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By Root 923 0

pigeons. What ever their charms, these creatures, alas, are extremely messy; they finally made the ledge so unhygienic that the window had to be kept shut at all times. How keep them away? My solution is a rubber snake on the ledge. I have seen the birds land on the ledge, see the snake, and immediately depart. They don’t come back. The odd fact is that, although European pigeons have been in New Zealand for a couple of hundred pigeon generations, there are no snakes in New Zealand and never have been. The phobic of the birds is therefore learned neither from exposure to snakes from images of snakes. In snake-free New Zealand it is a perfect instance of a natural atavism: an innate fear-response that is passed, unnecessarily in these parts, from generation to generation of pigeons.

Human responses to landscapes also show atavisms, and the Komar Melamid experiments are a fascinating, if inadvertent, demonstration of this. The lush blue landscape type that the Rus sian artists is found across the world because it is an innate preference. This preference is not explained just by cultural traditions. Specifically, suggestion that the pervasive power of the worldwide calendar industry might explain why even Kenyans think Hudson River School when asked about favorite pictures evades a more plausible hypothesis: that

calendars—and the picture preferences they reveal in completely in dent cultures—tap into innate inclinations. This fundamental to certain types of landscapes is not socially constructed but present in human nature as an inheritance from the Pleistocene, million years during which modern human beings evolved. The industry has not conspired to influence taste but rather caters preexisting, precalendrical human preferences. The tantalizing question is: why is there such a per sis tent preference for the blue, watery landscape?

II

The psychological literature on paradigm theory is what Danto appeals to in his explanation of why Kenyans gave the same response as everyone else when asked for their favorite landscape. There exists, however, another body of psychological scholarship that is much more potent addressing cross-cultural landscape tastes. It is a wide-ranging literature, some of it statistical (not unlike Komar and Melamid’s poll) and theoretical, offering hypotheses to explain pervasive tastes for natural habitats. Though the ideas behind it are old, it was initiated in its incarnation in the 1970s by Jay Appleton, parpaticularly in book The Experience of Landscape. Appleton’s ideas were deepened extended by Roger S. Ulrich, connected to larger issues of cognition perception by Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, and validated and given summary expression by Gordon H. Orians and Judith H. Heerwagen. Orians put forward a general account of the kind of ideal landscape human beings would find intrinsically pleasurable. In his formulation, landscape has much in common with the savannas and woodlands East Africa where hominids split off from chimpanzee lineages much of early human evolution occurred; hence it is called “the Savanna Hypothesis.” Briefly, this landscape type includes these elements:

• open spaces of low (or mown) grasses interspersed with thickets bushes and groupings of trees;

• the presence of water directly in view, or evidence of water nearby or in the distance;

• an opening up in at least one direction to an unimpeded vantage on the horizon;

• evidence of animal and bird life; and

• a diversity of greenery, including flowering and fruiting plants.

By now, this research is developed enough to be able to say much more about innate landscape preferences. These preferences turn out more than just vague, general attractions toward generic scenes: they notably specific. African savannas are not only the probable scene significant portion of human evolution, they are to an extent the habitat at close to ground level, unlike rain forests, tropical or temperate, which are more easily navigable by tree-dwelling apes.

Human beings are less attracted to absolutely open, flat grasslands more toward a moderate