The new Darwinism in the humanities: Part I: From Plato to Pinker

The Hudson Review Volume LVI, Number 2 (Summer 2003). Copyright © 2003 by The Hudson Review, Inc. HARO LD FROM M The New Darwinism in the Humanities Part II: Back to Nature, Again B etween th e year 1997, wh en How the Mind Works was p u blish ed , an d 2002, th e year of T he Blank Slate, Steven Pin ker’s treatm en t of art seem s to h ave u n d ergon e a certain am ou n t of refin em en t. In 1997, far from seein g th e arts as “adaptive,” in th e Dar win ian sen se of con ducive to fitn ess for survival and reproduction, Pinker described music and fiction as “cheesecake” for the mind that provided a sensual thrill like the feel of fat and sugar on the taste buds. With a view such as this, there wasn’t much difference between the psychological impact of Bach ’s St. Matthew Passion an d p orn ograp h y off th e Web. Pin ker m ad e th in gs even worse by ad d in g, “Com p ared with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtu ally u n ch an ged . Mu sic ap p ears to be a p u re p leasu re tech n ology, a cocktail of recreation al d ru gs th at we in gest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.” Whether the passage of time has caused him to reconsider or wh eth er h arsh critics su ch as Josep h Carroll1 h ave h ad a chastening effect, by the time of The Blank Slate, Pinker remarks, “Whether art is an adaptation or a by-product or a mixture of the two, it is deeply rooted in our mental faculties.” In other words, our response to art is a component of human nature and, even if he still considers it a pleasure-technology or a status-seeking feat, Pinker now seems to see it as more deeply connected with being human. “Organisms get pleasure from things that promoted the fitness of their ancestors,” he writes, and he mentions food, sex, 1 Joseph Carroll, “Steven Pin ker’s Ch eesecake for th e Min d,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 22, No. 2 ( 1998) . THEHUDSO N REVIEW children, and know-how as well as visual and auditory pleasure. Not qu ite “ad ap tive” bu t seriou s n on eth eless. If h e h as n ot already don e so, I figure it is on ly a matter of time before h e aban don s th e implausible view th at n obody would profoun dly miss music if it were simply to disappear. The number of totally music-insensitive people I have met during a lifetime would not use up the fingers of one hand. Carroll, an English professor at the University of Missouri who can plausibly be regarded as the leading thinker among Darwinian humanists, has recently produced a brief overview of developments in this new field. He writes: In th e p ast d ecad e or so, a sm all bu t rap id ly growin g ban d of literary scholars, theorists, and critics has been working to integrate literary study with Darwin ian social scien ce. Th ese sch olars can be identified as the members of a distinct school in the sense that they share a certain broad set of basic ideas. They all take “the adapted mind” as an organizing principle, and their work is thus continuous with th at of th e “ad ap tation ist p rogram ” in th e social scien ces. Ad ap tation ist th in kin g is grou n d ed in Dar win ian con cep tion s of human nature. Adaptationists believe that all organisms have evolved through an adaptive process of natural selection. . . . They argue that th e h u m an m in d an d th e h u m an m otivation al an d beh avioral systems display complex functional structure, and they make it their con cern to iden tify th e con stituen t elemen ts of an evolved h uman nature: a universal, species-typical array of behavioral and cognitive characteristics . . . genetically constrained . . . and mediated through . . . n eu rological an d h orm on al system s th at d irectly regu late p ercep tion , th ou gh t, an d feelin g. . . . Th ey are con vin ced th at th rough adaptation ist th in kin g th ey can m ore adequately un derstan d wh at literatu re is, wh at its fu n ction s are, an d h ow it works —what it represents, what causes people to produce it and consume it, and why it takes the forms it does.2 Carroll’s m agn u m op u s, Evolution and Literary T heory, 3 is a power ful polemic against the poststructuralist dogmas known as textualism and indeterminacy as well as their leading exponents, Derrida, Foucault an d th eir m an y disciples. Textualism is th e belief that what claims to be knowledge of a world is only knowledge of a text, including the “rhetoric” of science, and that the attempt to make contact with a reality outside of texts is doomed 2 “Ad ap tation ist Literar y Stu d y,” Style 36 ( 2003) . See also Carroll's website: http:/ / www.umsl.edu/ ~engjcarr. 