ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
Art as Adaptation
If artification is an adaptation and not a spandrel, then it needs to have served an
evolutionarily beneficial purpose. For artifying to be an adaptation, its existence
must have provided, or still provide, some benefit that we did not get from something else. The primary objection that must hold if art is not an adaptation, or technology, like mathematics, tools and the wheel, are claims that artifying is an expression of creativity and the general traits that evolved to form our inherited intelligence. Although Stephen Davies is critical of all possibilities, at the end of The
Artful Species he writes:
If I had to bet, I would say that the adaptations that give rise to
art behaviors are intelligence, imagination, humor, sociality,
emotionality, inventiveness, curiosity...art...gives direct and immediate expression to these traits and dispositions, I would identify it as a by-product rather than as a technology (2012, 185).
The standard suggestions for art as a spandrel are Pinker’s: that artification stimulates bodily systems that encourage motivation when we see signals that align with
evolutionary interest; is generated from a greater production of the pleasure produced by stimulating these interests; or, alternatively, from “the hunger for status,
the aesthetic pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments, and the
ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends” (2002, 405). Aside from arguments like those that follow, the counter-argument to the spandrel theory is that
even if artifying was a by-product of other adaptations, artification has properties
that would have had evolutionary competitive value and hence adaptations in their
own right. Such as, in literature, the ability to not only imagine scenarios that
would help develop social skills by practicing them in a kind of social simulator, or
teach a group’s cultural etiquette and taboos, but also make such teaching and
learning more enjoyable and hence more effective (e.g., arguments in Boyd 2009).
I do not have the space to discuss the adaptation / spandrel / technology debate
here, but I think that the adaptations of intelligence, imagination, humor, sociality,
emotionality, inventiveness, curiosity are rather vague on which to claim art as a
spandrel. For example, when adolescent otters play, they may softly bite each other’s necks and wrestle to gain a stronger fighting position. This play may emerge
from sociality, inventiveness and curiosity, but acts such as play neck biting that
attack the most vulnerable area for most enemies, and how to overpower a rival for
potential resources, are surely adaptations in their own right, because they are vastly more evolutionarily competitive than play that would not foster such useful
skills. This is similar to the reasons why Tooby and Cosmides changed their views
from “routinely...[using] various artistic behaviors unproblematically as examples
of evolutionary byproducts in our lectures” to arguing “that the human mind is
permeated by an additional layer of adaptations that were selected to involve humans in aesthetic experiences and imagined worlds, even though these activities
superficially appear to be nonfunctional and even extravagantly nonutilitarian”
(2001, 11). The hypothesis I present here does not necessarily require the arts to
have arisen as either a single adaptation or multiply through many adaptations,
though it assumes that if Dissanayake and Dutton are correct about two aesthetic
origins pre-Homo sapiens, then the basis of interrelationship between people that
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