The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [48]
Here, then, is a complex situation of innate, heritable dispositions (the Westermarck effect), given formal expression by a variety of cultural rules and meanings (incest taboos) that can be empirically connected to observable outcomes (deformed children). In Wilson’s account, what he calls these “enhancements” of incest avoidance look like justifications of an instinctual impulse. But the taboos might some cases be entirely rational: a directly observed, though infrequent, deadly effect produced by inbreeding might require, if it is to avoided, being made into a taboo by the vivid drama, superstition, mythological story—a supernatural theory of incest, so to speak. The taboo structure, in other words, might be originated by a perfectly familiarity with deformed children. So we have a spectrum: the pure operation of unconscious, innate drives, preferences, and capacities one extreme, and behavior based on rational observation, inde pendent drives, as well as purely learned behavior, at the other. Between these natural limits are the constructions of local and traditional culture that combine with inherited nature, channeling it, using it, exploiting it, it.
Sometimes superstitions and mythologies validate the impulses come from within; on other occasions, they may plainly validate empirical observation observed from without. Most of human life is in a middle territory, conducted in light of the overlapping effects of instinct, custom, authority (shamans in the Pleistocene, “experts” and the media today), and personal rational choices based on the evidence experience provides. It is useful to apply such analytical categories to facts of everyday life—hunger and thirst, fear of snakes (or electrical outlets), sex reproduction, incest avoidance, a sense of fairness, language, sociality, so forth. It is especially important to keep this analysis in mind when describing the evolved sources and innate impulses that drive something as culturally freighted as the arts.
III
The gold standard for evolutionary explanation is the biological concept an adaptation: an inherited physiological, affective, or behavioral between adaptation and the innumerable features of human biology and mental life that are not adaptations? If we follow standard evolutionary theory, anything produced by an adaptive process that an adaptation must fall into one of two categories: it can be either one-off random or accidental effect of gene combination—noise, might say, a mutation—or (2) a causally related by-product of an adaptation or arrangement of adaptations. To connect evolution and the arts, concern ourselves with ancient, persis tent patterns of human interests, capacities, and preferences. Random one-off mutations or chance effects of mutations are therefore ruled out as explanations; these are dependable drivers of evolution, to be sure, but they are not patterned features that are its end result.
By-products are a much more plausible class of possibilities for the arts. Might the arts be best understood as by-products of adaptations? A textbook example of a nonfunctional by-product of an evolved adaptation is the whiteness of bone. Skeletons make use of calcium, which available to animals in their food and confers structural strength. As happens, the insoluble calcium salts in bone are white, and so, therefore, bone. There are adaptive reasons why bone should be strong, but no such reasons dictate that it should be white or any other color. Whiteness is a consequence of the chemical composition of bone; were calcium salts another color, bone might be green or pink. Other examples by-products include the navel, essentially a scar that in itself has no adaptive function, and male nipples, which are by-products of the pro that in females leads to mammary glands.
When we move from evolved organic features to an evolved psychology, we enter a field where