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By Root 990 0

therefore adaptations. With the single exception of fictional narrative (which shall discuss in the next chapter), Pinker argues that the arts are of adaptations, rather than “adaptations in the biologist’s sense the word,” meaning beneficial for survival and reproduction in ancestral environment: “The mind is a neural computer, fitted by natural selection with combinatorial algorithms for causal and probabilistic reasoning about plants, animals, objects, and people. It is driven by states that served biological fitness in ancestral environments, such food, sex, safety, parenthood, friendship, status, and knowledge. That toolbox, however, can be used to assemble Sunday afternoon projects dubious adaptive significance.”

Sunday afternoon projects”—harmless, pleasurable, time-killing— pretty stiff way of dismissing the arts. Rather more famous is his suggestion that the arts are a kind of cheesecake for the mind. Cheesecake, argument goes, is a food of recent invention: “We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it.” What we have evolved and now carry with us from the ancestral environment is neural circuits that give us “trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons.”

By insisting that “some of the activities we consider most profound non-adaptive by-products,” Pinker is trying to steer well clear of any of hyper-adaptationism: “it is wrong to invent functions for activities one of sentimentally attempting to dignify things we like—chamber music or cheesecake—by turning them into adaptations. For a Darwinian aesthetics, the question is how genuine adaptations might produce explain capacities and preferences even for rarefied experiences. In respect, I think it is misleading for Pinker to describe cheesecake product of evolved, and presumably adaptive, Pleistocene tastes. Rather say that cheesecake directly satisfies those very tastes. Pinker calls cheesecake “unlike anything in the natural world,” but it is no more than most other foods, including many that our ancestors might whipped up with honey, ripe fruits, nuts, and mastodon fat during eighty thousand generations of the Pleistocene. Would we say sweet, fatty confections of the Upper Paleolithic were by-products tastes already evolved by the Lower Paleolithic? It would make more sense to say that Pleistocene foods appealed directly to Pleistocene tastes in the Pleistocene and that in our day cheesecake, even though not a Pleistocene food, still appeals to those tastes. Cheesecake, other words, is not a by-product at all but one of countless food varieties produced today to satisfy our present tastes, which originated long ago.

The explanatory power of evolutionary psychology lies foremost identifying adaptations. But its job can also include explaining the character and features of any persis tent human phenomenon, in part or whole, by connecting it to the properties of adaptations. A Darwinian account of food preferences (for fat, sweet, piquancy, protein flavors, fruit aromas, etc.) need not treat as by-products the items on present-day restaurant menu; those items directly satisfy ancient preferences. Similarly, a Darwinian aesthetics will achieve explanatory power neither by proving that art forms are adaptations nor by dismissing them as by-products but by showing how their existence and character are connected to Pleistocene interests, preferences, and capacities.

Instead of architectural spandrels and cheesecake, consider as analogy yet another human invention: the internal combustion engine. Imaginatively applying Pinker’s reverse-engineering rule, we could readily infer that the engine’s purpose is to produce torque in order to drive wheels. Along the way, we will also notice that the engine produces heat. We are entitled to regard