Why art is not a spandrel Stephen Davies ...

Why art is not a spandrel Stephen Davies, Philosophy, University of Auckland Important note: This is a final draft and differs from the definitive version, which is published in the British Journal of Aesthetics, 50 (2010): 333-‐341. I have been assured by the University of Auckland's research office that if they have made this publicly available then it does not violate the publisher's copyright rules. ABSTRACT If one views humans' creation and appreciation of art as grounded in our biological nature, it might be tempting to see art as a spandrel, as an adventitious by-‐product of some adaptation without adaptive significance in itself. Such a position connects art to our evolved human nature yet apparently avoids the demands of demonstrating how art behaviors enhanced the fitness of our ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic. In this paper I explore two arguments that count against the view that art is a spandrel. The first rejects the idea that the spandrel option is somehow less demanding or controversial than the alternative view according to which art is an adaptation. The second argues that if art behaviors came to us as spandrels, they would not remain so; their occurrence in the usual manner would become normative because they would come to provide honest signals of fitness.

Davies

Why art is not a spandrel

Why art is not a spandrel Suppose one thinks that the creation and appreciation of art is pan-‐cultural, indeed, that such behaviours are almost universal in humans and emerge spontaneously as part of our normal development. And suppose one believes, in addition, that this was so from deep into our prehistory, and not the result of datable acts of invention the products and practices of which were taken up and disseminated. Admittedly, such ideas presuppose a conception of art more modest than that invoked under the rubric of Fine Art, but this seems reasonable if we see the latter as an elite, arcane institutionalisation arising out of but not displacing its more quotidian predecessor. Given all this, one will be inclined to view humans' creation and appreciation of art as grounded in our biological nature, and thereby as shaped by natural selection. According to the standard view, there are then two main possibilities: (1) art behaviours are adaptations, which is to say they emerged as transmissible1 capacities that increased the ecological fitness of those who displayed them, so that their possessors parented more extensive and far-‐reaching lineages, or (2) art behaviours are spandrels, that is, adventitious by-‐products of adaptations, without adaptive significance in themselves.2 1

In evolution theory, "transmissible" usually equates to "genetically heritable". Alternative views are possible. Meme theory allows for cultural transmission; see S. Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Developmental systems theory suggests that what matters for evolution is the availablility of relevant resources to each generation, not whether those resources are biological or cultural in origin; see Paul Griffiths and Russell Gray, 'Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation', Journal of Philosophy, vol. 91 (1994), pp. 277-‐304. Multilevel selection theory argues that the units of selection can be groups rather than individuals, which again gives a significant role to social transmission in evolution; see Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) and David Sloan Wilson, Mark Van Vugt, and Rick O'Gorman, 'Multilevel Selection Theory and Major Evolutionary Transitions: Implications for Psychological Science', Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 17 (1) (2008), pp. 6-‐9. I do not consider the debate between such theories here.

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A third possibility is that art behaviours are vestiges, that is, former adaptations that have lost their original adaptive function. Both G. W. F. Hegel and Arthur C. Danto have produced

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In this paper, I consider the second option. At first glance it is an attractive hypothesis, in that it connects art to our evolved human nature yet apparently avoids the demands of demonstrating how art behaviours enhanced the fitness of our ancestors in the Upper Palaeolithic. The point is not merely that the art-‐as-‐spandrel position comes cheap, because it requires less argument. It is that arguments in favour of the alternative art-‐as-‐adaptation hypothesis are inevitably controversial and inconclusive. In considering which current features of human behaviour are outcomes of prehistoric adaptations, evolutionary psychologists speculate about challenges faced by our prehistoric ancestors and about how these could have been answered by the emergence of such behaviours. It is alleged that this sort of "reverse engineering" results in the production of "Just-‐so" stories.3

accounts of art according to which contemporary art is vestige-‐like. They suggest that art had an historical function that it has now discharged, so that it persists in a post-‐historical phase. Nearer to the view that art behaviours are vestiges left via biological evolution – in other words, that they hang on (and perhaps wither), despite no longer serving their original, adaptive function – is the position of Ellen Dissanayake in What Is Art For? (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988). She maintains that post-‐eighteenth-‐century Fine Art no longer builds community, which is art's evolutionary purpose on her view. In any case, all these writers have as their target Western Fine Art. Provided we take the broad view of art that I recommended earlier, one including domestic, decorative, folk, and popular art, it is apparent that art is created, valued, and enjoyed with a vigour that suggests it has not lost the evolutionary significance we are supposing it to have had for our ancestors. 3