3 Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory ( Columbia, Missouri, 1995) . HARO LD FROM M by on e’s in ability to produce an yth in g beyon d an oth er text or rh etorical strategy. In determin acy, wh ich follows from th e logic of textualism, refers to the supposed impossibility of arriving at truth when all you can hope for is to produce more conflicting or self-con tradictor y texts discon n ected from an y in depen den tly existing world. In such a universe of discourse, one opinion is as good as an oth er sin ce n on e h as foun dation s an y stron ger th an th e claims offered by each oth er’s rh etorical ch eerin g squads, thus leaving everything “indeterminate.” The anti-poststructuralist stan ce of Carroll’s book is a cou n terp art to Cosm id es an d Tooby’s assault on the Standard Social Science Model, which sees alm ost ever yth in g h u m an as a p rod u ct of cu ltu re, m in im ally grou n d ed in th e evolved p h ysicality of all existen t th in gs. In Carroll’s case, his repudiation of the poststructuralists addresses th eir sim ilar belief th at ever yth in g is u ltim ately m en tal, th e product of the self-enclosed human mind cut off from any constrain in g reality ( such as “h uman n ature” or a world) . Carroll reviews in eru d ite d etail all of th e m ajor p ost-stru ctu ralist th eorists an d, as far as I can judge, reduces th em to a pile of shreds. The positive core of Carroll’s book consists of his accounts of Darwinian adaptationism and his view that “the subject matter of literature is human experience,” which “is continuous with that of p h ysics an d ch em istr y” bu t wh ich h as, h owever, “cogn itive properties that emerge only at levels of organization higher than those with which physics and chemistry are concerned, and it is th ese h igh er levels th at are th e appropriate subject matter of literature.” This human world is not only the product of culture and rhetoric, the actions of which no Darwinian would deny, but it is principally driven by the three billion years involved in the m akin g of th e h u m an brain an d is th u s gen erated from th e grou n d u p rath er th an from th e h eaven s d own . “Con sid er,” Carroll writes elsewhere, “that the vast bulk of fiction consists in person al in teraction s con stituted primarily by combin ation s of motives involving mating strategies, family dynamics, and social strategies d evoted to seekin g statu s an d form in g coalition s.” Am on g h u m an s, th is basic beh avior is com p licated by th e p ecu liar h u m an p roclivity for creatin g elaborate cogn itive models of the world and our activity in that world. For Carroll, artistic rep resen tation is a n atu ral exten sion of an ad ap tive THEHUDSO N REVIEW h uman capacity for creatin g cogn itive models. In oth er words, “All form al literar y structures are prosth etic developm en ts of evolved cogn itive structures th at ser ve adaptive fun ction s.”4 In still another essay, Carroll examines in concrete detail the ways in wh ich sex, n urturin g, kin sh ip, an d a multitude of evolution ary ad ap tation s in stan tiate th em selves in n ovels by Jan e Au sten , Ch arlotte Bron të, Th om as H ard y, Arn old Ben n ett, an d Willa Cather.5 And in one of his most brilliant essays he sums things up like this: I would argue that the primary purpose of literature is to represent th e su bjective qu ality of exp erien ce. In op p osition to th e p ostKan tian n otion th at cogn itive an d lin gu istic categories are autonomous forms that constitute their own objects, I maintain, in compan y with Karl Popper, Kon rad Loren z, Tooby an d Cosmides, Joh n Bowlby, an d oth er evolution ar y th eorists, th at cogn itive an d lin gu istic categories h ave evolved in ad ap tive relation to th e en viron m en t. Th ey corresp on d to th e world n ot becau se th ey “con struct” th e world in accordan ce with th eir own auton omous, internal principles but because their internal principles have evolved as a means of comprehending an actual world that exists independently of the categories.6 Alth ough Dar win h ad a massive impact on a wide ran ge of disciplines shortly after the appearance of The Origin of Species in 1859, his influence waned during the first half of the twentieth century. The resurgence of Darwinism after World War II did not really begin to transform the social sciences and humanities until, p erh ap s, E. O . Wilson ’s exp losive con clu sion to Sociobiology ap p eared in 1975. ( Th at its fin al ch ap ter n ow seem s en tirely un surprisin g is a tribute to th e exten t of its n aturalization over th e course of twen ty-five years.) An d by th e begin n in g of th e nineties, the