Running
Head: AESTHETIC FITNESS
word count: 6,880
Aesthetic
fitness:
How
sexual selection shaped artistic virtuosity as a fitness indicator
and
aesthetic preferences as mate choice criteria
Geoffrey F. Miller
Address at time of publication:
Centre for the Philosophy
of the Natural and Social Sciences (CPNSS)
Tymes Court Building
London School of Economics
Houghton Street, London WC2 2AE, England
Current address:
Dr. Geoffrey Miller
Assistant Professor
Psychology, Logan Hall 160
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-1161, USA
(505) 277-1967 (office voice/fax)
(505) 277-1394 (dept fax)
http://www.unm.edu/~psych/faculty/gmiller.html
This
paper was published as:
Miller,
G. F. (2001). Aesthetic fitness: How
sexual selection shaped artistic virtuosity as a fitness indicator and
aesthetic preferences as mate choice criteria.
Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts 2(1), 20-25. Special issue on Evolution, creativity, and
aesthetics.
Abstract
Aesthetic ornamentation in other species almost always results from
sexual selection through mate choice, and sexually-selected ornaments usually
function as indicators of fitness – good health, good brains, and good
genes. This paper suggests that human
art capacities evolved in the same way, with aesthetic judgement evolving in
the service of mate choice. This theory
draws on the biological aesthetics of Darwin, Nietzsche, Veblen, Boas, Gombrich,
and Zahavi, and on the example of bowerbird courtship. It revives the traditional emphasis on
virtuosity in ornamental and representational art, in contrast to the runaway
creativity celebrated by Modernist art theory.
It suggests that aesthetic judgement evolved as a functional part of
social and sexual cognition, not as an side-effect of perceptual
psychology.
Aesthetic fitness:
How sexual selection shaped artistic
virtuosity as a fitness indicator
and aesthetic preferences as mate
choice criteria
In Darwin’s (1871) view, natural beauty arose through competition to
attract a sexual partner. His process
of sexual selection through mate choice – the struggle to reproduce, not to
survive – drove the evolution of visual ornamentation and artistry, from
flowers through bird plumage to human self-adornment. Moreover, Darwin saw animal and proto-human nervous systems as
fully capable of aesthetic judgement, used largely in the service of choosing
their sexual partners. However, when
Darwin’s sexual selection theory fell into disfavor among Victorian biologists
(Cronin, 1991; Miller, 2000a), so did his radically naturalized and sexualized
aesthetics.
This paper tries to revive Darwin’s
view of visual aesthetics and artistry as products of sexual selection through
mate choice. It does so in light of the
revival of sexual selection theory in evolutionary biology (e.g. Andersson,
1994), especially new ideas about the role of sexual ornamentation as a reliable
indicator of an animal’s health, fertility, fitness, and genetic quality
(Johnstone, 1995; Miller, 2000a, b,c,d,e; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). In this view, the fine arts are just the
most recent and pretentious manifestations of a universal human instinct for
visual self-ornamentation, which in turn is a manifestation of sexual
selection’s universal tendency to ornament individuals with visual
advertisements of their fitness. Thus,
the human capacity for visual artistry is viewed here as a ‘fitness indicator’,
evolved like the peacock’s tail and the bowerbird’s bower for a courtship
function.
Art as an adaptation
The adaptationist approach taken here considers human visual art in the
functionalist framework of evolutionary biology and evolutionary
psychology. Adaptationism entails identifying biological adaptations and
investigating their adaptive functions – that is, the ways in which their
survival or reproduction benefits outweighed their costs in ancestral
generations.
Probably no particular type of human art or aesthetic style can be considered
a genetically encoded adaptation. That
is the wrong level of description.
Rather, we should focus on the level of psychological adaptations:
evolved, domain-specific mental capacities that may include perceptual,
cognitive, emotional, motivational, learning, and motor control sub-systems
(Buss, 1999; Tooby & Cosmides, 1990).
It is only at this level that evolutionary psychology has some hope of
integrating the ultimate (evolutionary-functional) and proximate
(reductionistic) study of psychological adaptations. Also, the adaptationist approach emphasizes selection pressures
over phylogeny: if art evolved in our lineage over the last one or two million
years, there is little reason to expect proto-art abilities in living non-human
primate such as chimpanzees, which split off from us at least 5 million years
ago (c.f Lenain, 1995; Whiten, 1976).
The capacity to produce visual art and self-ornamentation appears to be
a genuine evolutionary adaptation unique to our species of primate
(Dissanayake, 1992). It fits many
criteria for recognizing adaptations (see Buss, 1999; Tooby & Cosmides,
1990). It is ubiquitous across human
groups, cultures, and history.
Art-making and art-viewing are pleasurable, and pleasure is an
evolutionary hallmark of psychological adaptation. Artistic production entails costs in time, energy, effort, and
skill, and such costs are rarely expended without some adaptive rationale. Humans are much better at producing and
judging art than any artificial intelligence program or any other primate. Art is not ‘innate’ in the sense of fully
functioning at birth (almost no psychological adaptations are), but art is
relatively fun and easy to learn, compared to evolutionarily novel skills such
as following APA format.
The fitness indicator theory of art outlined in this paper is not
new. Similar ideas were expressed not
only by Charles Darwin (1871), but also by Friedrich Nietzsche
(1883-1888/1968), Thorstein Veblen (1899), Frans Boas (1955), Ernst Gombrich
(1977, 1982), Amotz Zahavi (1975, 1978; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997), Frederick
Turner (1991), Fraser Neiman (1997), Marek Kohn (1999), and Camilla Power
(1999). The fitness indicator theory
has also been used in my previous work on art (Miller, 1999a, 2000a), music
(Miller, 2000b), creativity (Miller, 1997a), mate choice (Miller, 1997b,
1998a,b), and the evolution of human mental traits as indicators (Miller,
2000c,d,e).