S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, in 'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: a Critique of the Adaptationist Programme', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, vol. B 205 (1979), 581-‐598, criticised the "story telling" of adaptationists. H. D. Schlinger in 'How the Human got its Spots: A Critical Analysis of the Just So Stories of Evolutionary Psychology', Skeptic, vol. 4 (1996), pp. 68-‐76, made the comparison with Rudyard Kipling's stories of how animals acquired their distinctive characteristics. This style of objection is widely regarded as the most damning to the explanations offered by evolutionary psychologists. "Reverse engineering" can be defended as an acceptable form of abductive reasoning, however; see Harmon R. Holcomb III, 'Just So Stories and Inference to the Best Explanation in Evolutionary Psychology', Minds and Machines, vol. 6 (1996), pp. 525-‐540. And evolutionary psychologists sometimes also employ other methods to validate their hypotheses, such as study of primates, of children, and of present-‐day hunter-‐gatherers, and research on neural structures and their history (including research on autism and selective brain deficits).

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Despite the initial attractiveness of the art-‐as-‐spandrel approach, in this paper I question its plausibility. Before I get to that, I indicate how the notion of spandrels is applied in the discussion of biological evolution and I mention some of the theorists who claim that art, or some particular art form, is an example of a spandrel. I The term "spandrel" refers to an architectural feature, namely, the tapering triangular spaces formed by the intersection of two rounded arches at right angles. They are an instance of an architectural byproduct (one among many) that need have no functional significance on its own.4 In human terms, the best equivalent probably is the armpit, a structure inevitably formed where an articulable member joins the body's trunk. Other examples sometimes offered are the navel and male nipples. Applications of the term are not confined only to structural features, however. Both the redness of blood and the whiteness of bone are regarded as spandrels; in these cases they are non-‐functional by-‐ products of the chemical constitutions respectively of blood and bone. And the notion can be extended to refer to aspects of culture and society. According to Stephen Jay Gould, with only 10,000 years of history behind them, both writing and reading are spandrels. Indeed, he regards human culture and technology generally as by-‐products of the oversized human brain, which evolved to address now unknown problems faced by our ancestors.5

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The architectural term "spandrel" was first applied to biological features by Gould and Lewontin in 'The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.' They characterised spandrels as necessary by-‐products of the structures on which they are based, but this aspect of the view has been challenged; for example, see Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 272-‐273 and Alasdair I. Houston, 'San Marco and Evolutionary Biology', Biology and Philosophy, vol. 24 (2009), pp. 215-‐230.

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'Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism', The New York Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 11 (26 June, 1997); see paragraphs 42-‐43; see also 'The Exaptive Excellence of Spandrels as a Term and Prototype', Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (US), vol. 94 (1997), pp. 10750-‐10755.

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Several theorists suggest that art is a spandrel.6 In The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion, and Science (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), Steven Mithen discusses the way human general intelligence was spectacularly enhanced by a breaking down of the modularised isolation of mental domains specialising in natural history, social relations, technology, and language. His discussion suggests that the appearance at the most general level of art, religion, and science some 30,000 years ago was a by-‐product of these cognitive developments. Others make the claim not about art in general but about particular art forms. Alfred Russel Wallace, in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1889), regards music and dance as by-‐products of our brain power and excessive vitality. Steven Pinker says: "[of the arts] music … shows the clearest signs of not being [an adaptation]". He coins a striking metaphor: "I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties", these being language (when the music has lyrics), auditory scene analysis, emotional calls, habitat selection (as expressed in musical tone painting), motor control (when music leads to dancing), and "something else that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts".7 In other words, senses and capacities evolved for non-‐ musical purposes are stimulated by music in a fashion that we find enjoyable, though not to any evolutionary purpose.8 6

For some recent examples, see Eckart Voland, 'Aesthetic Preferences in the World of Artifacts – Adaptations for the Evaluation of "Honest Signals"?' in E. Voland and K. Grammer (eds), Evolutionary Aesthetics (Springer Verlag, 2003), pp. 239-‐260; Merlin Donald, 'Art and Cognitive Evolution', in M. Turner (ed), The Artful Mind: Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3-‐20; Terrence Deacon, 'The Aesthetic Faculty', in Turner op. cit., pp. 21-‐53; Semir Zeki, 'The Neurology of Ambiguity', in Turner op. cit., pp. 243-‐270.

