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What is art? Is it, as some have argued, man's noblest invention (Diamond 1992), or is it, as others have argued with equal seriousness, a mere by-product of other activities that are more important? Is art an activity that is spiritual and basically good and moral ( John F. Kennedy referred to artists as engineers of the soul in 1963), or is it, as Socrates warily wrote, "the honeyed muse" (Plato 1977, 20) that feeds the passions and impairs reason and is likely to be, as Oscar Wilde once quipped, immoral? Is art, as some anthropologists insist, a necessary activity if we wish to promote the well-being of individuals and cooperation within societies; or is it, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, a jealous mistress, robbing us of time and relationships? Is art a universal and ancient human activity, as some anthropologists argue, or is it (and the presumed aesthetic emotion), as some archaeologists hypothesize, found solely in Western societies?
These and other contradictory claims are the mystery that led me on a twenty-five-year quest to understand one of the arts, namely the visual arts. This book is a summary of that search, which, as luck would have it, was conducted precisely at a time when an understanding of visual art seemed at last to lie within our grasp. First, despite Marcel Duchamp's claim that art "has no biological source" (cited in Cabanne 1971, 100), modern Darwinian theory now provides us with a new vantage point from which we can view our species and its evolution and behavior, including art behaviors. Second, vast amounts of data have been accumulated-not only descriptions of contemporary forms of visual art but descriptions of visual art found in prehistoric, ethnographic, cross-cultural, and historic records. Thus we have both the theory and the data against which any hypotheses built upon that theory can be tested.
Within modern Darwinian theory, a number of proposals have been put forth to explain the arts. Hypotheses focus on art's neurological underpinnings (Aiken 1998); the role that art might play in devising scenarios to solve social problems (Alexander 1990); the importance of the arts in promoting cooperation in groups (Dissanayake 1992); and the evolutionary history of aesthetics or a sense of beauty (Thornhill 1998; Turner 1991). While these hypotheses are intriguing and productive, I wish to contrast my own with one that focuses on males, competition, and creativity. Geoffrey Miller (2000), who argues that art is a strategy used to compete for mates, proposes such a hypothesis.
The evolution of art, Miller proposed, involves the evolution of a human tendency to make material objects into competitive and changing advertisements of fitness, of our appropriateness as mates. "As males tend to be the mate seekers, sexually mature males," he writes, "have produced almost all the publicly displayed art throughout human history" (Miller 2000, 275). "The human mind's most impressive abilities," Miller argued, "are like the peacock's tail; they are courtship tools, evolved to attract and entertain sexual partners" (4). Peacocks have brightly colored tails because the ancestresses of living peahens preferred males with gaudy tails." In a runaway type selection, humans began producing visual art and making it more elaborate. Elaborate art not only attracts attention, but it also has high costs. Only those individuals who are extremely .t are able to pay such high costs. Females, predisposed to select mates who could pay such high costs, produce sexy sons, sons more likely to be chosen as mates.
While it appears to be true that males (and even females) decorate themselves (and write sonnets, sing love songs, and show their etchings) when attempting to attract mates, the cross-cultural and archaeological characteristics of visual art suggest that much more than mate choice has been involved in the making and viewing of visual art. Humans, for tens of thousands of years, apparently have been decorating the bodies of infants, menopausal females, and the dead. More importantly, when visual art is viewed across the centuries and millennia, the majority of it, as I describe in this chapter and the next, has been traditional, not idiosyncratic. "Most writers," Radin argued, "have emphasized the conservation shown in the essential form of material objects" (1932, 53). Traditions imply replication or copying, not change or creativity. While perhaps technologically complex and attractive (meaning it attracts our attention), traditional visual art comes from ancestors and persists across generations. Nontraditional art, which explicitly ignores or rejects the traditions of one's ancestors, is characterized by individualism, creativity, change, and elaboration or even outrageousness. While Miller's argument may explain contemporary art, it cannot account for the traditional arts, and, as the majority of human visual art has been traditional, this is a serious defect.
While both Miller and I are evolutionary biologists, he places an emphasis on sexual behavior; I place it on parental care. Even though it must be true, as Miller argued, that human ancestors managed "to convince at least one sexual partner to have enough sex to produce offspring" (3), it is also true that if those offspring were to survive to reproductive age, a significant amount of resources had to be devoted to their care. While mating (just as survival) is necessary if humans are to successfully reproduce, it clearly is not a sufficient explanation.
The ancestress hypothesis, which is the name I give my argument, proposes that the linchpin of culture, and a driving force behind the evolution of our species, was the increasingly large investment made in offspring initially by mothers, and then allomothers, and then males. Humans are extreme K-strategists (investing large amounts in a small number of mates and offspring), as opposed to r-strategists (investing very small amounts in a large number of mates and offspring). Mating behaviors can be at the expense of the parenting behaviors that apparently have been so important to our species.
An ancestress strategy is not a female strategy; it is a maternal one. Mothers are not just females with children; they differ from nonmothers. "Pregnancy and motherhood," Hrdy wrote, "forever change a woman" (1999, 95). Motherhood, however, does not imply that one becomes an ancestress. An ancestress is a dynast; she is a woman who lived and reproduced and left a lineage of descendants influenced by her strategies. An ancestress strategy is long term, aimed not just at personal survival or procreation but also at using social strategies to promote the survival, reproduction, and social success of that offspring, its offspring, and their descendants. While strategies that promote survival and reproduction can be, indeed are, self-interested, ancestress strategies are fundamentally social. A K-strategy is a social strategy. One crucial issue here is what is meant by the word social and whether or not social behavior is, like sexual behavior, at the expense of survival and whether or not it is, unlike sexual behavior, at the expense of increased reproduction. An r-strategy will out-reproduce a Kstrategy in every generation.
If we assume that visual art not only influences behavior but is, as many argue, also an adaptation, then doesn't it make sense that it would be directed not only at courtship (which an be ignored), or mating (which may not lead to conception), or conception (which can fail to lead to a viable child), or even the birth of a child (who can die), but also at the survival and well-being of children and more distant descendants?
Adaptations, as traits that work over time, are apparently traits that originate, that promote reproduction, and that are transmitted to the next generation, thus promoting that generation's reproduction. Adaptations, in sum, promote not only the reproduction of individuals but also of their descendants. The proximate aim of visual art was to identify individuals who shared descent from a common ancestor and to encourage cooperative, unselfish behavior among all individuals so identified. Visual art's effect, the effect that promoted its persistence through time, was an environment in which large numbers of individuals who shared common ancestry, codescendants, identified themselves and cooperated as close kin (although many were not close kin) and thus were not threats to costly, vulnerable human offspring but were their protectors, providers, and teachers. The social restraint regularly encouraged by traditions would have been crucial. When traditions break down, so do the personal sacrifices they demand and the cooperative social relationships those traditions and sacrifices encourage. Art, increasingly, will become individualistic, competitive, and creative.