writings of Cosmides and Tooby produced their own 4 Joesph Carroll, “Wilson’s Consilience and Literary Study,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 23, No. 2 ( 1999) . This is an especially brilliant and densely substantiated review of E. O. Wilson’s book. 5 Joseph Carroll, “Human Universals and Literary Meaning,” Interdisciplinary Studies, Vol. 2 ( 2001) . Unfortunately, lack of space makes it impractical to include specimen readings of literary texts here. Forthcoming from Routledge, however, is a collection of Carrroll’s essays, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature. At presen t, man y of these essays may be viewed on Carroll’s website. See note 2. In his new edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Broadview Press, Ltd., Carroll provides an almost book-len gth Introduction to Darwin and his subsequent history. 6 Joseph Carroll, “Pluralism , Poststructuralism , an d Evolution ar y Th eor y,” Academic Questions 9, No. 3 ( Summer 1996) . HARO LD FROM M startling impact, which continues even today. What seems particularly to have generated the humanistic turn was the increasingly poisonous effect of poststructuralism in its brushing aside of the material foun dation s of existen ce alon g with a h uman n ature derived th erefrom an d its in sisten ce th at almost ever yth in g is “con stru cted ” by an au ton om ou s in tellect as ch an n eled by society. Carroll’s un com prom isin g polem ic again st textualism and indeterminacy in his 1995 book seems to have produced an extremely strong humanistic influence, though even before this landmark work Frederick Crews had made his own highly critical remarks in a brief preface to After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, a collection of oppositional essays.7 And even before h im , in 1992, Ellen Dissan ayake com bated th ese orth odoxies in Homo Aestheticus ( see below) . More such attacks against poststructuralism followed, most notably Robert Storey’s caustic dismissal of poststructuralist delusions of grandeur in the “Pugn acious Preface” to Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation,8 with an avowed indebtedness to Carroll. Two collection s of essays from th e past few years provide a sen se of th e way in wh ich th is movemen t h as been developin g. The first, published in 1999, Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts,9 was assembled by Brett Cooke an d Frederick Turn er. “The evidence is steadily mounting,” the editors remark in their in troduction , “th at if we wish to un derstan d our profoun d an d long-standing impulse to create and enjoy art we are well advised to attend to our evolutionary heritage. . . . Even if art is for art’s sake, it follows th at we seriou sly con sid er wh at that p u rp ose means in Darwinian terms. Not for nothing, we assume, as have many before us, is art found in every society, living or dead.” Thus the origins and rationale for the production and consumption of art are represented here by a wide, if uneven, range of essays, all of which have some connection with Darwinian adaptation and its physical and cultural consequences. Among them, the editors 7 After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory, ed. by Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling ( Evanston, IL, 1993) . 8 Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Evanston, IL, 1996) . 9 Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts, ed. by Brett Cooke and Frederick Turner ( Lexin gton , KY, 1999) . Cooke h as recen tly p u blish ed a book-len gth ap p lication of adaptationist biopoetics in Human Nature in Utopia: Zamyatin’s We (Evanston, IL, 2002) . THEHUDSO N REVIEW h ave collected in to a m in i-an th ology E. O . Wilson ’s p assim rem arks on art ( som e ver y m argin al) from several of h is pion eerin g books, an d Cooke h as written a commen tary upon th em . An oth er con tributor traces th e gen eration of aesth etic emotion to shamanistic ecstasy biochemically produced by toxic herbs or mechanically induced by drumming, chanting, fasting, pain, all sharing aspects of sexual arousal. Yet another defines art in its most primitive manifestations as “color and/ or form used by humans in order to modify an object, body, or message solely to attract attention . . . to make objects more noticeable.” Cooke h im self, a sch olar in Ru ssian literatu re, p rovid es on e of th e collection ’s few con crete readin gs of a literary work in adaptation ist term s, exam in in g h ow th e treatm en t of wom en as property in Pushkin’s “The Snowstorm” reflects epigenetic ( i.e., th e superimposition of culture upon gen es) pattern s of social behavior. Although