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How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); the quotations are from pp. 534 and 538. See also, Ragnar Granit, The Purposive Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).

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Commentators have been rightly puzzled by Pinker's metaphor; for instance, see Joseph Carroll, 'Steven Pinker's Cheesecake for the Mind', Philosophy and Literature, 22 (1998), pp. 478-‐485. The desire of Homo sapiens for sweet, fatty foods was adaptive on the savannahs of the Upper Palaeolithic, when such nourishing foods could be hard to come by. Now, when every street corner has a burger outlet and coffee store, the taste may have become maladaptive. But in neither environment does a desire for sweet, fatty food (for cheesecake)

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II In this section I offer an arguments querying the claim that the art-‐as-‐spandrel option is easier or less controversial to support than is the art-‐as-‐adaptation alternative. If asked, most people would identify feathers as an adaptation for avian flight. They are wrong to do so. The first feathers evolved for thermoregulation9 and the descendants of some ancient bird types, such as emus and penguins, have no feathers suitable for flight. Even in flighted birds, the vast majority of their feathers play no role in their taking to the sky. So, is flight a spandrel, is it merely a non-‐adaptive by-‐product of avian thermoregulation? Obviously not. Though flight comes at a cost (which is why rail species revert so often to flightlessness on islands without ground predators), it provides a mode of mobility that produces many benefits toward survival and reproduction. But if it is an adaptation, where do we locate that? We do so not in the origins of feathers, but in certain modifications to specific feathers that (along with other flight-‐ facilitating changes in bone structure, musculature, and the like) made avian flight possible A yet more extreme example helps make the point. The cochlea of the human inner ear, with which differences in the pitches of sounds are detected, developed from the lagena, a bulging organ on the posterior section of the sacculus of fish that detects aquatic vibration and thereby locates the presence of other fish.10 But this does not mean that humans' pitch detection, which is important for auditory scene analysis and the appreciation of semantic and affective content in utterance, is merely a spandrel of an ancient Piscean

function as a spandrel. For other (not entirely convincing) criticisms of Pinker on music, see Daniel J. Levitin This is your Brain on Music: The Science of Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006). 9

Stephen J. Gould and Elizabeth Vrba, 'Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science of Forms', Paleobiology, vol. 8 (1982), pp. 4-‐15.

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For discussion, see Charles O. Nussbaum, The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), p. 52.

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adaptation. In accounting for the adaptiveness of the human cochlea, we should look not to the origins of the relevant organ but to changes in it that made it useful for (that is, that enhanced the fitness of) terrestrial creatures. As these examples show, evolution never begins afresh but builds instead on what already exists. The result, even if it is adaptive, sometimes exhibits an improvisatory, jury-‐rigged character. Bipedalism was adaptive for our ancestors, but we are also heir to the back problems and pains that go with it. All this helps to explain why so little of the possible "design space" is exploited by evolution; for instance, it explains why so many living creatures display similar basic body plans. Here is the relevant moral: demonstrating that something is a spandrel involves far more than identifying it as a by-‐product of some prior adaptation from which it operates very differently. So, even if it is true that art is a by-‐ product of Homo sapiens' development of a flexible, general intelligence, for instance, this does not show that art is not an adaptation. In consequence, the art-‐as-‐spandrel approach does not have the possible advantage claimed for it earlier: it does not require less supporting argument than the art-‐as-‐adaptation model. Spandrels can be confidently identified as such only after the possibility that they are adaptations in their own right is tested and defeated. When the investigation is closed, art may turn out to be a spandrel after all, but before we get to that conclusion we have to go down the same hard road as that taken by the person who hopes to show that art is an adaptation. A second consequence is this: if, as I suggested, arguments for the adaptiveness of art are properly regarded as questionable and speculative, arguments for the art-‐as-‐spandrel model will inherit these same qualities, because they must follow the same path. III I now offer rather general reasons for thinking that art is not best regarded as a spandrel, even if it originates there. This second and more compelling objection to the art-‐as-‐spandrel hypothesis can be summarised in the slogan: form becomes norm.