Art as a product of sexual selection
If art is an adaptation, what possible function could it have
served? From the viewpoint of current
animal communication research, art is a signalling system. There is a signaller (the maker of the art),
and a set of receivers (who perceive the work of art). The prototypical functions for animal
signals include long-range sexual attraction, short-range sexual courtship,
sexual rivalry, territorial conflict, begging by offspring to solicit parental
investment, warning signals to deter predators, and alarm signals to alert
relatives of danger (Bradbury & Vehrencamp, 1998).
Out of these standard functions for signalling, sexual selection for
courtship produces the most complex and aesthetically pleasing signals (Darwin,
1871; Cronin, 1991; Miller, 2000a).
Insofar as we praise human art for its complexity and aesthetic value,
it seems reasonable to focus on sexual courtship as the most likely adaptive
function of human art-production – at least in prehistory, if not in modern
society.
Sexual
selection is not just a theory of sex differences. Sexual selection emerges in any sexually-reproducing species as a
result of competition within each sex to attract sexual partners of the
opposite sex (for overviews see Andersson, 1994; Cronin, 1991; Miller,
2000a). Darwin (1871) distinguished
two kinds of sexual selection: aggressive rivalry and mate choice. Rivalry, especially between males, tends to
produce weapons, such as sharp teeth, large horns, and strong muscles. Mate choice, especially by females, tends to
produce ornaments, such as colorful tails, innovative sounds, and musky
smells. In Darwin’s view, mate choice
is mediated by animal nervous systems, so it is mid-way between natural
selection (selection on survival ability, mostly by the inanimate environment)
and artificial selection by human breeders.
This mediation by animal senses and preferences is what gives mate
choice such aesthetic power in evolution.
From 1871 until the turn of the 20th century, Darwinian
aesthetics was an active area of theorizing.
Darwin (1871) himself viewed the human visual arts as an outgrowth of an
instinct for body ornamentation. He
pointed out that males in most cultures indulge in much more self-adornment
than females, as predicted by his sexual selection theory. (He understood that
men of his own culture ornamented themselves with country estates and colonial
treasures rather than tattoos and penis sheaths). Herbert Spencer argued that sexual selection produced most of the
beauty in nature and culture, while Max Nordau posited a neurophysiological
link between reproductive urges and artistic creativity, which Sigmund Freud
appropriated in this theory of art as sublimated sexuality. Friedrich Nietzsche developed an especially
intriguing and little-appreciated biological aesthetics in The Will to Power,
in the section titled ‘The will to power as art’. Nietzsche (1883-1888/1968, p. 421) also accepted a sexual display
function for the visual arts, writing “Artists, if they are any good, are
(physically as well) strong, full of surplus energy, powerful animals, sensual;
without a certain overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable.”
Other theorists who were less open to sexual selection theory, such as
Alfred Russel Wallace, had more trouble understanding the adaptive benefit of
art, given its high time and energy costs but limited survival utility. For example, in The Beginnings of Art,
Ernst Grosse (1897, p. 312) argued that natural selection would “long ago have
rejected the peoples which wasted their force in so purposeless a way [i.e.
making art-works], in favor of other peoples of practical talents; and art
could not possibly have been developed so highly and richly as it has
been”. Throughout the 1890s, Darwinian
art theorists H. Balfour, A. C. Haddon, and Felix Clay also struggled to find
credible non-sexual functions for art.
Misled by Herbert Spencer’s phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, many
theorists of this era suggested that art’s high cost and apparent uselessness
implied the futility of Darwinian analysis.
Darwinian aesthetics also languished because most Victorian biologists
were unwilling to follow Darwin in granting female animal brains any power to
choose their mates by aesthetic criteria.
This patronizing attitude to animal aesthetic tastes was reinforced by
the rise of Behaviorism in early 20th century psychology. Although Darwin gave strong evidence for the
importance of female mate choice in producing male ornaments, biologists after
Darwin focused almost exclusively on male rivalry, rejecting the possibility of
female choice (Cronin, 1991, Miller, 2000a).
For over a century, sexual selection was seen as a process where active,
competitive males struggled for “possession” of passive females, by acquiring
territories and status, and repelling rivals.
Ornaments were usually interpreted as species-recognition signals, to
help animals avoid mating with the wrong species. Only in the last couple of decades has the picture changed, with
a mass of support for Darwin’s mate choice hypothesis in thousands of
experimental and theoretical studies (e.g. Andersson, 1994; Bradbury &
Vehrencamp, 1998). Sexual selection is
now recognized as a major factor in the evolution of animal bodies, brains,
signals, social interactions, and species.
What sort of evidence could support this sexual selection theory of
art? One clue would be an example of
convergent evolution: the independent evolution of art-like abilities in
another species through sexual selection.
Bower-birds offer strong evidence along this line.
Bowerbirds: The Darwinian
aesthetics of the extended phenotype
Bowerbirds are native to New Guinea and Australia. Each of the 18 species constructs a
different style of display site or bower.
