Art as behaviour--an ethological approach to visual and verbal art, music and architecture

Evolution of Artistic and Athletic Propensities: Testing of Intersexual Selection and Intrasexual Competition

Since Darwin proposed that human musicality evolved through sexual selection, empirical evidence has supported intersexual selection as one of the adaptive functions of artistic propensities. However, intrasexual competition has been overlooked. We tested their relative importance by investigating the relationship between the self-perceived talent/expertise in 16 artistic and 2 sports modalities and proxies of intersexual selection (i.e., mate value, mating and parenting efforts, sociosexuality, and number of sexual partners) and intrasexual competition (i.e., aggressiveness, intrasexual competitiveness) in heterosexuals. Participants were 82 Brazilian men, 166 Brazilian women, 146 Czech men, and 458 Czech women (Mage = 26.48, SD = 7.12). Factor analysis revealed five factors: Literary-arts (creative writing, humor, acting/theater/film, poetry, storytelling), Visual-arts (painting/drawing, sculpting, handcrafting, culinary arts, architecture design), Musical-arts (playing/instruments, singing, dance, whistling), Circus-arts (juggling, acrobatics), and Sports (individual, collective). Multivariate General Linear Model (GLM) showed more associations of the arts to intersexual selection in women and to intrasexual selection in men, and overall more relationships in women than in men. In women, literary and musical-arts were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selections proxies, visual and circus-arts were related to elevated intersexual selection proxies, and sports were related to intrasexual selection proxies. In men, literary-arts and sports were related to elevated inter- and intrasexual selection proxies, musical-arts were related to intrasexual proxies, and circus-arts were related to intersexual proxies; visual-arts did not have predictors. Although present in both sexes, each sexual selection component has different relative importance in each sex. Artisticality functions to attract and maintain long/short-term partners, and to compete with mating rivals.

Language, Childhood, and Fire: How We Learned to Love Sharing Stories

Stories do not fossilize. Thus, exploring tales shared during prehistory, the longest part of human history inevitably becomes speculative. Nevertheless, various attempts have been made to find a more scientifically valid way into our deep human past of storytelling. Following the social brain hypothesis, we suggest including into the theory of human storytelling more fine-grained and evidence-based findings (from archaeology, the cognitive sciences, and evolutionary psychology) about the manifold exaptation and adaptation, genetic changes, and phenotypic plasticity in the deep human past, which all shaped the emergence of storytelling in hominins. We identify three preconditions for humans sharing stories: first, the long evolution of language in the different taxa as one of the preconditions of ostensive signaling; second, the pivotal role of childhood in the evolution of collaborative intentionality; and third, the role of fireside chats in the rise of elaborative (i.e., narrative) sharing of stories. We propose that humans, albeit perhaps no other hominins learned to understand others through sharing stories, not only as intentional agents, but also as mental ones.

Evolved Features of Artistic Motivation: Analyzing a Brazilian Database Spanning Three Decades

Darwin explored the evolutionary processes underlying artistic propensities in humans. He stressed the universality of the human mind by pointing to the shared pleasure which all populations take in dancing, engaging in music, acting, painting, tattooing, and self-decorating. Artistic motivation drives/reinforces individuals to engage in aesthetically oriented activities. As curiosity/play, artistic behavior is hypothesized as a functionally autonomous activity motivated intrinsically through an evolved, specific, and stable aesthetic motivational system. The author tested whether artistic motivation is rather intrinsically sourced, domain-specific, and temporally stable using a large decades-long real-life public Brazilian database of university applications. In Study I, the author analyzed reasons for career-choice responded to by 403,832 late-adolescent applicants (48.84% women), between 1987 and 1998. In Study II, the author analyzed another career-choice reason question responded to by 1,703,916 late-adolescent applicants (51.02% women), between 1987 and 2020. Music, Dance, Scenic Arts, Visual Arts, and Literary Studies, in combination, presented a higher percentage of individuals reporting intrinsic factors (e.g., personal taste/aptitude/fulfillment) and the lower proportion reporting extrinsic motives (e.g., the influence of media/teacher/family, salary, social contribution/prestige) than other career groups. If artistic motivation were a recent by-product of general curiosity or status-seeking, artistic and non-artistic careers would not differ. Overall, intrinsic motives were 2.60–6.35 times higher than extrinsic factors; among artistic applicants’ were 10.81–28.38 times higher, suggesting domain-specificity. Intrinsic motivation did not differ among artistic careers and remained stable throughout the periods. Converging results corroborated a specific, stable, and intrinsically sourced artistic motivation consistent with its possible evolutionary origins.

Aristotle's dream: Evolutionary and neural aspects of aesthetic communication in the arts

Art in general perception is something that transcends our notion of reality. In view of the earliest findings in Paleolithic sites, their abstract appearance and sometimes ceremonial context increased their status of a secret language. Even the first figurative cave paintings remained in a context of an encoded semantic whole. The highly symbolic value of art seemed invulnerable. It was just the claim for "mimesis" in Greek antiquity (Plato) that urged artists to "realistically" depict what can be seen-as to stay in track of eternal messages behind. This devaluated the artistic oeuvre to a purely imitating craft and had to overcome at once several inherent obstacles. First, that reality (the phenomenal world) is in general only a pale reflection of what lays behind (Platonic ideas) and second, that the human eye, unlike the human mind, cannot penetrate to more than ephemeral impressions. Moreover, it mixed up reality with what we are able to see (i.e. visual perception), thus supposing a pinpoint representation of the world by our senses. Aristotle was the first to qualify art as picturing more than we usually are meant to see, filling the gap between the sensual and the spiritual world. Aristotelian aesthetics includes concepts of reduction and selection of composition and emotion, thus a summarized view within any performance of poetics or painting. And it took centuries to close the gap between natural and aesthetic perception or art. Life sciences in the 20th century discovered the evolutionary basis of sensory perception as being highly biased and organized, concept as emotion-driven and thus, mentally equipped as well. This sets a new approach in our understanding of perception, art, and aesthetics as an ongoing communication in process on common bases. Art may cooperate or disagree, but never can cut the nexus with its perceptual prejudices and substrate.