ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
members would have had an important advantage over others. Art could very well
have emerged in the midst of a Pleistocene “arms race” where groups sought increasingly more effective ways of emotionally-bonding members to each other and to the
tribe as a whole. If so, this reinforces Lock’s discussion of our deep abhorrence of
forgery. If the images and symbols to which we pledge our allegiance and lives don’t
really represent what we thought, then maybe they are not worth that level of commitment. Or conversely, if the artist has faked his or her creation, then is he or she
really committed to the group and its ideals. Either way, this disingenuousness threatens group cohesion, which in our evolutionary past could have had dire fitness consequences. Modern day forgery may continue to unconsciously evoke these deeply primal concerns.
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Michelle Scalise Sugiyama
Affiliated with the Anthropology Department and the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences at the University of Oregon
“Carving Art Behavior at the Joints: Symbolic Behavior, Aesthetic Responses, and
Artification”
I am an evolutionary anthropologist, not an art historian or philosopher, so my comments are directed at the theoretical foundations of Lock’s approach to art behavior
rather than his discussion of New Zealand art per se. My comments may thus be understood to apply not only to Lock’s article, but to the application of evolutionary theory to the study of art behavior in general.
To begin with first principles, the theory of natural selection is a scientific theory. As
such, its proper use is to generate hypotheses regarding natural phenomena, generate
predictions from those hypotheses, design experiments to test those predictions, and
subject the findings of those experiments to quantitativ H[