Until the end of time, p.27
Until the End of Time, page 27
Magnificent minds—rare but arising in every age, all shaped by nature and some by imagined inspiration from the divine—would discover new ways for articulating the transcendent. Their creative odysseys would express a variety of truth standing beyond derivation or validation, giving voice to defining qualities of human nature that remain silent until experienced.
To Create
Sensitivity to pattern ranks among our most potent survival skills. As we have seen repeatedly, we observe patterns, we experience patterns, and, most importantly, we learn from patterns. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and while it may be premature to declare shame on me, by the third or fourth time, such a shift of responsibility is justified. To learn from pattern is an essential survival talent imprinted by evolution on our DNA. Alien visitors dropping by earth may subsist on different biochemistry, but they will likely have no difficulty grasping the concept; almost certainly, pattern analysis is central to how they have prevailed too.
Nevertheless, such intergalactic interchange may not be a perfect meeting of minds. Certain of our cherished patterns might leave our alien visitors baffled. Arrange particular pigments on a white canvas or chip away particular chunks from a marble mass or generate particular vibrations across jostling air molecules—yielding particular patterns of light and texture and sound—and upon encountering such patterns we humans can feel reality open in ways we never imagined possible. For a brief but seemingly boundless moment we can sense our place in the world shift as if we have been transported to another realm. If the aliens have had these types of experiences, they’ll get what we’re talking about. But when we recount our inner response to creative works, there is a chance they will stare at us blankly. And as language can go just so far in describing these experiences, the aliens may sport a bemused expression as they glance from continent to continent and see vast numbers of our species, some by themselves, others in groups, intently concentrating and absorbing and tapping and gyrating as they envelop themselves in worlds of art and music.
Baffled by our response to artistic expression, the alien visitors are likely to be just as baffled, perhaps more so, by the creation of such works. The blank page. The pristine canvas. The unformed mass of marble. The lump of clay. The unwritten score that awaits the composer’s inspiration, or, once composed, waits to be played. Or sung. Or danced. Some of our species spend their days and nights imagining shapes to extract from the formless and sounds to pour into the silence. Some will expend the core of their life’s energy realizing these imaginative visions, producing patterns in space and time that may be revered, or abhorred, or ignored, or deemed the very essence of existence. “Without music,” said Friedrich Nietzsche, “life would be a mistake.”2 And, in the words of George Bernard Shaw’s Ecrasia, “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”3 But what sparks the imaginative impulse? Is it catalyzed by behavioral instincts shaped by natural selection? Or have we long been expending precious resources of time and energy on artistic pursuits that have little connection to survival and reproduction?
We are thrust into the world without consultation. Once here, we are granted leave to embrace life for merely a moment. How elevating to grab the reins of creation and fashion something we control, something intrinsically ours, something that is a reflection of who we are, something that captures our peculiar take on human existence. While many among us would decline an opportunity to switch places with Shakespeare or Bach, Mozart or van Gogh, Dickinson or O’Keeffe, plenty would jump at the chance to be infused with their creative mastery. To illuminate reality with beacons of our own making, to move the world with works that flow through our particular molecular makeup, to craft experiences that can stand the test of time—well, it all sounds thoroughly romantic. For some, there is magic in the creative process, an irrepressible drive for self-expression. Others see an opportunity to elevate their status and esteem. For others still, there is a nod toward eternity; our artistic creations, as Keith Haring once said, are a “quest for immortality.”4
If creating and consuming works of the imagination were a recent addition to human behavior, or if these activities were only rarely practiced across human history, it is unlikely that they would reveal universal qualities of our evolved human nature. After all, some things—like bell-bottoms and fried bananas—arise from contingent peculiarities, and so teasing out the details of their historical lineage offers only limited enlightenment. But the fact is, far into the past and clear across lands inhabited, we have been singing and dancing and composing and painting and sculpting and carving and writing. Cave paintings and elaborate burial goods, as encountered in the previous chapter, date from as far back as thirty to forty thousand years ago. Etchings and artifacts that show evidence of artistic expression have been discovered from a few hundred thousand years earlier.5 We are faced with a behavior that is pervasive and yet, unlike eating and drinking and procreating, doesn’t wear its survival value on its sleeve.
With a modern sensibility, this may not strike you as puzzling. To experience a work that enlivens the soul or moves us to tears is to go beyond the humdrum of the everyday, and who wouldn’t thrill to an experience like that? But as with the superficial observation that we eat ice cream because we like sweet things, this explanation is focused solely on our proximate responses and hence is limited to the most immediate impetus for creative inclinations. Can we go deeper? Can we gain insight into why our forebears were so willing to turn from the all-too-real challenges of survival and expend precious time, energy, and effort engaging the imaginative?
Sex and Cheesecake
When we encountered our early brethren telling stories, we considered a similar question, and the most convincing answer invoked the flight simulator metaphor: through the creative use of language we have experienced perspectives familiar and foreign, allowing us to broaden and refine our responses to encounters in the real world. By telling stories and hearing stories and embellishing stories and repeating stories, we played with possibility without suffering consequences. We followed trail upon trail that began with “What if?” and, through reason and fantasy, explored a wealth of possible outcomes. Our minds freely roamed the landscape of imagined experience, giving us a newfound nimbleness of thought that, plausibly, proved valuable for survival.
