The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [12]
From the viewpoint of our ancestors, this way of life had no conceivable beginning or end. From our day back to the time of Socrates and Plato is a mere 120 generations. If we go further back from their Athens the invention of writing, agriculture, and the first cities, it is a longer: another 380 generations. But the Pleistocene itself—the evolutionary theater in which we acquired the tastes, intellectual features, generations long. Over such a vast period of time, human beings moved of Africa and into environments very different from the savannas. Our ancestors moved along coastlines, went inland, learned to survive arctic hunters, and managed to sustain life in the deserts of Asia and Australia. They populated rain forests both temperate and tropical, followed the receding glaciers northward through Europe, and found off the east coast of Asia. Human evolution did not occur in any geograph i cal place but over much of the globe. Unlike many animal species that are adapted to a single physical habitat and will die out that environment disappears, human beings—clever, social, language-using tool-makers—devised ways to live in almost all physical environments on earth.
Nevertheless, certain characteristics of landscapes continue to evoke emotional human responses, revealed in basic, prerational longings and desires. Such purely emotional responses are not easy to isolate analysis because they can coincide in respects with rational responses. This overlap between the rational and the emotional in reactions landscape types can confuse the issue. Consider a thought experiment: a hunter-gatherer group of two dozen souls, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago, has been moving through a rocky, arid terrain in search food. These ancestors of ours emerge from the end of a narrow canyon find themselves standing before a grand vista. To their right is upland temperate landscape. Its green hills and valleys increase toward higher blue mountains. The horizon slopes down on the left toward desert, with no indication of life save sagebrush and no signs water. That our hypothetical hunter-gatherer band will make its way the hills seems to be explainable as a purely rational choice. So why hypothesize an innate emotional response? Isn’t emotion here an explanatory fifth wheel?
The first thing to be said is that in actual Pleistocene life the choice might not be nearly as clear-cut as my thought experiment suggests.To older, more experienced members of the band, the desert may offer of food that are not immediately obvious. The lush hills, other hand, might be inhabited by another, hostile hunter-gatherer band. Many factors, in other words, might affect a rational decision eighty thousand generations of the Pleistocene, it would only take small average survival advantage in the right-turn choice—toward green, watery landscapes, flat or undulating, with open spaces and thickets of forest—for such a response to become ingrained in the species level of emotion and aesthetic preference.
In a discussion of the mechanisms of emotion, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have reviewed issues that have some bearing on the question raised here: why shouldn’t we expect that all preference phenomena explained in terms of rational calculation? The human mind, they argue, a crowded network” of innate routines, “programs” in their computer metaphor, for solving problems that confronted our hominid ancestors. As with the example of fear of snakes, these can be highly specific: for instance, face recognition, foraging, mate choice, sleep management, and predator vigilance. Such routines can, in life contexts, conflict with one another: wanting to obtain water can be in conflict with wanting avoid dangerous predators near a waterhole. That is why some larger domains have cast over them what Tooby and