Art for evolution's sake

For those wary of biological explanations of human behavior, "The Art Instinct" makes for a refreshing read. A philosophy professor in New Zealand and the founder of the respected web site Arts & Letters Daily, Denis Dutton is no reductionist; his view of art would preserve all that is unique, challenging, and revelatory - in a word, human - about our creative and expressive activities. To this end, he avoids beginning his book with a discussion of art-like behavior in animals, as Darwin might have done. Surely the manifold cognitive capacities and sensory endowments that go into making and using art have their analogues and precursors throughout the natural world.

Birds in particular explore a range of aesthetically expressive behavior - singing, dancing, and nest-building for their prospective partners' delectation. In New Guinea, where Dutton has done fieldwork, male bower birds fabricate nests with a degree of ornament and complexity far beyond the demands of shelter in order to attract a mate. But as Dutton points out, the bowers, which are constructed for a single purpose, make pale analogues of humankind's richer cultures of making. "They are not part of an aesthetic culture," he writes, "to be preserved, discussed, and appreciated outside a pattern of animal mating."

Art, by contrast, is not about automatic responses to pretty things, expressive movements, and compelling rhythms, but our aesthetic activities and sensibilities in all their capricious diversity, from cave art and oral epics to museums and raves. It's that very flexibility and creativity - that humanity, in a word - of art which Dutton sets out to explain in evolutionary terms.

Some biologists have argued that art is an evolutionary accident, the fortuitous product of adaptations produced for other ends; Dutton disagrees. Far from being an accident of evolution, imagination is a useful survival tool, and thus almost certainly an adaptation in its own right. Dutton swiftly enumerates situations, from the Pleistocene age to the present, in which imagination proves its utility. One of the most important dimensions of our imaginative faculty, he argues, is its virtuality. Early hunter-gatherers would have derived immense benefit from a capacity to imagine and surmise: What's in the next valley? Do those caves harbor sheltering alcoves or dangerous bears?

To take the next step to fiction would seem to give early humans a simulation machine, useful for war-gaming their options in survival choices. But Dutton refuses this adaptive explanation for fiction, advanced by Stephen Pinker and others, pointing out that our fictional library extends into realms far beyond anything humans would encounter. It is instead, he argues, an enhancement and extension of counterfactual reasoning - the ability to step beyond mere reproduction of facts in the imagination to hypothetical states of affairs.

Fiction, it has been argued, also serves as an efficient archive of cultural knowledge; Eric Havelock famously argued that for nonliterate peoples, epics like the "Iliad" constitute a kind of oral encyclopedia. Perhaps more than its tactical or archival capacities, however, fiction provides a unique platform for social and psychological reasoning. "The inner psychological experience of one's fellows, the shared emotional and intellectual world of the tribe," Dutton writes, is the final field upon which fiction plays - and perhaps its ultimate evolutionary raison d'etre as well.

Even for a hard-nosed evolutionist, then, there's more to our images and stories than mere data and lore. "Just as there would have been a major adaptive advantage in learning from stories to deal with the threats and opportunities of the external physical world," Dutton writes, "so for an intensely social species . . . there was an advantage . . . in honing an ability to navigate in the endlessly complex mental worlds people shared with their hunter-gatherer compatriots." Observing the decrease in violent deaths in the modern era, Pinker (who is skeptical about evolutionary claims for art) has suggested that our experience of fictional worlds, especially in journalism, memoir, and the social novel, may have helped us moderns to enlarge the circle of empathy beyond family and tribe. Dutton follows ethnomusicologist Ellen Dissanayake in extending this power to all of the arts. "We find beautiful artifact - carvings, poems, stories, arias - captivating because at a profound level we sense that they take us into the minds that made them. This sense of communion. . . . was about living the richer sociability that would carry on the human species and allow it to flourish."

Our capacity to see the world as others might see it enlarges the compass of friendship and gives us the latitude to seek nonviolent solutions to conflicts. As Walter Lippmann wrote, "What is called the adjustment of man to his environment takes place through the medium of fictions." Far from being an entertaining byproduct of uniquely human characteristics, art may prove to be the adaptation that saves us from ourselves.

Matthew Battles is a freelance writer in Jamaica Plain.