complex
task of constructing representations (Hoffman 2000).
This
applies to all the other "laws of beauty" that R&H propose: the
isolation
of visual outlines; contrast extraction; symmetry; metaphor; and the
"generic
principle" that tends to reject interpretations that rely on rare
coincidence.
I have time to comment only on more.
The
peak-shift
effect is summed up in the slogan 'All art is caricature'
(Ramachandran
and Hirstein 1999, 18). It refers to the tendency of the visual
system
to learn a tendency rather than a characteristic, and thereby to react
more strongly to an exaggeration of the original characteristic than to
the characteristic itself. Once a rat has been trained to respond to a
rectangle of ratio 3:2, "the rat's response to a rectangle that is even
longer and skinnier (say, of aspect ratio 4:1) is even greater than it
was to the original prototype on which it was trained".
(ibid.)
It's intriguing to speculate that this trait lies at the basis of the
directionality
of sexual selection: just as the rat reacts to the "more rectangular"
shape
rather than to the prototype, so the chooses not the mate whose neck is
the precise length that has proved "successful" in the past, but the
longest
neck. In matters of beauty in representations of the human body,
R&H
suggest, "idealization" amounts to exaggerations of characteristics
regarded
as "essential", as in this illustration of the Goddess Parvathi (FIG
17).
These
cognitive mechanisms of chunking and "binding" information, as well as
others typically exercised in recognizing objects, generate limbic
activation
which is in turn responsible for the emotional impact that they are
able
to have even in the absence of otherwise emotionally interesting cues.
(The Parvathi picture is hardly a fair example, but the Pollock will
do.)
And the "mystery" of art is surely due in part to the fact that these
mechanisms
work without our having the slightest consciousness of their existence,
let alone the manner of their functioning. The Pollock example is
particularly striking: for I venture no one before Taylor et al. had
any
idea that fractal structure might have anything to do with the impact
of
Pollock's drip paintings: and although viewers would surely
distinguish
and have a preference between merely the merely random lines of a
and the fractal ones of b and c (whether produced by machine or by
Pollock),
it is equally sure that virtually no one could have diagnosed the
source
of the aesthetic preference. (FIG
18)
All
these images exemplify a principle that is distinctive in Ramachandran
and Hirstein's hypothesis: namely that aesthetic pleasure appears to
have
at least the Cummins-function of reinforcing the exercise of specific
exercises
of the most important mechanisms the brain employs to construct our
visual
world. "Every man," said Aristotle at the very beginning of the Metaphysics,
"desires to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in
our senses ...; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for
themselves; and above all others the sense of sight.." (Met.
I.1)
The prescient phrase here is "loved for themselves". The senses,
it appears, generate pleasure even by their gratuitous exercise out of
context. In the same vein, though usually with the much higher degree
of
self-consciousness, painters in modern times have abandoned realistic
interpretation
not so much because they have given up on mimesis, but because
they
have turned to exploring for their own sakes the shapes, colours,
textures,
rhythms, and other effects that enter into representational art.
From the present vantage point , though modern art appears to
constitute
a spectacular counter-example to Turner's principle of "natural
classicism",
the exception is more apparent than real.
8.
Conclusion: Four Functions of Art.
In
this brief survey, it has emerged that the biological functions
attributed
to art fall into four kinds. We can think of these as delineating
four types of beauty:
a)beauty
as a solution to a coordination problem: colours are arbitrary
signals,
but the pleasure we take in them is related to the fact that they work
to guide us. As is always the case in evolution, an informational
problem is solved, subject to immensely complex causal
constraints.
b)beauty
as the phenomenal correlate of non standard mechanisms of selection,
namely Baldwinian selection and its more specific (and more familiar)
species,
sexual selection. This might in turn be one of two types:
-
purely positional, where the feature selected for acquires value only
in
relation to others in its range as they occur in the population;
or
-
as an index of some other desirable quality, such as fertility or
strength.
While this makes no difference to the actual mechanism of selection, we
saw that many people thirst to find something that will count as "real"
biological functions of art, as if that alone could justify the
importance
we attribute to art. But I have been skeptical of that
demand:
there is, I maintain, no connection between the type of origin of a
trait
and the importance it can legitimately claim in our lives.
c)beauty
as a reflection of the innate structure of the universe. This
is Turner's grand scheme. The metaphysical flavour of that
proposal
does not inspire my sympathy, but it is plain that it corresponds to
something
very real in the phenomenology of art and beauty. And while that does
not
warrant Turner's bold leap into the ontological plane, it does seem
ripe
for a Kantian reinterpretation as a hypothesis about the deep structure
of the mind. In terms of contemporary cognitive science, this
means
we should attend to the mechanisms employed by the brain to structure
the
world of our experience. That is precisely what the fourth proposal
aims
to do:
This
last proposal stresses a type of "beauty" the "function" of which is
likely
similar to that other close kin of art, play; but it is play
located
in the very heart of the brain's cognitive modules. Each of the
mechanisms
detailed by R&H (and many more that are rapidly emerging into the
scientific
literature) is a good bet for a module with a proper function—whether
by
adaptation or by exaptation. That each is tied, as R&H argue, to
the
limbic system and therefore to the emotional system, strongly suggests
that the influence of a further selection pressure might have been at
work
to cement those mechanism into our cognitive toolbox. Just
exactly
why some have become conscious while most can only be discovered by
painstaking
experiment, is an intriguing question. But I shall resist the
temptation
to indulge in further speculation.
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[1]I
have been giving these two examples to students for a couple of decades
(but which someone tells me S.J. Gould has used more recently
somewhere).
My own evidence derives in part from Frances Burton's research on the
macaques
of Gibraltar. [ref?]
[2]Randall
Dipert remarks: "if art really does not serve some function,
play
some role in contributing toward our conception of a fruitful life, it
is unimaginable why we would voluntarily engage in it" (Dipert 1993,
111).
[3]
On this view it is difficult to exclude advertising
from the realm of art.Although
if it has a bad influence Plato would disapprove, he would have to
concede
it to be art. Note
that Plato's theory of Forms and desire fits advertising remarkably
well:
since on Plato's view you always long for something other than what you
actually get, you'll keep buying the product I advertise, providing I
never
actually let you have the real object of your desire.
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