The New Synthesis:Evolutionary Approaches to the ArtsAn Introductioni. Origins and principles
About fifteen years ago several distinct lines of scholarly and scientific study began to cometogether to form a new field, variously referred to by such nonce formulations as "evolutionaryaesthetics," "biopoetics," and "bioaesthetics". The researchers who were discovering a commoninterest came from widely different fields; they includedevolutionary psychologists, human ethologists and sociobiologists who had realized theastonishing amount of time and energy humans spend on artistic activities, and wondered whythey did;psychophysicists and neuroscientists whose equipment, such as tachistoscopes, neuronal probes,computer databases, and MRI scanners, was now sophisticated enough to give meaningfulinformation about artistic and aesthetic experience;researchers in the psychology of art and art therapy who were dissatisfied with existing Freudianmethods and wanted data to supplement their own findings;literary, musical, art-historical, and theatrical scholars in the humanities who desired a way out of what they perceived as the dead end of poststructuralism;philosophers of science and sociologists who were exploring the implications of new ideas suchas chaos and complexity theory for understanding the social self-organization of humans andother higher animals;
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anthropologists exploring the parallels between animal and human ritual;experts in signaling theory interested in the richer forms of human communication;games theorists studying the emergence of shared values through replication dynamics and groupselection;computer simulation experts looking for interesting nonlinear systems to model;experts in infant development and early socialization;scholars in myth, folkore and oral tradition seeking prehistoric roots for their data;investigators of sexuality interested in gene-culture interaction;aesthetic philosophers wanting new foundations for their inquiries;and many more.The principles of the new field might be summed up as follows:1. It makes sense to study human arts and aesthetic experience by scientific methods and usingscientific information. (This principle is not as obvious as it sounds. It assumes, for instance,that human beings have a nature; that art and aesthetics are not just inaccessibly subjectivematters of opinion or epiphenomena of socioeconomic status; that there is no unbridgeablechasm between the physical and mental worlds; and that methods can be found that are equal tothe sheer complexity and inherent ambiguity of the subject.)2. Art and beauty are human universals and are features of an animal that evolved.3. The arts and the related capacities of aesthetic experience are direct or indirect products of adaptation.4. The evolution of art and beauty involved a feedback between biogenetic and socioculturalelements.5. The results of that evolution should show up in specific neural and somatic functions andstructures, and in the developmental process.
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6. The origins and history of the arts in all cultures can be better understood using theseperspectives; and may in turn cast light on the meaning of the scientific data.7. Such knowledge may help us both in knowing our own nature, and also in the making,exegesis and experience of the arts.Biopoetics--or whatever we want to call it--being a new field, it is presently at the stage of collecting data, checking out what methods and schemas are useful, and establishing the scopeand depth of its inquiries. In this introduction I would like to sketch a sort of map of theterritory, giving a sense not only of the possible shape of the field as it matures but also itsgeneral neighborhood and related problem areas. It will thus perhaps cover a rather largerlandscape than the bit of it that can be usefully studied for the time being; but it might not hurt tobe oriented in the wider world of human inquiry. I will locate the essays in this collection withinthe overall schema, as a way to illustrate the rich material and new insights to be gleaned in thenew field, as a hint about where the best researchers are concentrating their energies at this stageof the game, and as an introduction to the essays themselves. Readers are welcome to quarrelwith my assignment of the articles to specific classifications, for most of them cover a good dealof ground, and the relations among the categories I will distinguish are at least as interesting asthe categories themselves. But it may be useful to tease out the threads of inquiry, howeverinterwoven they must be in practice.
ii. General theory of natural nomogenesis
Thus, first of all, we might locate our new field in the context of a large change that has quietlybeen going on in the sciences over the last few decades--a change in our attitude toward thelawfulness and order apparent in the universe. The major component of this change is the idea of
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