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Structural integrity – symmetry, proportion, balance, and a normal disposition of elements – is an indicator of fitness. It signals a history of health and immunity from disease. And, for this reason, structural integrity is appreciated as an aspect of human attractiveness. For instance, the degree of symmetry of human faces correlates with judgments of their beauty.11 (Note however that, though we are attracted to hyper-‐normalcy in facial features and the like, we can be attracted more to what is unusual provided it remains within the bounds of a normal distribution. In other words, we like what is average, but we might like more what lies nearer the extremes of what is not regarded as transgressive.12)

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On facial symmetry, see Judith H. Langlois and Lori A. Roggman, 'Attractive Faces are only Average', Psychological Science, vol. 1 (1990), pp. 115-‐121; D. Symons, 'Beauty is in the Adaptations of the Beholder: the Evolutionary Psychology of Human Female Sexual Attractiveness', in P. R. Abramson and S. D. Pinkerton (eds), Sexual Nature -‐ Sexual Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 80-‐118; and Patrick Hogan, Science, Literature, and the Arts: A Guide for Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003). On the equation of beauty and symmetry, see Colin Martindale, 'Cognition, Psychobiology, and Aesthetics', in F. Farley and R. Neperud (eds), The Foundations of Aesthetics, Art, and Art Education (New York: Praeger, 1988), pp. 7-‐42; Vilayanur Ramachandran and William Hirstein, 'The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience', Journal of Consciousness Studies vol. 6 (June-‐ July, 1999), pp. 15-‐51; and Randy Thornhill, 'Darwinian Aesthetics Informs Traditional Aesthetics', in Voland and Grammer (eds) op. cit., pp 9-‐35. On symmetry as a health indicator, see Dahlia Zaidel, Shawn M. Aarde, and Kieran Baig, 'Appearance of Symmetry, Beauty, and Health in Human Faces', Brain and Cognition, vol. 57 (2005), pp. 261-‐263. On beauty as honest signalling for fitness, see A. Zahavi and A. Zahavi, The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin’s Puzzle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2000); and Uta Skamel, 'Beauty and Sex Appeal: Sexual Selection of Aesthetic Preferences', in Voland and Grammer (eds) op. cit., pp. 173-‐200.

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See Symons op. cit.; Thomas R. Alley and Michael R. Cunningham, 'Averaged Faces are Attractive, but very Attractive Faces are not Average', Psychological Science, vol. 2 (1991), pp. 123-‐125; and Michael R. Cunningham and Stephen R. Shamblem, 'Beyond Nature Versus Culture: A Multiple Fitness Analysis of Variations in Grooming', in Voland and Grammer (eds) op. cit., pp. 201-‐237. Ramachandran and Hirstein op. cit. generalise this result, the "peak shift effect", to art.

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Now, navels and male nipples count along with eyes, noses, ears, chins, and the like toward structural integrity. They have to be present in the usual number, proportion, and places if a person is to display at least an average amount of fitness. Perhaps that is one reason why young women wear short tops and low-‐slung jeans, why they decorate their navels with studs or jewellery, and why belly dancing developed: these behaviours advertise health and attractiveness. Ask yourself, how would you feel if your son wanted to marry a young woman who has no navel and who claims to have come – whatever that would mean – without one?13 How would you feel if your daughter wanted to marry a young man who was born with neither nipples nor navel? And would you welcome as an in-‐law someone with blue bones and green blood? As he flashed a blue-‐toothed grin in the attempt to distract attention from the spreading chartreuse flush that betrayed his embarrassment, one could not help wondering if he is genuinely human and what kind of offspring he might father. The point extends to all aspects of human behaviour. A failure to develop in the customary fashion – for instance, dysfunctionality in language acquisition and use – will be perceived by others as signalling neural or other problems. The same goes for aspects of social behaviour – for instance, a sense of justice and a commitment to cooperation – that made life in the Upper Palaeolithic possible. And if the creation and appreciation of art was prehistorically as widespread as I claimed initially, a person who showed no interest in any form of art would be as unappealing as someone who is without intelligence, humour, social grace, care for others, and a navel. If navels and art behaviours came to us as spandrels, they would not remain so. Their occurrence in the usual manner would become normative because they provide honest, though cheap, signals of fitness. They are cheap in the sense that their occurrence in the usual manner is so prevalent that it is only departures from this that assume importance. Such departures would take on significance for sexual selection and social integration. In general, any transmissible human form or behaviour that was recognised as signifying well-‐ 13

Surgery can result in the absence of a belly button. A reduced one can be the outcome of a lotus birth or premature caesarean.