Bowers are constructed only by males, and only for courtship (Borgia, 1986). Each male constructs his nest by himself,
then tries to attract females to copulate with him near it. Females fly around searching for the most
visually impressive bower, and copulate with the best bower-builders. Males that build superior bowers can mate
with up to ten different females per day; bad bower-builders attract no females
(Borgia, 1986, 1995,
1997; Lenz, 1994). Once inseminated, the females
go off on their own, build their own small cup-shaped nests, lay their eggs,
and raise their offspring by themselves with no male help (like Picasso’s
mistresses). Just as sexual selection on ornamental
plumage drove speciation among the closely related Birds of Paradise, changes
in bower fashion probably drove the proliferation of bowerbird species (Borgia,
1997; Uy & Borgia, 2000). . This evidence confirms Darwin’s (1871) view
that bowers evolved as courtship ornaments, through sexual selection by female
choice. Functionally, bowers attract
females to copulate by advertising male fitness, and they have no survival
function.
Structurally, bowers are large and complex, show bilateral or radial
symmetry, are decorated colorfully, and require a great deal of time, energy,
material, and skill to construct. For
example, the Golden Bowerbird of northern Australia, though only 9 inches long,
builds a sort of roofed gazebo up to 9 feet high, many times its own body size
and weight. Males fly around searching
for the most brilliantly colored natural objects (such as berries, snail
shells, and flowers), bring them back to their bowers, and arrange them
carefully in clusters of uniform color.
When the berries and flowers lose their color after a few days, the
males replace them with fresh material.
Females mate preferentially with males who construct larger, better
quality, and more highly ornamented bowers (Borgia, 1985, 1986, 1995; Lenz,
1994). Immature males build
unimpressive bowers, and it requires several years of practice (and survival in
a hostile environment) before high-quality bowers can be achieved. The bower can be considered the ‘extended
phenotype’ of the male bower-bird (Dawkins, 1982): a genetically evolved,
species-specific artefact constructed outside the individual’s body, but very
much in the service of the individual’s genes.
In fact, recent evidence shows that the cognitive challenge of
bower-construction was the major selection pressure driving the evolution of
brain size in bowerbirds. Madden (2001)
found a correlation around .80 between bower complexity and relative brain size
across 10 species of bowerbirds and four non-bowerbirds (such as the closely
related catbirds). Sexual selection for
bower complexity almost doubled male brain size. For example, after controlling for body size, the brains of a
complex bower-builder C. lauterbachi were 80% larger than those of the catbird
A. melanotis. This is not quite
as dramatic as the tripling of brain size in art-making humans compared to
non-artistic chimpanzees (Miller, 2000a), but impressive nonetheless. Madden’s (2001) study was the first to show
expansion of overall brain size in response to sexual selection pressures, and
the first to show a relationship between brain size and the complexity of an
aesthetic display constructed outside the body. In this light, Madden’s work suggests there was convergent
evolution not only between bowers and human art, but between bower bird brains
and human brains.
As Darwin (1871)
realized, bowers are one of the best examples of sexual selection through mate
choice, and also one of the only examples of animal art. Bowers show that mate choice can create
complex psychological adaptations for constructing aesthetic ornamentation
beyond an animal’s body. Bowers also
illustrate the idea that mate choice favors fitness indicators. The aesthetic quality of a bower is a
reliable indicator of good skill, a good brain, and good genes, and female
bower-birds have evolved the aesthetic discernment to judge bowers in order to
get the best genes (heritable fitness) for their offspring. In social cognition terms, their aesthetic
tastes allow them to make fitness-attributions through the bower, as it were,
to the bower-builder behind. This point
leads us to fitness indicator theory.
Fitness indicator theory
In recent years, biologists have found that many sexually-selected
traits function as reliable indicators of reproductively important traits such
as age, health, fertility, social status, and genetic quality (Andersson, 1994;
Cronin, 1991; Johnstone, 1995; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997). Collectively, these traits determine the
individual’s expected Darwinian fitness, so indicators of these traits can be
called ‘fitness indicators’ (Miller, 2000a,b,c,d,e). By choosing sexual partners with high-quality fitness indicators,
animals are more likely to get healthy partners, competent parents, and good
genes for their offspring.
For example, the peacock’s tail works as a fitness indicator because
unhealthy, weak peacocks cannot grow very large colorful, symmetric,
well-preened tails. Even if they could,
their encumbering tails would make it even more difficult to escape from
predators such as tigers. The result is
that the size of a (surviving) peacock’s tail correlates positively with the
peacock’s age, health, and heritable fitness (Petrie, 1994). By mating with a large-tailed peacock,
peahens are getting good genes that will give their offspring survival and
reproductive advantages.
Indicators are usually subject to the ‘handicap principle’ (Zahavi,
1975; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997) that they must have high costs in order to be
reliable. Cheap, easy-to-grow,
easy-to-maintain indicators could be faked too easily by unhealthy, unfit
individuals, so the indicator would lose its value as a signal, and receivers
would evolve to ignore it. Technically,
the key feature is that the indicator must have a higher relative marginal
costs to an unfit animal than it does to a highly fit animal (Grafen,
1990). It took biologists 20 years to
understand and accept Zahavi’s (1975) handicap principle, but it has recently
become a major theme in sexual selection research (Johnstone, 1995).
Handicaps
have the counter-intuitive feature that the more vulnerable they are to
disruption (by poor nutrition, injury, parasites, pathogens, genetic
inbreeding, high mutation load, or socially subordinate status), the more
useful they are as fitness indicators.
Vulnerable traits amplify the apparent variance in phenotypic quality
across individuals (Hasson, 1990). They
take small differences in genetic quality, nutritional state, general health,
or intelligence, and turn them into dramatic differences in ornament quality –
including the quality of courtship behavior such as bower-building or
art-production. In this way, they make
individual differences more visible to mate choice, amplifying the power of
sexual selection to shape both ornament quality and underlying fitness (Rowe
& Houle, 1996; Houle, 2000).