As we consider more abstract forms of art, this explanation needs to be revisited. It’s one thing to envision the mind burnishing the ideals of courage and heroism through riveting tales of hard-won battles or spellbinding accounts of treacherous journeys. It’s seemingly quite another to argue that the mind exercised an adaptive muscle by listening to the Pleistocene’s Édith Piaf or Igor Stravinsky. There is a seemingly yawning chasm between experiencing music—or, for that matter, painting or dancing or sculpting—and surmounting challenges encountered in the ancestral world.
Darwin himself considered the potential adaptive function of an innate artistic sense motivated by the famous evolutionary puzzle of the peacock’s tail. A large and brightly colored tail makes it a challenge for a peacock to hide and, when chased by a fast-approaching predator, makes it a challenge to escape. Why would such a grand, beautiful, but apparently maladaptive structure evolve? The answer, Darwin concluded after much consternation, is that while the peacock’s tail can be a ball and chain in the struggle for survival, the tail is nevertheless an essential part of the peacock’s reproductive strategy. It is not only we humans who find the peacock’s tail appealing. Peahens do too. They are attracted to sprightly plumes, and so the more impressive his tail, the more likely the peacock will mate. The resulting progeny, in turn, stand a good chance of inheriting dad’s traits and mom’s tastes, propagating a genetic war in which battles are won not by acquiring more food or ensuring greater safety but by growing more resplendent tails.
It is an example of sexual selection, a Darwinian evolutionary mechanism whose cogs are driven by reproductive access. A peacock who dies young will fail to reproduce, the very reason natural selection favors those who survive. But the same reproductive failure will befall a peacock who lives long and prospers yet is shunned by all potential mates. To influence the biological makeup of subsequent generations, survival is necessary but not sufficient. Producing offspring is what matters, and so characteristics that promote mating will enjoy a selective advantage, sometimes even at the expense of safety.6 Such costs cannot be astronomical—there is a limit to how unwieldy tails can be before survival would be utterly imperiled—but need not be free. And though the peacock’s tail is the go-to example, similar considerations are applicable across a great many species. White-bearded manakins strut their moves in raucous mosh pit dances to entice potential mates; fireflies flash hypnotic courtship displays with success turning on the finesse of their flitting light shows; male bowerbirds construct elaborate bachelor dens, entwining twigs, leaves, shells and even colorful candy wrappers in an ostentatious display that apparently serves no other purpose than to seduce a future Mrs. Bowerbird.7
When Darwin first described sexual selection in his 1871 two-volume book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, the proposal was not an instant hit. To many of his contemporaries, it seemed inconceivable that behavior in the brutish realm of nonhuman animals might hinge on aesthetic responses.8 Not that Darwin was imagining birds or frogs lost in poetic reverie, gazing at the sun’s reddish rays as it dips below the horizon. The aesthetic sense he proposed was focused solely on mate selection. Even so, Darwin’s ascription of a “taste for the beautiful”9 to a broad swath of the animal kingdom seemed cavalier. Heck, to Alfred Russel Wallace, who viewed human aesthetic sensibilities to be a gift from God, it was unseemly.10
But if we don’t invoke an innate sensitivity to beauty, how do we explain the lavish bodily adornments, creative displays, and physical constructions that are integral to myriad mating games playing out in the animal kingdom? Well, there is a less lofty approach. Consider again the peacock’s tail. While we humans may appreciate the aesthetics of a peacock’s plumage, to a peahen it may arouse an instinctual response of considerable genetic importance. Peacocks adorned with dazzling plumage are strong and healthy, increasing the likelihood that they will sire hardy offspring. And since peahens, much as the females in most species, can produce far fewer progeny compared to their male counterparts, they have developed an especially strong preference for fit males; such unions enhance the success rate of each resource-consuming and hence precious fertilization.11 With rich plumage being a visible demonstration of a potential mate’s strength and vigor, peahens attracted to such tails are more likely to spawn robust peachicks. These peachicks, in turn, will on average be endowed with the very genes for desiring and acquiring resplendent plumage, facilitating the spread of such traits through future generations. Beauty, in this analysis of sexual selection, is a good deal more than skin-deep. Beauty amounts to publicly available credentials attesting to a potential mate’s adaptive fitness.
In either case—whether mate choice is driven by aesthetic sensitivities or by health evaluations—the resulting preferences can provide a rationale for costly traits, bodily and behavioral, whose intrinsic survival benefits are questionable. As this description seems applicable to our species’ long-standing and essentially universal artistic practices, perhaps sexual selection offers illumination. Darwin thought it might. He invoked sexual selection to explain the human penchant for bodily piercings and colorations and suggested as well that the powerful response music can elicit is an evolutionary outcome of sexual selection shaping human mating calls. Males who could best sing or dance, or had the most alluring tattoos or decorated garments, may have been the target of choosy females and so more readily sired artistically attuned progeny. In boy meets girl, artistic talent may have determined whether boy went home alone.