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formedness and developmental normalcy would not only become statistically average as it successfully spread through the population, it would become normative in the evaluative sense, whether it first emerged as an adaptation or as a spandrel. IV In this final section I respond to concerns that might be raised against the previous objection to the view that art could be a spandrel. The bodily features I have discussed are universal and cheap. The most reliable indication of a sign's honesty as a signal of fitness is its cost to the creature that displays it.14 Universal, cheap signals will not be accepted as reliable signs of fitness, so they will not become normative. They will not come to guide and constrain our judgments of our fellows in the manner I have suggested. I have two replies to this first objection. In the case of the structural features I used as examples, it is precisely their cheapness that makes departures from the norm significant. I agree that their presence in the usual way says little, but if there are anomalies regarding them, this should set off warning bells. I predict, though I do not know the data, that individuals with extra digits, webbed feet, or strangely placed navels tend on average to attract mates with a lower overall fitness than otherwise one would predict for them.15 The second reply shifts attention to the complex social practices, including our interest in the arts, that are my main topic. The relevant talents 14

See Zahavi and Zahavi op. cit., Alan Grafen, 'Biological Signals as Handicaps', Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 144 (1990), pp. 517-‐546, and Thomas Getty, 'Sexually Selected Signals are not like Sports Handicaps', Trends in Ecology and Evolution, vol. 21 (2006), pp. 83-‐ 88.

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Karolina Kurkova, a Czech supermodel, has an indentation rather than a navel, most likely as a result of surgery, but a navel is frequently airbrushed into photographs of her; see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7738144.stm. And plastic surgery is frequently used to "correct" unusual navels. Of course, stories in which "normal" people are pitted against mutants are a science-‐fiction stock-‐in-‐trade; for a more subtle than usual treatment of the theme, see John Wyndham's novel The Chrysalids of 1955.

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and skills can be developed and displayed to different degrees and in different areas. In general, we place a high value on creativity, and we expect it to be specialised. And we place similar worth on connoisseurship in appreciation. A person with van Gogh's ear for music – a person let us say who enjoys only commercial mainstream music and makes no discriminatory judgments within the category, or worse, enjoys no music at all – might cultivate an expert's interest elsewhere, say in post-‐impressionist painting. This emphasis on expertise and connoisseurship should not be equated with aesthetic elitism. It applies across the full range of the arts. Aficionados distinguish many different types of techno16 and every pop fanatic I have ever met has claimed to have a special interest in a kind of music with minority appeal and could point to crucial differences between their favoured variety of pop and others, these being differences that my ears were inclined to miss. Expertise, both as creator and appreciator, rarely depends on raw talent alone. It comes hard won, being educated, developed, and refined through practice, experience, exposure, and study. Here is the point: even if the possession of a normal navel is cheap, and is therefore not a positive sign of fitness, the same does not apply to the arts. These allow many and costly ways to achieve creativity and subtle proficiency in appreciation, which can therefore act as reliable, positive signs of fitness. Moreover, though interest in the arts, broadly construed, might be universal, individuals specialise where their talents, interests, and knowledge lie, and this differentiates the market in complex ways. A person can afford to become a narrow specialist at great personal cost in energy, cognitive investment, and expense, provided enough others are like-‐minded, and what counts as "enough" might be only a small portion of the total population if that total is high. Relevant art behaviours can serve as reliable signifiers of fitness, then, though there may be high variability and competition between the many types and expressions of art expertise that are possible.