these patterns are transmitted by society, the actors in volved h ave little if an y awaren ess of th e evolution ary mechanisms that are expressed by their society’s ( and their own) enactment of conventions. For example, Cooke gives us the generally accepted Darwinian description of th e radically differen t sexual beh avior of males and females in most cultures: With gendered species, the great differential between the reprod u ctive in vestm en t m ad e by th e two sexes in th eir offsp rin g in fluen ces differen ces in th eir beh avior. Th e female gen erally h as m u ch less rep rod u ctive p oten tial th an th e m ale, an d sh e in vests sign ifican tly m ore tim e an d en ergy in each offsp rin g. Th e m ale usually makes little in vestmen t an d, th eoretically, h as a vast reproductive potential. It then follows that the female will carefully select her mate, so as to optimize her limited reproduction. Males of most species may . . . try to be as promiscuous as possible so as to h ave more offsprin g. Some of th ese differin g strategies are expressed in h u m an beh avior, su ch as th e com m on age d ifferen tial between husbands and wives. Man y of th e un derlyin g drives beh in d reproduction an d n urturing may seem to be “common sense” or “logical,” but evolutionists find their pervasiveness across cultures to be more than just a funny coincidence. Of course, it is possible for people “to buck the often obsolete trends of biological adaptation, but they u su ally will p ay an em otion al p rice for d oin g so,” given th e lingering power of atavisms. Cooke applies these and other forces HARO LD FROM M th at operated durin g th e lon g Pleistocen e period in wh ich we were formed to account for the essential twists and turns of the marital action in Pushkin’s story—and he is pretty convincing. Thus far, however, the number of aesthetic evaluations of works of art from a Darwinian perspective has been small, and it is hard to say how fruitful such an approach will turn out to be. There is always th e d an ger of forcin g a variety of artifacts th rou gh a critical grin der th at makes th em all come out lookin g like th e same dust. Though the range of Freudian and Marxian criticism h as been great, on ce certain basic formulae h ad been applied again and again, there was an increasing tedium and self-parody involved, eliding the most distinctive aspects of art works, while distortin g th eir ch aracter. So far, Dar win ian ap p roach es h ave ten ded to be m ore h istorical, an th ropological, psych ological, biological, sociological than aesthetic, so Darwinian art criticism is still in its earliest phase. Of course it is not possible to reduce complex art works to total con formity with an y scien tific parad igm , an d at least on e of th is volu m e’s con tribu tors, Nan cy Easterlin, has established a role as an adversarial Darwinian who tries to d em on strate ways in wh ich cu ltu re an d art works go against the Pleistocene drives that to some degree have misfitted us for con temporary life ( as Pin ker in sisted in The Blank Slate, although he regarded this going-against as more deleterious and frustratin g th an Easterlin does) . Th us sh e takes th e con trarian position that “works that are considered valuable and timeless are not those in which normative cognitive patterns are most closely reproduced.” Un like Pin ker, sh e is n ot ready to write off postmodern literary tech n iques an d, to some degree, sees th em as p layin g th em selves off again st th e ad ap tation ist n orm s th at generate our unwitting everyday predilections. Th e secon d collection of Dar win ian essays ( an d th ere are a number of others) , edited by Easterlin herself, was a special issue of Philosophy and Literature, a sym p osiu m on evolu tion an d literature.10 In it, Mich elle Sugiyama writes on on e of th e most recurrin g th em es in Dar win ian literar y study, th e fun ction of narrative: “An understanding of why and how humans create and consume narrative requires an understanding of ( 1) features of ancestral environments and ( 2) features of the mind that made th e em ergen ce of th is p h en om en on p ossible.” Tracin g th e 10 Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2 ( October 2001) . THEHUDSO N REVIEW origins of narrative far back into human prehistory, she reports on the view of anthropologists and psychologists that ritual, art, an d n arrative “may be con ceptualized as mean s of exch an gin g in formation relevan t to th e pursuit of fitn ess in local h abitats [ durin g th e Pleistocen e] .” Moreover, th e same th emes pervade n arratives worldwide, “social relation s ( e.g., kin sh