The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [45]
Since Danto is willing to give primacy to the artist’s interpretation constitutive of art in the Western tradition, the same courtesy ought extended to his two imagined tribes. His failure to interrogate indigenous artists and connoisseurs of these tribes as to whether perceive differences that escape Western curators and schoolchildren might be construed as ethnocentrism. But this would be fatuous: it is hard to know what it would be for a philoso pher to be ethnocentric about example that is the product of his own fertile imagination. Danto, all, is the chief colonial administrator and exclusive ethnographer territory that includes the Pot People and the Basket Folk. Nevertheless, I am certain that if he would allow a few more alert anthropologists
CHAPTER 5
Art and Natural Selection
I
Charles Darwin was not the first thinker to suggest that living organisms evolved through time. The pre-Socratic philoso pher Anaximander said as much 2,500 years ago, and the concept had become widely accepted by Darwin’s own time. Nor did Darwin’s originality lie with the idea that all animal life is related, or that parts of organisms or their behavior patterns are conducive to survival: by Darwin’s time, such facts were constantly being appealed to by theologians as evidence for God’s hand in nature. Darwin’s theory of evolution triumphed because it proposed a physical mechanism to make evolution both intelligible and possible: the development of species by a process of random mutation and selective retention, known forever after as natural selection.
At a stroke, natural selection deprived religious naturalism of its greatest single support beam. Darwin discovered a purely physical pro -cess that could generate biological organisms that function as though they had been consciously designed. Indeed, they were “designed,” but in new sense: design by blindly causal rather than knowingly intentional processes. Today, biblical creationists still insist on the necessity of divine intention to account for at least some features of the natural world, for instance, the intricate purposiveness of a weaver bird’s nest or the human eye. Anyone with a clear grasp of evolution is unlikely to find the creationist position interesting. But when it comes to applying evolution design and purpose reemerge all over again, though in ways not always appreciated even by sophisticated defenders of Darwinism. It is one thing to connect the structure and function of the immune system inner ear to evolutionary principles. It is quite another to suppose that evolution might be linked to the paintings of Albrecht Dürer or the poetry of Gérard de Nerval. Darwin believed there were important connections between evolution of human artistic practices. We shall look ideas on this subject later, parpaticularly in chapter 7. First, though, want to examine an important question: are the arts in their various forms adaptations in their own right, or are they better understood as modern products of adaptations?
Evolutionary psychology is the study of the developmental history and adaptive functions of the mind, including the ways those functions shape the mind’s cultural products. Evolutionary psychology holds hope, as Steven Pinker puts it, “of understanding the design or purpose of the mind”—its individual features, biases, capacities—“not in mystical or teleological sense, but in the sense of the simulacrum of engineering that pervades the natural world.” The engineering