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Dutton points out that like language every culture has art. And both language
and art have developed far beyond what would be required for mere survival. The
proposed explanation for the runaway development of language is that initially
language provided a tool for cooperation and survival. Once language skills be-
came important for survival language, fluency became a mate selection marker.
The genetic feedback loop due to mate selection then generated ever-increasing lan-
guage ability in the population leading to a corresponding language instinct (Pinker
1994 ).
Additionally, Dutton posits that early human mate selection was, in part, based
on the demonstration of the ability to provide for material needs. Like language,
this ability then became a survival marker in mate selection subject to increasing
development. Just as a peacock's feather display marks a desirable surplus of health,
works of art became status symbols demonstrating an excess of material means.
It is not by coincidence then that art tends to require rare or expensive materials,
significant time for learning and making, as well as intelligence and creativity. And
typically art has a lack of utility, and sometimes an ephemeral nature. All of these
require a material surplus.
One could argue that even if art making has a genetic basis it may be that our
sense of aesthetics does not. In this regard, Dutton notes the universal appeal, re-
gardless of the individual's local environment, for landscape scenes involving open
green spaces trees and ample bodies of water near by, an unimpeded view of the
horizon, animal life, and a diversity of flowering and fruiting plants. This scene
resembles the African savannah where early man's evolution split off from other
primate lines. It also includes numerous positive cues for survivability. Along with
related psychological scholarship Dutton quotes the previously noted Alexander
Melamid:
. . . I'm thinking that this blue landscape is more serious than we first believed. . . almost
everyone you talk to directly—and we've already talked to hundreds of people—they have
this blue landscape in their head. . . So I'm wondering, maybe the blue landscape is genet-
ically imprinted in us, that it's the paradise within, that we came from the blue landscape
and we want it. . . We now completed polls in many countries—China, Kenya, Iceland, and
so on—and the results are strikingly similar.
That our aesthetic capacity evolved in support of mate selection has parallels
in other animals. This provides some hope for those who would follow a psycho-
logical path to computational aesthetic evaluation, because creatures with simpler
brains than man practice mate selection. In other words perhaps the computational
equivalent of a bird or an insect is “all” that is required for computational aesthetic
evaluation. But does mate selection behaviour in other animals really imply brain
activity similar to human aesthetic judgement? One suggestive study by Watanabe
( 2009 ) began with a set of children's paintings. Adult humans judged each to be
“good” or “bad”. Pigeons were then trained through operant conditioning to only
peck at good paintings. The pigeons were then exposed for the first time to a new
set of already judged children's paintings. The pigeons were quite able to correctly
classify the previously unseen paintings as “good” or “bad”.
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