The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [90]
Sexual selection theory as developed in The Descent of Man has and irritated many otherwise sympathetic evolutionary theorists because, I suspect, it allows purposes and intentions back into evolution through an unlocked side door. The slogan memorized by generations students of natural selection is random mutation and selective retention. The “retention” here is strictly nonteleological, a matter of brute physical survival. The retention process of sexual selection with human beings however, in large measure purposive and intentional. In this context, puzzling about whether peahens have purposes in their mating choices an unnecessary distraction: other animals aside, it is absolutely clear that with the human race, sexual selection describes a revived evolutionary teleology—the reintroduction of intentional, intelligent design evolutionary process. The designer, however, is not a deity but individuals themselves. Though it is directed toward other human beings, it is as purposive as the domestication of those wolf descendants that became familiar house hold pets. Every Pleistocene man who chose bed, protect, and provision a woman because she struck him as, witty and healthy, and because her eyes lit up in the presence of children, along with every woman who chose a man because of his extraordinary hunting skills, delightful sense of humor, and generosity, making a rational, intentional choice that in the end built much of human personality as we now know it. Natural selection aside, it is evolutionary fact that available individuals who were less witty and had poorer hunting skills, were indifferent to children, or were consciousness and purpose that is absent in principle from natural selection. To that extent, Homo sapiens is a self-designed species.
Human evolution is therefore structured across a continuum. At one are purely natural selective processes that give us, for instance, our internal organs and the autonomic processes that regulate our bodies. At the other end are rational decisions—intentional, and yet adaptive and species-altering if they include a bias, however tiny, in favor of reproduction over tens of thousands of generations in prehistoric epochs. It is at this end of the continuum, where rational choice and innate intuitions can overlap and reinforce one another, that we find important adaptations that are relevant to understanding the human personality, including the innate value systems implicit in morality, sociality, politics, religion, and the arts. Decisions made by women and men over hundreds of millennia have honed the human virtues as we now understand them: the admiration of altruism, skill, strength, intelligence, industriousness, courage, imagination, eloquence, diligence, kindness, and forth. Not all of these evolved human excellences (they run roughly parallel to the list of universal mating criteria) are implicated in a general understanding of art and beauty. But some of the virtues clearly are, and connecting them with natural selection and sexual selection gives us powerful means not only to talk about the origins and universal character of the arts worldwide but also to throw light on issues and paradoxes have bedev iled theoretical aesthetics since the Greeks.
The philosophy of art as an academic discipline has long thrived paradoxes and the insights that come from taking them to pieces. Its normal procedural mode is, like many other branches of philosophy, analyze conflicting ideas and either to show how one or the other side correct, or to demonstrate how a new understanding of a paradox make it evaporate. Aristotle invented aesthetics as the logical analysis arts, and Kant perfected