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The Dartmouth
March 28, 2024 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

BOOKED SOLID: Art and evolution

In his new book, Denis Dutton, co-founder and editor of the go-to humanities web site Arts & Letters Daily, takes an innovative approach to aesthetics, demonstrating that the human desire for beauty is an innate trait that has evolved in us over thousands of generations.

Laying the groundwork for his theory in terms of Darwinian principles and basic aesthetic philosophy from Hume and Kant, Dutton forges on to explain that "the art instinct" is a by-product of adaptations that are crucial for human survival.

In doing so, Dutton undertakes the seemingly impossible task of proving that artistic taste -- that set of convictions, which seems to many of us to be the very definition of subjectivity -- is as pre-programmed as any other element of our genetic code.

Dutton's book abounds with examples from other researchers who have studied the arts around the world. Perhaps the most memorable of these is the 1993 People's Choice project in which Russian ex-pats Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid conducted a survey in 10 countries around the world, asking people questions about which colors, figures and forms of art they found the most aesthetically pleasing.

An overwhelming majority of their subjects preferred "blue landscapes" above any other type of scene, and they particularly liked landscapes with vegetation similar to that found in African savannahs -- the very places where human life first thrived, supported by ample supplies of water, animal protein and vegetation.

Dutton's big idea is this: we all have more in common than we often are willing to believe, and our commonality carries into the supposedly subjective realm of artistic preference to a shocking degree.

While this might put us on edge at first since we're so used to blaming human behavior on cultural conditioning, the book offers some important insight. If, as Dutton argues, our aesthetic preference for artistic renderings of fertile landscapes with shady trees and nearby bodies of water reflects the habitat needs of our early ancestors, then art is more than just pleasing for the eyes -- it's a record of our evolutionary origin.