Denis Dutton, Professor of Philosophy at University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has published a book entitled The Art Instinct, in which he argues that art is an evolutionary adaptation. If you give a monkey a typewriter….
“Show me something pleasurable and I’ll show you something which is very likely associated with Pleistocene adaptation”
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One response to ““Show me something pleasurable and I’ll show you something which is very likely associated with Pleistocene adaptation””
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Dear Prof. Heldke,
“Show me something pleasurable and I’ll show you something which is very likely associated with Pleistocene adaptation”
The Darwinian claim is that anything generally pleasurable to human beings — sweet and fat, erotic pleasure, the pleasure of taking care of our children, gossiping with friends, or playing with our dogs (speaking for myself, anyway) — came to be pleasurable to us today because it bestowed a definite survival or reproductive advantage to our ancestors in the Pleistocene, the period of 1.6 million years when modern Homo sapiens emerged. This does not mean that these things are necessaily good for us today (sweet and fat) or that they apply to every member of the species (some people don’t like children, even their own). Evolution only insures that on average things that made a difference in the Pleistocene became pleasurable, and still are to most people today.
The arts — for example, storytelling, movies, “beautiful” landscapes paintings, virtuoso performances of all kinds — also give people deep pleasures. My book, The Art Instinct, mounts serious arguments that these pleasures too stem from what were adaptive practices for survival and procreation in human prehistory. A lot of reviewers have taken the thesis and my arguments very seriously, as you or your students can see here:
Do you have arguments against me, beyond the monkey remark?
Denis
(note spelling and the fact that my university is in New Zealand, not Australia)
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