Thanks Mando. I want to emphasize that there's much to admire in steven Pinker's Blank Slate. He writes well and makes excellent arguments that allow for plasticity in the way the brain functions but still insists, and rightly I feel (I say feel to avoid claiming to know) that much of our brain structure is indeed genetically pre-set or predisposed. Yet he looks for a correspondence between universal brain preferences or predispositions and cultural habits which Dutton claims are universal too. If Pinker wants to discredit the Blank Slate notion that puts nurture above nature, if not exclusively so, then why does he rely on an analogy that equalizes the nurtured with the natural as he does when he compares his science with Dutton's speculation while insisting that nature trumps nurture? But as I said, I'm ready to accept Pinker and Dutton without much quibble although their views don't necessarily define art since we can always say that something excluded by their views is now, once was, or could be art. And that art could be lesser, the same, or better than what they propose is exemplified by Dutton's universal cultural characteristics and genetically echoed by Pinker's brain science. I mean some eras produced bad art but they still called it art and so art it is.
Another snag I find in the neurological and cognitive sciences with respect to answering how and why humans think as they do is their almost total emphasis on biological and even psychological evolution. Given that bower birds create artful nests or that chimps use sticks to probe for termites or that other animals sometimes modulate their calls, or devote energy to sexual attraction (peacock's tails) and the like, it seems obvious to me that what really sets humans apart is the use of metaphor. When will the bower bird start casting in plaster, grinding paint, or delegating the nest decoration job to slave sparrows? Chimps have had more than enough time to improve their stick probes. But while we may think these animals are on the path to creating tools and imagining ways to cheat their limitations, they don't improve much and only then with rote training soon ignored. But humans just keep on making up new stuff. Whereas ordinary evolution may require a 100,000 years to grow a bigger eye, a longer tail, faster gait -- an improvement of the biological machine, a human needs only to "make-believe" an advantage and then create an "as-if" to attain it. Instead of evolving over lengthy time to get a better eye, man creates a make believe eye, or make-believe wings, and so on. This sort of evolution seems to have developed in very brief time while our biological evolution creeps its petty pace over eons. When and why did humans begin to make-believe, to create surrogate advantages, to invent tools as if they were extensions of their bodies and senses? So far, all the evidence we have for our metaphorical breakthrough is limited to about 25,000 years, more or less, and mostly much less, say, 5,000 years. My pet cat is bristling with sensory antennae and other sensory capabilities far superior to an ordinary human's But unlike the human, the cat has evolved without metaphorical ability. If my cat thinks it seems not to think in make-believe, it does not imagine making surrogate wings to chase the little birds into the sky. I won't find him tinkering with glue and feathers. I suppose It only thinks about how to use its biological abilities to their best advantage: jump higher, run faster, prowl quietly. What biological glitch, or what genetic "fire and wire" event enabled or required the human brain to give up on natural selection, and so-slow-you-can't-see-it evolution and to focus on make-believe, the as-if, the metaphorical world? Another amusing thought: The creationists are wasting their time trying to beat out the biologists and biological or even psychological evolution with all their silly bunk about complexity of anatomy, etc. They should turn to the human capacity for astonishingly fast evolution as rather puny creatures (compared to a cat or dog and thousands of other animals) who make-believe. Man as a metaphor-maker may actually have a history more or less in line with the Biblical creationist origin of 4004BC (Bishop Usher). When Adam and Eve ate the apple they acquired the secret of life -- make believe -- and so God punished them by telling them that from then on they'd have to rely only on their metaphorical abilities, to invent surrogate "as-if" improvements of their biological bodies in order to survive and it wouldn't be easy but, with a little sweat of the brow, it works. So, my friends, go forth and make-believe. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: armando baeza <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: armando baeza <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, November 24, 2009 7:42:19 PM Subject: Re: Reading Dutton: Chapter 10 - Four Characteristics of Great Art I like that very much, and will save it to quote from, thanks mando > .asp