Evolutionary psychology has revealed that many cues of human physical
beauty function as fitness indicators.
These cues include height, facial symmetry, facial averageness, facial indicators
of sex hormone levels, male upper-body musculature, and female waist-to-hip
ratio (see Etcoff, 1999; Gangestad & Thornhill, 1997; Manning, Scutt,
Whitehouse, & Leinster, 1997; Thornhill, 1998; Thornhill & Grammer,
1999). For example, men are sexually
attracted to low waist-to-hip ratios in females, and a low female waist-to-hip
ratio really does correlate with youth, fertility, and health (Singh,
1995). This research concerns aesthetic
tastes, not just sexual psychology.
Insofar as the human form has been considered the prototype of beauty in
every culture, this research shows the utility of using fitness indicator
theory to understand the adaptive logic behind visual beauty.
Fitness indicators often advertise good genes, not just good bodies and
brains. By ‘good genes’, biologists
usually mean a genotype that has a low number of expressed deleterious
mutations. Mutation is a major problem
for every species. New mutations are
always arising, and since they hurt much more often than they help, they are
continually eroding fitness. For
example, Eyre-Walker and Keightley (1999) estimated that in our hominid
ancestors over the last several million years, there have been on average 1.6
new, harmful, expressed mutations per individual per generation. This exceeds the mutation rate that natural
selection alone could counter-act (Crow, 1999; Kondrashov, 1995). So how do species resist a ‘mutational
meltdown’ (Ridley, 2001)? Some
biologists believe that sexual selection for indicators of genetic quality is a
major factor in allowing complex, long-lived species to persist in the face of
mutation’s entropic power (e.g., Atmar, 1991; Michod & Hasson, 1990;
Pomiankowski & Moller, 1995; Rowe & Houle, 1996). Indeed, many biologists believe that
limiting the propagation of harmful mutations may be the reason why sexual
reproduction evolved in the first place (Ridley, 1993).
Indicators of genetic quality can be bodily traits, or behavioral traits
such as bird song, bower-building, or human art-production. Behaviors are often better fitness
indicators simply because brains are so complex, so hard to grow, so costly to
maintain, and so easy to disrupt, compared to other organs (Miller, 2000a). For example, a songbird’s singing ability
is a potent fitness indicator. The
number of different songs a male can sing (his 'song repertoire') correlates
positively with his age, with the size of the brain area specialized for song
learning, with his reproductive success, and with the health and survival
likelihood of his offspring; this is why females prefer large-repertoire males
(Catchpole & Slater, 1995; Hasselquist, Bensch, & von Schantz,
1996).
Which behavioral traits would be most valuable as good-genes
indicators? Some behaviors summarize
much more information about an individual’s genotype, by depending on more
complex neurogenetic developmental pathways, which can be disrupted by
mutations on a much larger set of genetic loci (Houle, 2000; Miller, 2000e;
Rowe & Houle, 1996). Mate choice
should evolve to focus on complex, challenging behaviors that amplify minor
differences in genetic quality between individuals into massive, easily-noticed
differences in the relative qualities of their courtship behavior – such as
art-production.
This
leads to an important point about assessing whether art is an adaptation. Some evolutionary psychologists have
suggested that genuine psychological adaptations should show low phenotypic
variance (small individual differences) and low heritability, because selection
should have eliminated maladaptive genetic variation. These criteria make sense for traits that evolved under natural
selection for survival, but they do not make sense for sexually selected fitness
indicators (Miller, 2000c,d,e). If art
evolved under sexual selection as a fitness indicator, then we should expect
large, conspicuous individual differences in artistic ability, and at least
moderate heritability. Moreover, if
artistic ability evolved to advertise other underlying mental and personality
traits, we should expect substantial phenotypic correlations between artistic
ability and those other traits. Thus,
although art ability might be modular at the level of adaptive design, it might
not appear very independent in a factor analysis of mental abilities. In fact, if artistic ability evolved as an
indicator of the fitness component known as general cognitive ability
(‘intelligence’), then we would expect it to show a very high correlation with
intelligence – such that it would be easy to mistake for an evolutionary
side-effect of ‘domain-general human intelligence’ (Miller, 2000e).
From the viewpoint of fitness indicator theory, maybe our aesthetic
preferences evolved to favor art-works that could only have been produced by a
high-fitness artist. Art-objects may be
displays of their creator’s fitness, and may be judged as such. As with the sexual ornaments on our bodies
(Gangestad & Thornhill, 1997), perhaps beauty boils down to fitness.
To
be reliable, fitness indicators must be difficult for low-fitness individuals
to produce (Zahavi, 1975; Grafen, 1990; Johnstone, 1995). Applied to human art, this suggests that
beauty equals difficulty and high cost.
We find attractive those things that could only have been produced by
people with attractive, high-fitness qualities such as health, energy,
endurance, hand-eye coordination, intelligence, creativity, access to rare
materials, the ability to learn difficult skills, and lots of free time.
An art-work’s beauty reveals an artist’s virtuosity. This is an old-fashioned view of aesthetics,
but that does not make it wrong.
