The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [59]
III
For evolutionary aesthetics, the problem is to reverse-engineer the improbable but manifestly human urge to both make fictions and enjoy them. Any solution to this problem must take into account Steven Pinker’s caution discussed in the previous chapter: it is easy but empty to observe that fiction, for instance, helps us to cope with the world, increases our capacity for cooperation, or comforts the sick, unless we can plausibly hypothesize that such coping or cooperation or comfort evolved as an adaptive function, conferring survival advantages in the ancestral environment. A thoroughgoing Darwinism makes a specific increase, however marginally, the chances of our Pleistocene forebears surviving and procreating.
Keeping this requirement in mind, here are three interconnected kinds of adaptive advantage that might explain the pervasiveness of fictions in life, now and as far back as history can record. “Fictions” includes oral story traditions and preliterate mythologies in the ancestral environment and, by implication after the invention of writing, such enhancements, extensions, and intensifications as novels, plays, operas, movies, and video games.
1. Stories provide low-cost, low-risk surrogate experience. They satisfy a need to experiment with answers to “what if?” questions that focus on the problems, threats, and opportunities might have thrown before our ancestors, or might throw before us, both as individuals and as collectives. Fictions are preparations for life and its surprises.
2. Stories—whether overtly fictional, mythological, or representing real events—can be richly instructive sources of factual putatively factual) information. The didactic purpose of storytelling is diminished in literate cultures, but by providing vivid and memorable way of communicating information, likely had actual survival benefits in the Pleistocene.
3. Stories encourage us to explore the points of view, beliefs, and values of other human minds, inculcating potentially adaptive interpersonal and social capacities. They extend mind-reading capabilities that begin in infancy and come full flower in adult sociality. Stories provide regulation for behavior.
Although he generally regards the arts as by-products of adaptations, Pinker nevertheless grants that in all likelihood fictional storytelling directly evolved as an adaptation. The mind uses fiction to explore solve life problems in the imagination: “The cliché that life imitates it". Pinker’s most striking meta phor for this function of storytelling is drawn from Pinker’s most striking meta phor for this function of storytelling is drawn from chess. We might expect that the countless potential situations and possibilities of chess would require a reliance by chess grand masters on strategic rules—maxims and algorithms—for play. This, however, is not the case. “Keep your king safe” or “Get your queen out early” are not much help beyond beginner’s chess, and experienced players do not have available to them higher-level algorithms to rely on: chess games become too complicated too fast for mere maxims to be of much use. So instead, expert players study the published moves in countless actual games, building up a mental catalogue of the ways good players have to challenges and situations. These games, studied and memorized part or in whole in their thousands by chess grand masters, provide templates and heuristics that make chess victory possible in uniquely games. “Chess experience” for a mature player does not consist only what the player knows from games personally played; it is rather what player knows from all the games the player personally played studied or observed.
Although thirty-two pieces on sixty-four squares provide an enormous number of combinatorial possibilities—untold trillions of moves—they would be dwarfed in range by the contingencies served up by daily experience in a human lifetime.