It nice to see so many philosophers are coming around . Boris Shoshensky To: [email protected] Subject: Reading Dutton: Chapter 5 - Art and Natural Selection Date: Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:08:51 GMT
Having established his cross-cultural definition of art in the previous two chapters (at least, to his own satisfaction) , Dutton is now ready connect it to evolution, beginning with the question: "Are the arts in their various forms adaptations in their own right, or are they better understood as modern by-products of adaptations?" "The gold standard for evolutionary explanation is the biological concept of an adaptation: an inherited physiological , affective, or behavioral characteristic that reliably develops in an organism; increasing its chances of survival and reproduction" The champion for the "by-products" explanation was Stephen Jay Gould who "came to regard the whole realm of human cultural conduct and experience as a by-product of a single adaptation: the oversized human brain" In other words, back in the Pleistocene, humans developed big brains to cope with survival, and then, more recently, they've been using those big brains for all kinds of interesting things. The champion for a more direct adaptation is the experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular author, Steven Pinker, who wrote "How the Mind Works", "The Blank Slate", and "The Language Instinct" (the likely precursor for "The Art Instinct") Is it more reasonable to believe that humans developed big brains that eons later, just happened to develop language -- or that they developed brains to handle the kind of language that they needed to survive? I would be more inclined to believe the latter scenario -- but as Cheerskep used to endlessly remind us, the notion of notion of language is a murky one -- and how much murkier is the notion of 'art'. Following an analogy presented by the current biologist/philospher Eckart Voland, we might regard ourselves as moths who "have succeeded in inventing a lantern in order to have fun circling it" "If the arts are like the lantern, why have we worked so hard to invent them and why do we have such fun circling them" So rather than imagining that there are "configurations of specific genes to explain every feature of mental life: genes for composing fugues, badminton, square dancing etc" -- Dutton will be looking for the evolutionary origin of the various appetites that the arts have been created to satisfy - as he did in Chapter one with his discussion of "blue landscapes". This, of course, assumes the existence of various appetities and the pleasure that follows their fulfillment -- an existence that cannot always be proven with the same kind of certainty as can the existence of the galaxies seen by the Hubble space telescope. (BTW -- this chapter includes a long discussion of the by-product evolutionary origin of the female orgasm, as carefully studied by Elisabeth Lloyd - presumably to awake the attention of those readers who have been dozing off) ____________________________________________________________ Weight Loss Program Best Weight Loss Program - Click Here! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL2231/c?cp=j8E2L2swofqFpVe1leCpLQAAJz6c l_zTaptgNR5c8Mer1v9kAAYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEUgAAAAA=
