ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
Art serves advanced blending, compression, and blended classic joint attention. It is
not an independent mental capacity that evolved separate from language, advanced
social cognition, advanced tool invention, theatricality, fashion, mathematical insight,
scientific discovery, and so on. On the contrary, advanced blending made a suite of
advanced capacities possible, and each of them scaffolds for the others. They labor
together. Advanced blending helps to make them possible, and they help to make advanced blending so useful.
References
Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Thomas, Francis-Noël and Mark Turner. 2011. “The Studio,” chapter four of Clear and Simple as the
Truth: Writing Classic Prose. Second edition. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Tomasello, Michael. 2010. “Cognitive Linguistics and First Language Acquisition.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Edited by Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens. pages 1092-1112.
Turner, Mark. 2014. The Origin of Ideas: Blending, Creativity, and the Human Spark. New York: Oxford
University Press.
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Kathryn Coe, Justin R. Garcia, and Ryan O. Begley*
Anthony Lock’s (2015) paper on evolutionary aesthetics draws on the concept of consilience, the term E. O. Wilson chose to refer to the merging of the sciences and humanities. As Lock recognizes, achieving consilience does not rest on a scientist’s ability to probe into and find meaning in literary musings about visual art, drama, music,
and dance – traits which, Wilson (1998: 229) writes, are characterized by “those qualities...we call the “true and beautiful”. To build consilience, Wilson wrote, two questions had to be scientifically addressed: Where do the arts come from and “how are
their essential qualities of truth and beauty to be described through ordinary language?” (p. 229).
Included among the scholars who attempt such a merging are Denis Dutton and Ellen
Dissanayake, whose combined work is a primary focus of Lock’s paper. Although
differing in their theoretical approaches to art, both seem to accept Wilson’s claim that
the essential qualities of art are truth and beauty and attempt to address his questions
by incorporating science (e.g., evolution through natural selection) into their approaches. Both see an origin of art in the very distant past and argue that its origin
largely was in social interactions. The proof of the pudding, however, is not simply to
introduce terms such as “science” or “natural selection” into the discussion, but rather
to show the evolutionary function of art – how art can be converted into survival
and/or descendants (Coe, 2015).
Natural selection is not a goal-directed process, it is not aimed at producing truth,
beauty, or the art of two artists living during a particular time period in New Zealand.
Rather it is a dynamic process that helps explain survival and persistence (or lack
thereof). It logically will occur if there is variation of traits, if that variation is inheritable, and if the inherited traits are associated with differential fitness outcomes, with
fitness measured in terms of numbers of viable descendants. To argue that art is an
adaptation, and not, as Pinker (1997) claims, a mere by-product of selection for other
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