The Tasteful Ape: Darwinism and the Arts

by Mark Anthony Signorelli (October 2009)

Not that anyone could believe Dr. Fagan was engaging in anything other than a rhetorical figure, or that he might allow such a public and lasting testament of faith to slip from his lips unawares – Lord knows how such a thing would go over at the meetings of the anthropological society – but whether he was cognizant of the fact or not, the word he used was the only one a man of his preconceptions honestly could use, for from the point of view of orthodox Darwinism – that is to say, non-teleological, materialist Darwinism – the phenomenon of aesthetic activity is quite simply inexplicable, and, insofar as it defies a biological account, may fairly be termed a miracle. Chesterton made this point nearly a century ago in Everlasting Man: “it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and…it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.”^{^[iv]}

^{^[xv]} The aesthetic Darwinians remind one of nothing so much as those credulous merchants of the Middle Ages, plunging recklessly into the ports of some long-rumored kingdom, only to carry back in their voluminous holds all the vile, corrosive, vermin-born plagues of abused science, wherewith to infect the happy realm of letters.

Superficially, at least, Darwinian explanations share something with Marxist, Freudian and Nietzschean explanations. They are systematically cynical about appearances, instances of what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion”. How often have you heard it said that really, at bottom, all human relations are a matter of (take your pick) economic exploitation, unconscious libidinal impulses, or the Will to Power? Or, if you are a Darwinian, that they are all coefficients of natural and sexual selection?^{^[xxv]}

^{^[xxxi]}

In this order, all men occupy their role, and to each role – and not, emphatically, to each individual – is due its proper respect, accorded in universally recognized ways. To kings and eminent warriors, such as Achilles, are due the very highest degree of respect. “To deprive another of what is due to someone occupying his role or to usurp the role of another is not only to violate dike; it is to infringe upon the timê, the honor of the other. And if I am dishonored, as Achilles was by Agamemnon, then I am required to seek redress.”^{^[xxxii]}

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^{^[xxxiv]}

Gottschall acknowledges the implausible application of the Darwinian paradigm to the Iliad, since, after all, the conscious decision of each protagonist to engage in warfare is made perforce at the expense of his likely survival and reproduction:

^{^[xxxv]}

His initial attempt to address this apparent incoherence is a citation of an idea from the early Darwinian theorist Ronald Fisher, an idea so spectacularly assinine, it is almost impossible to believe that Fisher actually published it, and even more impossible to believe that Gottschall would cite it as evidence for his argument:

^{^[xxxvi]}

timê, their honor, more than they value their lives.

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The entire tendency of the aesthetic impulse is to pull men away from their merely biological natures towards a conceived ideal of rational freedom:

^{^[xliii]}

[i]Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations, (The Teaching Company) lectures 1 and 10.

[ii]G. K. Chesterton, Everlasting Man (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993) 34.

[iii]Jonathan Gottschall and D.S. Wilson, eds. The Literary Animal (Chicago: Northwestern Univ. Press, 2005) Forward.

> See minute 51.

[vi]After over a century of insistence by its partisans that Darwinian theory has utterly routed teleology from the realm of respectable philosophical discourse, Daniel Dennett now assures us that natural selection imbues organisms with purposes “as real as purposes could ever be.” <> See minute 8.

[vii]Quoted in David Stove, Darwinian Fairytales (New York: Encounter Books, 1995) 227.

[viii]Robert Trivers, Social Evolution (California: Benjamin/Cummings, 1985) 198-200.

[ix]“The adopter not only wastes her own time: she also releases a rival female from the burden of child-rearing, and frees her to have another child more quickly. It seems to me a critical example which deserves some thorough research. We need to know how often it happens; what the average relatedness between adopter and child is; and what the attitude of the real mother of the child is – it is, after all, to her advantage that her child should be adopted: do mothers deliberately try to deceive naïve young females into adopting their children” quoted in Stove, 309.

[x]“ Any rational person would not pursue a feud, any more than he would let guilt or shame prevent him from stealing a friend’s wallet.” in Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (New York: Viking, 1996) 133.

[xi]Quoted in Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002) 3.

[xii]Dutton, 9.

[xiii]Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1994) 310.

[xiv]Brian Boyd, “Evolutionary Theories of Art,” in Gottschall and Wilson, 147.

[xv]Jonathan Gottschall, The Rape of Troy (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008) 163.

[xvi]Ridley, 138.

[xvii]Quoted in Stove, 321.

[xviii]Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1995) 32.

[xix]Eckart Voland, “Aesthetic Preferences in the World of Artifacts” in Karl Grammer and Eckart Voland, eds. Evolutionary Aesthetics (New York:Springer, 2003) 246.

[xx]Dutton, 146.

[xxi]Denis Dutton, “Aesthetics and Evolutionary Psychology” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics ((New York: Oxford University Press, 2003) <www.denisdutton.com/aesthetics_&_evolutionary_psychology.htm>

[xxii]Dissanayake, 44

[xxiii]Dutton 2009, 236.

[xxiv]See Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (New York: Touchstone, 1995) esp. chapters 2 and 3; also Stephen Jay Gould Full House (New York: Harmony Books, 1996) 40-41; Gould himself cites Ernst Mayr as an early defender of this position.

[xxv]Roger Kimball, “Art in Darwin’s Terms,” Times Literary Supplement 20 March 2009

[xxvi]Gottschall, 2.

[xxvii]Gottschall, 10.

[xxviii]Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1981) 127.

[xxix]Gottschall, 60.

[xxx]Gottschall, 61-61.

[xxxi]Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1988) 14.

[xxxii]MacIntyre 1988, 14.

[xxxiii]Gottschall, 87.

[xxxiv]MacIntyre 1981, 127.

[xxxv]Gottschall, 96.

[xxxvi]Gottschall, 96.

[xxxvii]MacIntyre 1981, 124.

[xxxviii]Gottschall, 155-157.

[xxxix]MacIntyre 1988, 20-21.

[xl]Gottschall, 163-165.

[xli]MacIntyre 1981, 128.

[xlii]MacIntyre 1988, 27.

[xliii]Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter XXVII <http://bartelby.org/32/527.html>

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