Art and Signaling in a Cultural Species

In recent years, the research field of the evolution of art has witnessed contributions from a wide range of disciplines across the "three cultures" (i.e., humanities, social sciences and natural sciences). In this thesis, I make both a critical review of existing explanations, and try to do elucidate the evolution of art by employing insights, methods and concepts from different disciplines (esp. biology, philosophy, and psychology).

First, I critically evaluate the evidentiary criteria from standard evolutionary psychology some accounts employ  to demonstrate that art qualifies as a human biological adaptation. I argue that these criteria do not suffice to make that claim. Furthermore, I make the case for a cultural evolutionary approach to the arts. One commonly used evidentiary criterion for art as adaptation is the “tight fit” between art and human cognition, which is interpreted as suggesting that cognition has undergone selection to produce and appreciate art. However, disentangling cultural and genetic evolution allows formulating the alternative hypothesis that art has evolved culturally to match human cognition.

Second, I observe that in ancient and modern hunter gatherer societies, artistic activities are virtually always associated with ritual. I discuss what this implies for the adaptive significance of art. Specifically, if the arts have culturally evolved in function of ritualistic purposes, their adaptive value has depended on the adaptiveness of ritual (and whether ritualistic activities are adaptive, is still debated).

Third, because architecture is characterized by the combination of utilitarian and aesthetic aspects, it is particularly interesting from an evolutionary perspective and therefore I devote special attention to it. Employing the cross-species comparative approach, I investigate two main purposes human architecture has in common with nonhuman animal constructions: protection and signaling. Based on the phylogenetic approach I establish that protection may have been the primary function of building aptitudes in human evolution, and that building was later co-opted for signaling purposes. Subsequently, I comparatively evaluate the role of signaling models (arbitrary coevolution, sensory exploitation and costly signaling) in the cultural evolution of architectural aesthetics. Furthermore I combine insights from environmental psychology, niche construction and cultural evolution theory to develop the hypothesis that a function of religious monumental architecture may have been to support – or even to galvanize – social learning. Finally, I connect the account I developed to the cognitive science of religion. I complement the frequently held view that religious monumental architecture is a costly signal with the mechanism of sensory exploitation. I attempt to demonstrate that by exploiting the emotional response of awe in religious followers, religious monumental architecture promotes and regulates prosocial behavior and creates in them an openness to adopt supernatural beliefs.

Fourth, I deal with the evolution of visual art, paying again special attention to cultural evolution and the explanatory value of sensory exploitation. I assert that the relatively late appearance of figurative art (around 45 thousand years ago)  in the course of human evolution may be attributed to an increase in the number of social learning opportunities within and between human populations at that time. I support this assertion with archaeological data that indicate overall population growth and increased population densities at that time. These demographic changes, I argue, have allowed the retention and accumulation of innovations required for figurative art making (e.g., learned aspects of figurative drawing and pigment processing). Contrary to previous accounts, I furthermore aim to show that this process does not require figurative art to have served adaptive purposes. Employing sensory exploitation, I establish that figurative art could have evolved by exploiting pre-existing biases of evolved psychology. The dominant themes of upper Paleolithic and late stone age figurative art, animals (predators and preys) and humans (e.g., “Venus” figurines), seem to support this contention.

Fifth, I present a number of experimental studies I conducted to verify whether contemporary art experts would have socially learned to resist exploitation of evolved psychology. One aspect of art’s exploitative power may be that it elicits aesthetic pleasure by pushing “pleasure buttons” that evolved for other purposes. Consequently, spectators may trade-off rewards from indulging in art and biological activities, resulting in less effort being allocated to reproduction. I contend that, while the general audience (i.e., laypersons) may indeed be exploited, experts (i.e., artists, art critics, etc.), who are typically being exposed to high doses of art, may have socially learned to resist exploitation by selectively preferring art from prestigious art contexts (i.e., prestige bias). The latter would be in line with the claim that prestige bias may trump (aesthetic) content biases of evolved psychology. The results of three experimental studies support this contention. I find that laypeople's art appreciation is positively affected by a content bias for attractive faces, mediated by aesthetic pleasure, whereas experts' appreciation is positively affected by prestige and mediated by admiration for the artist. Moreover, experts confer lower appreciation to attractive compared to moderately attractive content, which is consistent with the contention that expertise and the use of prestige are associated with resistance against beautiful content that exploits evolved preferences. This research thus suggests that expertise moderates content and context (prestige) biases, which may be of relevance to an ongoing debate about their relative importance as drivers of cultural evolution. In addition, this study provides a tentative but novel explanation for the fact, famously established by philosopher Arthur Danto (2003), that beauty lost its central position in Western art during the 20th century. However my findings cannot exclude alternative explanations for the fact that art expert appreciation deviates from evolved aesthetic preferences. Further research may experimentally assess the role of prestige bias and resistance as drivers of this deviation versus other, previously suggested, potential processes. For example, preferences of experts may deviate on account of the fact that art serves as a badge of elite group membership and thus expert art appreciation as a means to distinguish oneself from the masses. Alternatively, art experts may seek intellectual challenges instead of pushing pleasure buttons. Future research may experimentally verify the respective roles of these different hypothesized mechanisms. In addition, it may be investigated how insights from sexual selection research may help elucidating the different processes at play in cultural evolution and particularly in the cultural evolution of art appreciation, given the (formal) commonalities between sexual selection and cultural selection models.