Throughout most of human history, the perceived beauty of an object has
depended very much on its cost in terms of time, energy, skill, or
resources. Objects that were cheap and
easy to produce were almost never considered beautiful. As Thorstein Veblen (1899, p. 80) pointed
out in The Theory of the Leisure Class, “The marks of expensiveness come
to be accepted as beautiful features of the expensive articles”. Likewise, Franz Boas (1955) found that in
most cultures he studied, “goodness and beauty are the same” (Boas, 1955, p. 356), with goodness denoting
the patient, resourceful, and creative application of high skill and high
intelligence. In his view, this thirst
for virtuosity explains our preferences for regular form, symmetry, perfectly
repeated decorative motifs, smooth surfaces, and uniform color fields – which
are all difficult to produce under pre-modern conditions, but easy to assess
(also see Gombrich, 1982). Thus, our
sense of beauty was shaped by evolution to embody a tacit awareness of what is
difficult versus easy, rare versus common, costly versus cheap, skillful versus
slovenly, and fit versus unfit.
From this sexual selection viewpoint, the artist’s challenge is to
demonstrate his or her fitness by making something that a lower-fitness sexual
rival could not make. Almost anything
can be made aesthetically, because anything can be made with special care that
would be difficult to imitate by one who was not so careful. This fits with Dissanayake’s (1992) view of
making art as ‘making special’. Fitness
indicator theory explains why our aesthetic tastes are so culturally flexible
at one level, yet so invariant in their underlying emphasis on virtuosity. Just as sexual selection can make almost any
body surface more elaborate and complex as a visual ornament, resulting in a
diversification of visual ornamentation across species, our sexually-selected
aesthetic tastes can favor the elaboration or ‘making special’ of almost any
object according to almost any set of challenging norms or rules, resulting in
the diversification of visual styles across human cultures. This also explains why most people rejected
the 20th century Modernist styles (such as abstract expressionism or
conceptual art) that self-consciously rejected virtuosity as a criterion of
artistic importance (Miller, 2000a).
Fitness indicator theory helps us understand why ‘art’ is an honorific term
that connotes superiority, exclusiveness, and high achievement in almost any
domain of skill, whether pottery or psychotherapy.
Beauty conveys truth, but it is a truth about the artist’s individual
fitness, not about the human condition in general. Compared to human language, the non-representational visual arts
seem very poor as communication media.
Yet compared to human language, all animal signalling systems in all
other species that have ever evolved seem very poor at communicating
propositional information about the external world. The primary function for almost all animal signalling systems is
to convey fitness information about the signaller, not information about the
world (Bradbury & Vehrencamp, 1998).
In this sense, the absence of distinct propositional meaning in most of
the human visual arts is biologically normal, and language is the bizarre
exception.
Since the rise of evolutionary psychology around
1990, several thinkers have applied sexual selection theory, biological
signalling theory, the handicap principle, and related ideas to understand the
human arts. Constable (1997) analyzed
verse poetry as a system of verbal handicaps that constrain vocabulary choice,
thereby making poetry a more effective intelligence-indicator. Kohn (1999) viewed the Acheulian hand-axe as
a sexually-selected part of the Homo erectus extended phenotype, and as
a reliable fitness indicator. Power
(1999) analyzed the origins of cosmetics, especially the use of red ochre,
using the handicap principle. Neiman (1997) analyzed the
construction of Mayan pyramids as costly, wasteful displays, and Frank (1999) did
likewise in analyzing runaway American consumerism. Zahavi has also applied his handicap principle insightfully to
human aesthetics (Zahavi, 1978; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997).
How
can we apply fitness indicator theory to understand specific aesthetic tastes
and artistic styles? This section
develops a brief example. Many physical
beauty cues advertise a component of fitness known as ‘developmental
stability’, which may have some interesting analogs in the visual arts. Developmental stability refers to an
individual’s ability to grow organs in their optimal, species-typical form,
despite the disruptive effects of genetic mutation and environmental stressors
(Gangestad & Thornhill, 1997).
Body symmetry is one convenient way to measure developmental stability
in the lab – and in the wild. Because
perfect bodily symmetry is so hard to produce but so easy to assess
perceptually, many visual ornaments in many species have evolved to show off
their bilateral symmetry.
This
fitness-indicating power of symmetry holds equally well for artefacts. The ability to produce an art-work that
incorporates perfectly symmetric elements (bilaterally or radially) is a potent
indicator of artistic skill (Gombrich, 1982; Kohn, 1999; Washburn, 1999). This may be why we find beautiful those
ornamental art-works that incorporate symmetric motifs. More generally, the regular repetition of
ornamental motifs across a decorated surface, without noticeable errors,
functions as a potent indicator of artistic skill (Gombrich, 1982), and was
respected as such in all cultures until the invention of mechanized production
(Boas, 1955).
At
a more abstract level, representational art follows the same indicator logic as
body symmetry and ornamental regularity.
Accurate visual representations of recognizable objects are very easy to
assess (given our excellent visual memory), but very hard to produce (given the
challenge of suppressing our depth perception circuitry to see with the
‘innocent eye’ required in painting).
This may be why accurate representations have been considered
aesthetically impressive in every human culture, at least until the invention
of photography (Gombrich, 1977). Only
since then have students been taught to suppress our natural tendency to equate
artistic merit with representational accuracy.
The fitness indicator theory of aesthetics suggests that the perception
of beauty in an art-work is normally just the first step in a chain of
inference that reaches all the way into our mechanisms of social cognition and
social attribution. Aesthetic judgement
normally entails some attribution to the artist of intelligence, creativity,
skill, maturity, imagination, conscientiousness, and agreeableness – or their
opposites. These in turn are taken,
unconsciously, as inputs into other social assessment systems, principally mate
choice, but also systems for evaluating offspring, relatives, friends, allies,
and individuals in other biologically significant social roles.
