The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

Second, an ingenious idea has been proposed by Geoffrey Miller, the evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, and by others that art evolved to advertise to potential mates the artist’s manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination. This was promptly dubbed the “come up and see my etchings” theory of art. Like the male bowerbird, the male artist is in effect telling his muse, “Look at my pictures. They show I have excellent hand-eye coordination and a complex, well-integrated brain—genes I’ll pass on to your babies.” There is an irritating grain of truth to Miller’s idea, but personally I don’t find it very convincing. The main problem is that it doesn’t explain why the advertisement should take the form of art. It seems like overkill. Why not directly advertise this ability to potential mates by showing off your skills in archery or athletic prowess in soccer? If Miller is right, women should find the ability to knit and embroider to be very attractive in potential husbands, given that it requires superb manual dexterity—even though most women, not even feminists, don’t value such skills in a man. Miller might argue that women value not the dexterity and skill per se but the creativity that underlies the finished product. But despite its supreme cultural importance to humans, the biological survival value of art as an index of creativity is dubious given that it doesn’t necessarily spill over into other domains. (Just look at the number of starving artists!)

Notice that Pinker’s theory predicts that the women should hover around the buyers, whereas Miller’s theory predicts they should hover around the starving artists themselves.

To these ideas I’ll add two more. To understand them you need to consider thirty-thousand-year-old cave art from Lascaux, France. These cave-wall images are hauntingly beautiful even to the modern eye. To achieve them, the artists must have used some of the same aesthetic laws used by modern artists. For example, the bisons are mostly depicted as outline drawings (isolation), and bison-like characteristics such as small head and large hump are grossly exaggerated. Basically, it’s a caricature (peak shift) of a bison created by unconsciously subtracting the average generic hoofed quadruped from a bison and amplifying the differences. But apart from just saying, “They made these images just to enjoy them,” can we say anything more?

Humans excel at visual imagery. Our brains evolved this ability to create an internal mental picture or model of the world in which we can rehearse forthcoming actions, without the risks or the penalties of doing them in the real world. There are even hints from brain-imaging studies by Harvard University psychologist Steve Kosslyn showing that your brain uses the same regions to imagine a scene as when you actually view one.

But evolution has seen to it that such internally generated representations are never as authentic as the real thing. This is a wise bit of self-restraint on your genes’ part. If your internal model of the world were a perfect substitute, then anytime you felt hungry you could simply imagine yourself at a banquet, consuming a feast. You would have no incentive to find real food and would soon starve to death. As the Bard said, “You cannot cloy the hungry edge of appetite by bare imagination of a feast.”

Likewise, a creature that developed a mutation that allowed it to imagine orgasms would fail to pass on its genes and would quickly become extinct. (Our brains evolved long before porn videos, Playboy magazine, and sperm banks.) No “imagine orgasm” gene is likely to make a big splash in the gene pool.

Now what if our hominin ancestors were worse than us at mental imagery? Imagine they wanted to rehearse a forthcoming bison or lion hunt. Perhaps it was easier to engage in realistic rehearsal if they had actual props, and perhaps these props are what we today call cave art. They may have used these painted scenes in much the way that a child enacts imaginary fights between his toy soldiers, as a form of play to educate his internal imagery. Cave art could also have been used for teaching hunting skills to novices. Over several millennia these skills would become assimilated into culture and acquired religious significance. Art, in short, may be nature’s own virtual reality.