The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [89]
Explaining these developments by connecting them with sexual selection and the rise of language does not make them at root “all the same,” or all about sex. This was one of Freud’s many errors. He sensed, many of us do intuitively, that at some deep level much art is somehow connected with sex. He thought it could be found in his libidinal drives, in which surplus energy is the source of sexual display or, even more improbably, in those Freudian systems of symbolism in which everything convex stands for some tumescent body part. Many “letting steam” theories of art make the same kind of error: they fail to running around the block is a better way of letting off energy than composing a string quartet. What sexual selection in evolution does us an explanation of why so much human energy has been exhausted objects of the most extreme elegance and complexity—not just massive symmetry of the Pyramids, but the poignancy of Shakespeare’s sonnets or the Schubert Quintet in C.
Sexual selection explains the will of human beings to charm and each other. At the same time, it explains why we can regard other now and again as so charming and interesting. We find beautiful artifacts—carvings, poems, stories, arias—captivating because at a level we sense that they take us into the minds that made them. This sense of communion, even of intimacy, with other personalities erroneous—even systematically delusional—but the self-domestication sexual selection was not about truth; it was about living the richer that would carry on the human species and allow it to flourish. That too defines success, for the survival not just of the physically strongest but of the cleverest, wittiest, and wisest. If along the way amazing process has given us Lascaux, Homer, Cervantes, Chopin, Stravinsky, and The Simpsons, as well as minds to appreciate and take plea sure in them, then so much the better.
CHAPTER 8
Intention, Forgery, Dada: Three
Aesthetic Problems
I
Much of the appeal of Darwin’s theory of evolution—and the horror of for some theists—is that it expunges from biology the concept of purpose, thereby converting biology into a mechanistic science. In this respect, the author of On the Origin of Species may be said to be the combined Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler of biology. Just as these astronomers gave us a view of the heavens in which no angels were required to propel the planets in their orbs and the earth was no longer the center of the celestial system, so Darwin showed that no God was needed to design the spider’s intricate web and that man is in truth but another animal. Had Darwin ceased his research and theoretical speculation with the publication of the Origin of Species, he would still be honored as the greatest biologist of history. But he went on to extend his thinking into the evolution of the mental life of animals, including the human species, work that culminated in The Descent of Man. I have explained Darwin’s account as a claim that the human race domesticated not only dogs and alpacas, roses and cabbages, through selective breeding, but that it also domesticated itself through the long process of mate selection.
Describing sexual selection as human self-domestication should not seem all that strange. Every direct prehistoric ancestor of every person alive today at times faced critical survival choices: whether to run or These choices were frequently instantaneous and intuitive, and, needless say, our direct ancestors were the ones with the better intuitions. But there was another crucial intuitive choice often faced by our ancestors: whether to choose this man or woman as a mate with whom to rear children and share