Perhaps
the psychological study of aesthetics should be re-considered as a branch of
social attribution research, rather than a branch of perceptual psychology. Our
ability to judge beauty as a fitness indicator is part of our ‘social
rationality’ (Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999), a set of inference heuristics for
making biologically significant decisions about other individuals on the basis
of observable behavioral cues. The
question for empirical psychologists should not be whether such inferences are
logically warranted (they rarely are), but whether they have some pragmatic
utility, by virtue of relying on cues (such as fitness indictors) that have
objective cue validity in Brunswik’s (1956) sense.
It makes sense to separate art-work from artist only in our modern urban
societies, in which art-works are commodified, transported, preserved, traded,
and mechanically reproduced through photography and printing. When we seek the evolutionary origins of
art, we should remember that any art-work our prehistoric ancestors would have
been able to see, would have probably been made by a living individual with
whom they could have interacted socially or sexually. The artist was never far from his or her work, or else the work
could not have functioned as the artist’s extended phenotype.
This
is bad news for arm-chair aesthetic theorists.
It means we should stop looking for formal determinants of beauty in
art-works themselves, and start looking for correlations between (1) variation
in the design details of art-works produced by representative samples of real
people, (2) variation in the underlying fitness components (e.g. intelligence,
personality, health) of those same people, and (3) variation in the beauty
ratings assigned to those art-works by other people – preferably young, single,
opposite-sex people in the same mating market (for other empirical predictions,
see Houle, 2000; Miller, 2000a,c,d,e).
In my view, Brunswikian social psychology, not the formal mathematical
analysis of exemplary art-works, is the royal road to understanding human
aesthetic judgements.
Sexual selection, sex differences, and
sexual motives
Sexual
selection often produces sex differences, but not always. In socially monogamous species such as
humans and most birds, both sexes tends to be choosy, and both sexes evolve
sexual ornamentation (Kirkpatrick, Price, & Arnold, 1990; Miller, 2000a). For this reason, a sexual selection theory
of art evolution need not imply higher male art-production ability and higher
female aesthetic-judgement ability.
Although males have produced vastly more public art in agricultural and
industrial societies (Miller,1999a), the sexual dimorphism in art output among
prehistoric hunter-gatherers may have been smaller. In any case, sexual selection is likely to have produced more
dimorphism at the level of artistic motivation than at the level of artistic
capacity, given the overlapping perceptual and cognitive abilities required to
produce and to appreciate art (Miller, 2000a).
If art evolved through sexual selection to serve a courtship function,
we are not likely to be consciously aware of that function. A peacock’s tail need not know that it
evolved for a sexual-attraction function, and neither do our brains. Contra Freud, a sexually-selected instinct
for making aesthetically pleasing ornamentation need not have any connection
with a sexually-selection desire to copulate, even at an ‘unconscious’ or
‘subconscious’ level. The proper biological function of art (which must concern
survival or reproduction somehow) must not be confused with the proximate
individual motivations for producing art (which may include making money,
inspiring religious devotion, or challenging patriarchy). No part of the human nervous system needs to
keep track of the fact that beautiful art-works often led to successful
reproduction; evolution kept track for us.
Conclusion
After a century of neglect and obscurity, Darwin’s (1871) sexual
selection theory has been revived, and its psychological and aesthetic
dimensions are becoming better appreciated.
This paper has argued that there is a reasonable null hypothesis about
human art considered as a biological adaptation: It evolved through sexual
selection to serve the same courtship functions as almost all other examples of
organic beauty and complex behavioral signals observable in nature. Such ornamentation often evolves as a reliable,
costly indicator of the signaller’s good health, good brain, and good
genes. This leads to the further
proposal that many design features of art function as indicators of the
artist’s virtuosity, creativity, intelligence, conscientiousness, and other
important heritable mental and physical traits. This ‘aesthetic fitness’ view suggests that aesthetic judgement
is a natural part of mate choice and social cognition, in which an art-work is
viewed as the extended phenotype of the artist.
Appendix: 34 predictions of the
aesthetic fitness indicator theory
[Note: this appendix could not be included in the published version of the paper, due to space limitations.]
The fitness indicator view of aesthetic judgement
and artistic production is, like most real mid-level hypotheses in evolutionary
psychology, eminently testable (see Ketelaar & Ellis, 1999). Indeed, one major advantage is that it can
be tested using many of the same empirical methods that have already been used
in animal comunication research (see e.g. Andersson, 1994; Bradbury &
Vehrencamp, 1998; Catchpole & Slater, 1995; Johnstone, 1995). The hypothesis that a behavioral trait has
evolved through sexual selection as a fitness indicator leads to the 34
predictions below. They are generic to
fitness indicators, but in the context of this paper on the visual arts, the
‘trait’ would be art production ability (presumably controlling for instruction
and practice), and the ‘mate choice criterion’ would be aesthetic
value-judgments about artistic merit.
Not all 34 predictions need be supported for the hypothesis to hold
true, but the more the better. For a
fuller explanation of how these predications relate to the theory, see
Miller (2000a,b,c,d).
1. phenotypic variance: the trait should vary significantly between individuals in the species. Without variance there is no way for mate choice to use the trait as an indicator
2. perceivability: variation in the trait should be perceivable, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, by the opposite sex, in a way that could potentially influence mate choice.