More recently, psychologist Geoffrey Miller, and also philosopher Denis Dutton, have developed this perspective further, suggesting that human artistic capacities provide a fitness indicator perused by discerning females.12 Not only do expertly crafted artifacts, creative displays, and energetic performances demonstrate a mind and body that is firing on all cylinders, but such works also attest to the artist being generously endowed with the right stuff for survival. After all, the reasoning goes, only by virtue of possessing material resources and physical prowess could the artist afford the extravagance of expending time and energy on activities that lack survival value. (Artists of the Pleistocene, apparently, were anything but starving.) In this view, artistic undertakings amount to a self-promoting marketing strategy that results in unions between talented artists and discriminating mates, yielding progeny more likely than not to be endowed with similar traits.
Sexual selection as the evolutionary driver of human artistic activity is intriguing, but has generated more strife than accord. Researchers have raised many issues: Is artistic talent an accurate signal for physical health? Might artistic capacities be so entwined with raw intelligence and creativity, qualities with unassailable survival value, that artistic predilections spread via natural selection with no need to invoke sexual selection? With sexual selection’s focus on male artists, how does the theory explain the artistic activities of females? And perhaps most challenging of all, public engagement with artistic activities during the Pleistocene as well as that era’s courtship rituals and mating practices are largely a matter of conjecture. Sure, the conquests of Lucian Freud and Mick Jagger may be legendary, but what if anything does that tell us about the importance of artistic skill or stage presence for reproductive access among early hominins? In light of such concerns, Brian Boyd has offered a considered summary: “Sexual selection has been an extra gear for art, not the engine itself.”13
Steven Pinker suggests a wholly different perspective on the adaptive utility of the arts. In a passage that has been quoted frequently by supporters as well as detractors, he argues that all but the language arts amount to nutritionally bankrupt desserts served up to pattern-obsessed human brains. Much as “cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons,”14 the arts, according to Pinker, are adaptively useless creations designed to artificially excite human senses that evolved to promote the fitness of our ancestors. This is not a value judgment. Pinker’s sharply crafted arguments, brimming with cultural allusions, make clear that he has a deep affection for the arts. Instead, this is a dispassionate assessment of whether the arts have played a role in one particular task: enhancing the prospect that in the ancestral world the genes of our forebears, and not those of our artless, tone-deaf, left-footed, philistine cousins, were passed on to the next generation. And it is toward this one end that Pinker argues that the arts are irrelevant.
Evolution has surely coaxed us toward a raft of behaviors aimed at increasing our biological fitness, from finding food, securing mates, and ensuring safety to establishing alliances, fending off adversaries, and instructing progeny. Heritable behaviors that, on average, resulted in greater reproductive success spread widely and became the go-to mechanisms for surmounting particular adaptive challenges. In shaping some of these behaviors, one carrot evolution wielded was pleasure: if you find particular survival-promoting behaviors pleasurable, you will be more likely to undertake them. And by virtue of their survival-promoting qualities, these behaviors will increase the likelihood that you’ll stick around long enough to reproduce, endowing future generations with similar behavioral tendencies. Evolution thus generates a collection of self-reinforcing feedback loops that renders pleasurable those behaviors that enhance fitness. In Pinker’s view, the arts cut the feedback loops, sever adaptive benefits, and directly stimulate our pleasure centers, yielding gratifying experiences that from an evolutionary perspective are unearned. We like how the arts can make us feel, but neither creating nor experiencing them makes us more fit or appealing. From the standpoint of survival, the arts are junk food.
Music is Pinker’s poster child, the genre of the arts whose adaptive irrelevance he lays out most fully. He suggests that music is an auditory parasite, free riding on emotionally evocative aural sensitivities that long ago provided survival value to our forebears. For example, sounds whose frequencies are harmonically related (frequencies that are multiples of a common frequency) indicate a single and potentially identifiable source (basic physics reveals that when a linear object vibrates, whether a predator’s vocal cords or a weapon made from hollowed bone, the vibrational frequencies tend to fill out a harmonic series). Those of our forebears who responded more pleasurably to such organized sounds would have paid them more attention and thus garnered greater awareness of their environment. The heightened cognizance would have tilted the survival scales in their favor, enhancing their well-being and promoting the further development of auditory sensitivity. Increased receptivity to other information-rich sounds, from thunder to footfalls to cracking branches, would have further sharpened attentiveness and thus filled out environmental awareness yet further. And so those of our ancestors who were more sonically attuned possessed a fitness advantage, promoting the spread of aural sensitivity throughout subsequent generations. According to Pinker, music hijacks such sonic sensitivity and takes it for a joyride of sensual pleasure that confers no adaptive value. Much as cheesecake artificially stimulates our ancient adaptive preference for foods with elevated caloric content, music artificially stimulates our ancient adaptive sensitivity to sounds with elevated information content.
