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Darwin himself wrote at the conclusion of On the Origin of Species, the distant future, I see open fields for far more important Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation.” How right he was: recent years have seen immensely productive applications of Darwinian ideas in anthropology, economics, social psychology, linguistics, history, politics, legal theory, and criminology, as well as philosophical study of rationality, theology, and value theory. Underlying this Darwinian sea change in research and scholarship is evolutionary psychology, the science that explains many hitherto curious aspects of social, sexual, and cultural life. While it is true that the arts, the cultural worlds out of which they arise, are immensely complex, are not isolated from evolution. Why should the study of the arts itself off from a perspective that has already enriched and revitalized so many other fields of inquiry?

The arts in all their glory are no more remote from evolved features the human mind and personality than an oak is remote from the subterranean waters that nourish and sustain it. The evolution Homosapiens in the past million years is not just a history of how came to have acute color vision, a taste for sweets, and an upright gait. also a story of how we became a species obsessed with creating artistic caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens.

This book is about that obsession: its ancient evolutionary sources and how they ultimately affect artistic tastes and interests today. My line attack is rather different from other approaches. I do not begin with psychology—for example, with studies of how colors sounds are perceived—and interpret the present character of the from those findings. Such an approach explains too much: not only perception of paintings but the practical use of eyesight and every other sense. Nor do I start off with prehistory, beginning with the invention jewelry perhaps eighty thousand years ago, moving on to remarkable ivory carvings of mammoths and the haunting cave paintings of Lascaux, in order to come out at the other end talking about Michelangelo Picasso. Arguments in this manner try to extrapolate too much from a small, fragmentary, and still poorly understood body of surviving Paleolithic art. The state of the arts today can no more be inferred from looking inside prehistoric caves than today’s weather can be predicted from the last Ice Age.

I begin instead in chapter 1 with something familiar and down-to-earth: calendars and the kinds of landscape illustrations that decorate them across the world. Like landscape painting and the design of public parks and even golf courses, calendars have an intriguing relationship African savannas and other landscape forms hospitable for human evolution. As I will show, human landscape tastes are not just products social conditioning, stemming from manipulative choices made calendar manufacturers (or by landscape artists); rather, people who make and sell calendars are catering to prehistoric tastes shared by their customers across the globe.

My method is therefore to start with what we know by direct, firsthand experience: the state of the arts worldwide today. From this vantage point we can then look back toward what is known about human evolution, bolstered by ethnographies describing preliterate hunter-gatherer tribes that survived into the twentieth century, since their ways life reflect those of our ancient ancestors. Piecing this evidence Greeks: human nature, with its innate interests, predispositions, and in intellectual and social life, including tastes in entertainment artistic experience.

An innate human nature applied cross-culturally in turn points to naturalistic, cross-cultural definition of the concept of art, as discussed in chapter 3. The arts must be understood in terms of a cluster features—skill display, plea sure, imagination, emotion, and so forth— that normally allow us to identify