3. stability: individual variation in the trait should be at least somewhat stable across time and situations. If the trait value varied capriciously across time and situations, there would be no incentive for mate choice to use it as a criterion. For subjectively judged traits such as the aesthetic merit of an art-work, there should be decent test-retest reliability for any sexually relevant judge (e.g. any single, opposite-sex person in the same local mating market as the actual producer of the art-work), and decent inter-subjective agreement (positive correlation between ratings) between such judges
4. significant cost: the trait should incur a significant cost to produce, as measured in energy, time, risk, or nutritional resources. This positive cost prediction suggests that, holding an individual’s fitness constant, there is a trade-off between the trait (such as art-production) and other survival and reproduction tasks. However, this trade-off can be very difficult to measure except experimentally, because in practice, inter-individual differences in overall fitness can swamp the intra-individual trade-offs between different fitness components (see Johnstone, 1995; Rowe & Houle, 1996; Houle, 2000). Thus, correlational studies will probably not reveal a negative correlation (trade-off) between art production and other fitness components such as longevity or fecundity, and are thus inappropriate ways of measuring costs.
5. the condition-dependent handicap condition: the relative marginal cost of producing the trait should be lower for higher-fitness individuals. This is the key technical condition of Zahavi’s (1975) handicap principle, as interpreted by Grafen (1990). If could be tested with cognitive neuroscience methods, by showing that, holding constant the quality of art-work produced in a brain imaging study, higher-fitness individuals should burn less glucose in the brain areas devoted to art production than lower-fitness individuals -- glucose burn rate here being the index of the marginal cost of the cognitive activity.
6. experimental condition-dependence: if the behavioral trait evolved as an indicator of current phenotypic quality (i.e. good condition), then the trait should be highly sensitive to experimental increases or decreases in an individual’s condition (see Jacobs, 1996). For example, food deprivation or experimentally induced hypoglycemia – both of which reduce the glucose available to the brain – should particularly impair sexually-selected trait quality (e.g. art-production ability) relative to behavioral traits that evolved under natural selection for survival.
7. positive correlation with fitness measures: variation in the trait should correlate with know components of fitness, such as health, longevity, fertility, fecundity, body size, body symmetry, social status, intelligence, low mutation load, and genetic outbreeding (for methodological examples, see Gangestad & Thornhill, 1997, Sluming & Manning, 2000). Note that assessing this correlation would require a broad, representative sample of individuals, not a restricted-range sample such as university students or professional artists
8. positive fitness-factor loading: more specifically, if phenotypic variation in many traits is measured from a broad, representative sample of people, and if all phenotype correlations between such traits are calculated and put into a correlation matrix, and if that correlation matrix is subject to hierarchical factor analysis, a top-level ‘general fitness factor’ should emerge (analogous to the g factor in psychometrics) – see Houle (2000) and Miller (2000). If this general fitness factor does emerge, then variation in the trait (e.g. artistic ability) should show a significant positive loading on that factor. This positive fitness-loading could be taken as the Brunswikian ‘cue validity’ of the trait as a fitness-indicator.
9. positive correlation with other preferred mental and personality traits: if the trait evolved as an indicator of neurological fitness, it should positively correlate with brain size, regularity of brain development, information-processing efficiency, general cognitive ability (see Jensen, 1998), and perhaps some of the ‘Big Five’ personality traits that are favored in mate choice, such as openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and low neuroticism.
10. social attribution based on trait value: if prediction 8 holds (i.e. the trait has some objective cue validity as an indicator of psychometric and personality traits), then mate choice systems should have evolved to make the appropriate social attributions on the basis of observed trait values. In the visual arts, this implies that art-works by socially relevant individuals (not necessarily strangers) should provoke attributions about the artist’s intelligence, creativity, and character in opposite-sex observers. In cognitive neuroscience terms, aesthetic judgment tasks given these social conditions should activate cortical areas known to be involved in social attribution.
11. favored in mate choice: when choosing sexual partners, and all else being equal, individuals should prefer to mate with those who show high-quality forms of the trait, i.e. forms that correlate positively with other measures of fitness. This prediction does not imply that the trait under investigation should have a higher importance than other well-established mate choice criteria such as kindness, intelligence, physical attractiveness, or social status (see Buss, 1999) – only that it be taken into consideration, and that the preference should be in the ‘right’ (i.e. positively fitness-correlated) direction.
12. favored especially by ovulating females: traits that function as good-genes indicators, but that have high costs in other domains such as parenting, should be particularly favored by females during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle (for choosing short-term extra-pair partners), and less favored at other times (when choosing good parents is more important). Applied to the visual arts, this prediction implies that women should become more aesthetically discerning during ovulation, more inclined to view art-works as manifestations of male talent, and perhaps more inclined to view art ability as genetically heritable.
13. increased offspring number: individuals with high trait values (especially males) should produce more offspring, at least in societies without contraception. Since many of these additional offspring may result from extra-pair copulations, they may be difficult to detect without doing DNA paternity tests on all offspring in a particular population.
14. assortative mating: in species with social monogamy such as ours, individuals should assortatively mate with respect to the trait, because the competitive mating market should ensure that high-fitness individuals prefer each other by virtue of the trait, leaving lower-fitness individuals no choice but to settle for each other (see Johnstone, 1997; Miller, 2000a; Sloman & Sloman, 1988).
15. higher rates of extra-pair copulation: individuals (especially males) with high trait values should be more likely to have extra-pair copulations (affairs) outside their primary relationships, due to their higher sexual attractiveness. For the evolutionary logic behind this, see Barash (2001) and Birkhead (2000).
16. lower rates of being cuckolded: The sexual partners of individuals (especially males) with high trait values should be less likely seek extra-pair copulations with other partners (see Barash, 2001; Birkhead, 2000).
17. mate-guarding: individuals in relationships should guard their mates from exposure to individuals with high trait values, to discourage extra-pair copulation with such individuals. Also, social interactions with individuals who have higher trait values on the putative fitness indicator (e.g. respected artists) should provoke more intense sexual jealousy in partners (see Buss, 2000).
