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By Root 967 0

dancing, and making love. If Pleistocene communal life was similar to recent hunter-gather existence, there would have been a tendency for men’s artistic artifact production to concentrate on carving hard materials, such as stone, hardwood, and bone, while women would have channeled their efforts into cloth and fiber artistry. Outside some surviving jewelry, we know little of personal adornment, but it likely that Ötzi’s tattoos continue a persistent tradition of face and body painting. Elaborate hair styling would have likely been a feature Pleistocene life, but again we know almost nothing of it. Piecing the whole picture of the fifty thousand years or so immediately preceding the invention of cities and agriculture, it is inconceivable that Pleistocene people did not have a vivid intellectual and creative life. This would have found expression in song, dance, and imaginative speech—skills that matched in complexity and sophistication what we know of Pleistocene jewelry, painting, and carving.

Darwin’s concept of sexual selection offers to us a startlingly meta phor for the mind, one that has at least as much to say about origin of the arts as natural selection does. The ancients understood embodied ghost. For Hume it was a bundle of perceptions, while Freud’s view the mind came to resemble a high-pressure hydraulic system. More recently, the analogy of the computer chip has come dominate discourse about the mind. If we combine the computer model Darwinian natural selection, we so far have a picture of the mind strategizing, planning, problem-solving machine that cleverly survived in the savannas with well-honed computational algorithms.

Darwinian sexual selection, however, presents a radically different model of mind. As Miller so nicely puts it, the mind in sexual selection best seen as a gaudy, overpowered Pleistocene home-entertainment system, devised in order that our Stone Age ancestors could attract, amuse, and bed each other. Of course, bed was not the only objective, since the qualities of mind chosen and thus evolved in this process human self-domestication made for enduring pairings, the rearing children who themselves might survive, and thus the creation of robust social groups. But the gadgets and gizmos of the home-entertainment model of mind—in electronics stores they are even called “modules”— are designed for much more than just recording accurate knowledge planning hunting parties. They are about telling stories or inventing ideologies that will captivate an audience. This sexually selected mind record and playback functions, along with a library of stories and in audio format, and a dictionary with an impressive thesaurus for meanings and synonyms and not, needless to say, for spelling Pleistocene). Better even than any modern home-entertainment unit, human version not only archives and reproduces funny stories meta phors but makes them up on the spot, demonstrating wit and originality of a sort yet to be matched by any computer. Provide this sexually selected mind with a piece of wood and it can use its hands and tools carve an animal; for it, a cave wall can be a perfect place to paint a whole menagerie. It has penchants for the oddest activities—such as its liking jokes, which it uses to induce strange but highly pleasurable temporary convulsions in itself and others.

From the Greeks through the Enlightenment and on into the computer age, every prevailing analogy for the mind has captured some aspect or function of it. But none even begins to explain the mind Descent of Man, by regarding the mind as a sexual ornament, presents a first step toward explaining those features of the human personality that we find most charming, captivating, and seductive. Adding sexual selection to natural selection, we begin at last to see the possibility for a complete theory of the origin of the arts.

IV

An essential requirement of Darwinian fitness indicators is that they function reliably and honestly: they must pose authentic tests. If they be faked, they are useless as indicators. If unhealthy peacocks grow