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For example, see Sean Cooper's discussion in M. Erlewine et al. (eds)

All Music Guide to Rock (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1997), pp. 1155-‐1156

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The second concern provoked by the idea that form becomes norm is one that detects hints of social Darwinism in the idea that arbitrary aesthetic tastes that do not identify reliable signs of fitness can, by becoming widespread, later dictate what counts as fitness. It looks as if some aesthetic standard would become evolutionarily normative if it could be imposed sufficiently widely, with the result that an evolutionary sanction could be claimed, say, for racial and sexual discrimination, for foot-‐binding, ritual scarification, homophobia, and enslavement of ethnic minorities. Admittedly, the position defended earlier holds that what become normative are only those transmissible human forms or behaviours that are recognised as signifying well-‐formedness and developmental normalcy, but now the worry can be articulated as one about how vulnerable and corruptible are these notions. Most societies tolerate many individual differences as normal – differences in hair and eye colour, in hair distribution or curliness or straightness, in skin pigmentation, in height, in intelligence. But suppose the government of a populous society enforced a decree against left-‐handedness to the point where its citizens regarded left-‐handedness as an abnormality. Rather than accepting that their belief changes the standard for normalcy, at least in their own society, should we not regard their belief as mistaken? A first reply to this concern notes that the preferences under discussion are ones that shaped the lives of our distant ancestors; they are an aspect of the human nature we inherited from our forebears. As such, they will not easily be changed by government edicts, though such edicts might succeed in suppressing or distorting their expression. Here we might draw an analogy with human's selective breeding of non-‐human animals. We breed them for traits we choose, sometimes to the detriment of the animals' normal functioning, but this external control does not necessarily change their underlying nature or the preferences that are indigenous to their species. It is not the case, for instance, that Labradors are sexually attracted only to other Labradors. In the human case, we know that locally arbitrary conditions can conspire with human preferences that go on to affect what counts as statistically normal at a given place and time with respect to such factors as neck length, height, weight, tooth whiteness, and the like, but

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again, it is not as if intercultural or interracial marriage is unheard of. So, the basic character of the preferences we are discussing runs deep. Moreover, it is worth recalling that, even if human nature includes a common core, it is also a crucial aspect of human nature that individuals differ. As footnoted earlier, we are drawn to what is unusual as well as to what is average, and this works to preserve diversity. In fact, evolution is driven by individual difference; there is not uniformity but a varied distribution of traits across the species' population and an equally varied distribution of preferences for particular traits. The point here is that developmental normalcy does not and could not correspond to developmental sameness. Though I have supposed that the creation and appreciation of art is universal, I have also indicated the variety of ways in which artistic creation and appreciation can find expression. Not only are there differences in the art practices of distinct cultures, there is a significant diversity of art practices within each culture. And for any given art practice, there is likely to be a spread of levels that accommodates many degrees of competence among the participants. All this means that there are many ways that individuals can seek the artistic development of their distinctive talents as creators or appreciators. Nothing in the form-‐becomes-‐norm idea requires or predicts uniformity or regimentation when it comes to a social practice like art, with its long historical development, advanced sophistication, and scope for virtuosic originality. Indeed, it is precisely the multiplicity of art's possibilities that make it such an informationally nuanced signal of fitness. The factors that dictate our preferences can develop and alter over time, of course, and this may shift what counts as well-‐formedness and developmental normalcy. To return to dogs, their association with humans has altered their previously wolfish nature, so that now they are among the few animal that find human yawning contagious and that look where the finger points and not at the pointing finger. But this is not a result that could have been achieved by a regime of training alone; it also required the selective evolution of neural structures that might make such training effective. And while humans are highly unusual in the cognitive and social plasticity of their desires and norms, and this is certainly relevant to their capacity to adjust to an extraordinary range of environments

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and circumstances, it is not plausible that law, religion, or other forms of "external" social control can alone change our natures to any radical, dramatic extent. V In this paper I have argued that the thesis that art is a spandrel does not provide an easy route to establishing a connection between human art behaviours and our evolved Homo sapien natures. Indeed, supporting that hypothesis is not simpler or more conclusive than arguing for the controversial alternative that identifies our creation and appreciation of art as an adaptation. In addition, I suggested that characteristics and features that display well-‐formedness and developmental normalcy (or departures from these), even if they originate as spandrels, take on the function of honestly signalling fitness (or unfitness) and thereby acquire adaptive significance. If interest in art emerges spontaneously as part of our normal development and thereby comes to signify that normalcy, and if there is then selection for the art behaviours relative to that normalcy, then the art behaviours that result could not count merely as spandrels. In fact, the variety of art interests and specialisations make art potentially a rich indicator of many different fitness-‐enhancing capacities. Stephen Davies, Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland.

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