18. derogation of trait quality in sexual competitors: if the trait is used and valued in courtship, same-sex rivals should selectively derogate each other with respect to trait quality (see Buss & Dedden, 1990). In the visual arts, this may entail impugning the skill or creativity manifest in art-works produced by potential rivals.
19. gossip about trait values: in social species such as ours, in which mate choice often includes collective decision-making involving family and friends, gossip about potential mates should focus some attention on the trait that is claimed to be a fitness indicator. High trait values should be recognized and praised.
20. alternative mating strategies: individuals low in trait quality should more often pursue alternative mating strategies that attempt to circumvent mate choice by the opposite sex, including increased use of sexual harassment and sexual coercion (see Thornhill & Palmer, 2000).
21. genetic correlation between trait and preference: if mate choice was shaping the trait over recent evolutionary history, we should expect to see a positive genetic correlation between trait quality and choosiness with respect to the trait (see Jennions & Petrie, 1997). This is because there is typically some genetic variation not only in sexually-selected traits, but also in sexual-selective preferences (Bakker & Pomiankowski, 1995). In the visual arts, this would imply positive phenotypic and genotypic correlations between art production ability, aesthetic discernment, and the relative importance attached to art ability in mate choice.
22. conspicuous courtship display: during courtship, individuals should conspicuously (if unconsciously) display the trait to the opposite sex. This could be measured across different time-scales, comparing courtship to non-courtship situations across minutes, hours, days, ovulation cycles, or seasons.
23. higher trait mean in males: assuming sexual selection operated more strongly on males, as it almost always does (Darwin, 1871; Andersson, 1994), sexual selection should have favored higher mean trait values in males. Note that for behavioral traits such as art production, this need not imply higher male cognitive abilities underlying the trait, only higher motivation to produce the behavior in social situations that could potentially attract mates.
24. higher trait variance in males: in species that evolved with some degree of polygyny and some frequency of extra-pair copulation, the higher male variance in reproductive success should favor a risk-seeking pattern of trait expression, such that male trait values show higher variance than female trait values (see Pomiankowski & Moller, 1995). That is, there should be more male artistic geniuses but also more talentless males who are hopeless at art.
25. young-adult peak in trait expression: for sexually selected behavioral traits, trait expression should peak in young adulthood, at the peak of mating effort. It should be low before puberty, should increase rapidly thereafter, and should decline gradually as individuals shift their time and energy from courtship to parenting. This demographic profile appears to hold true for several genres of painting (Miller, 1999a).
26. strategic investment in trait based on self-assessed talent: in species such as humans that have several different kinds of behavioral courtship displays (e.g. language, art, music, ideology), there are different sexual/status niches (Barkow, 1989). Juveniles should assess their relative talent in each behavioral domain and invest time and effort in building skills preferentially in their highest-talent areas. This specialization in distinct status niches should be more intense among males than females, further amplifying male variance in the trait value, and reducing phenotypic correlations in skill across behavioral domains, despite the genotypic correlations in capacity that may exist.
27. positive heritability: if the trait is an indicator of good genes, it should prove genetically heritable in twin and adoption studies, or using other behavior-genetic methods
28. increased heritability after puberty: if the trait is costly and evolved under sexual selection, the genes underlying the trait should become more expressed only after sexual maturity, perhaps in response to sex hormones. This should lead to higher trait heritability in adults than in children, as has been found with general cognitive ability (Plomin et al., 2000).
29. genetic correlation with fitness: if the trait is an indicator of good genes, then it should not only correlate phenotypically with the general fitness factor (prediction 8 above); it should also show positive genetic correlation with that factor (see Houle, 1992, 2000).
30. high CVa: if the trait is an indicator of good genes, it should also fulfil the more technical condition of showing a high coefficient of additive genetic variance, denoted CVa by evolutionary geneticists (see Pomiankowski & Moller, 1995; Rowe & Houle, 1996). Note that measurement of this coefficient in the domain of visual arts would requires development of a true ratio scale for artistic ability.
31. genetic inbreeding should reduce trait quality: if the trait is a good-genes indicator, the offspring of sibling or cousin marriages should show reduced trait values, due to the expression of deleterious homozygous mutations.
32. large mutational target size: if the trait evolved as a good-genes indicator, it should depend on a large number of genes, and thereby summarize a lot of information about individual’s mutation load, since more genes give a larger sample size of possible mutation sites (Rowe & Houle, 1996). Molecular genetic investigation of the trait should reveal that a large number of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) affect the trait, rather than a small number of Mendelian genes.
33. heterogeneity in QTLs across groups: if the trait is a good-genes indicator that has been subject to mate choice in recent evolutionary history, then any deleterious mutations that impair trait quality should be removed fairly quickly by sexual selection. They should therefore have a short evolutionary half-life, and be restricted to local populations. This should lead to between-group heterogeneity in the quantitative trait loci (QTLs) underlying genetic variance in the trait. That is, the genetic loci that create heritable variation in the trait in one family or ethnic group should often be different from those that create heritable variance in other families and ethnic groups (for an introduction to quantitative genetics, see Lynch & Walsh, 1998).
34. offspring viability: if the trait is a good-genes indicator, individuals with higher trait values should produce healthier, higher-fitness offspring (e.g. see Hasselquist, Bensch, & von Schantz, 1996).
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Author Notes
This work was supported in part by a Leverhulme Trust grant to Lord
Michael Young of the Institute of Community Studies, London.