ip, marriage, sex, social status, morality, in terperson al con flict, deception ) , animal behavior and characteristics, plants, geography, weather, an d th e cosmos.” An d comin g much closer to h ome th an th e Pleistocene, many of these themes were already traced by Joseph Carroll in his examination of Victorian novels mentioned above. In this collection, however, Carroll ( who appears in both) intercon n ects literature n ot on ly with evolution but with ecology as well, in “The Ecology of Victorian Fiction.” No organism can be understood except in its interactive relations with its total environment. An organism is never an isolated thing. By definition and in brute reality the world that an organism inhabits is part of th at organ ism. Th e organ ism carries th at world embedded an d m ou ld ed [ sic] in to ever y in m ost fold of its p h ysiology, its anatomy, and its psyche. . . . The felt quality of experience within a natural world is one of those fundamental conditions of experience. It sh ou ld also be on e of th e fu n d am en tal categories of literar y analysis. This joint consideration of Darwinian adaptationism and ecology has, in fact, produced the discipline of behavioral ecology. One can see how its insights might have great bearin g on th e creation and interpretation of literary works, given the role of place not only in nature-writing but in poetry and fiction as well. Alth ou gh a Dar win ism n ewly in fu sed with in sigh ts from cognitive neurosciences is spreading rapidly, humanist academia so far remain s a bastion of doctrin aire resistan ce, n ow th at th e formerly youn g poststructuralists are in con trol of En glish an d h istory departmen ts ( n ot to men tion th e social scien ces) . Th e political correctness that forms the bedrock of their fundamentalism depen ds for its auth ority on th e belief th at people are mostly blan k slates almost en tirely flesh ed out by culture. Th is belief implies that just about anything can be changed if culture so dictates. And it has been doing a lot of dictating—to a human nature that is not always very obliging. The Darwinians are seen by this opposing camp as conservatives, since their belief that the core of ou r bein g h as been given rath er th an ch osen seem s HARO LD FROM M restrictive an d lim itin g, even th ou gh th is h u m an n atu re is expressible in infinite ways that result in individuals who are far from identical. Culture, of course, retains great force no matter what ontology is assumed as operative: any woman living in the year 1800 in En glan d wh o h appen ed “by n ature” to be ath letic had little chance of satisfying athletic yearnings in a culture that forced women in to a domesticity un derwritten by God. Such a woman living then would have been prime material for psychiatry, a misfit neurotic who at that time could only turn to priests wh o rein forced th e n eu rosis. Tod ay, su ch a wom an wou ld be regarded as a model of health and would be welcomed into the world of women’s sports, no psychiatrist needed. This phenomenal ( in the philosophic sense) expression of the genes as culture is now being elaborated by yet another Darwin-related discipline, th at of cultural biology, wh ose empirical in vestigation s of brain growth reveal that both individual choices and cultural practices alter th e actual ph ysical compon en ts of h omin id brain s, wh ich rem ain op en to d evelop m en t th rou gh ou t a lifetim e ( bu t can never be cut loose from “human nature”) .11 It is only a matter of time before even humanist academia will be forced to admit that the doctrinaire truth of a truth-doubting poststructuralism is on its last legs. I have saved Ellen Dissanayake for last because her work is the most difficult to characterize. Just before Lingua Franca folded at th e en d of 2001, Caleb Crain wrote a lon g accoun t of h er th at began with the following summary paragraph: Suppose there were a person who saw, before almost anyone else, that the most important concept in modern biology could be applied to the arts. Suppose, however, that this person studied biology only as an un dergraduate, n ever took a class in an th ropology, an d n ever received a Ph.D. Suppose, in fact, that she were a homemaker for a dozen years and then spent fifteen years in the Third World, where it was difficult for her to gain access to the research libraries and social n etworks th at most professors take for gran ted. Neverth eless, over the past two decades—with no more institutional support than a few years of adjun ct teach in g, several gran ts, an d a couple of visitin g p rofessorsh ip s—sh e h as m an aged to p u blish th ree books settin g forth her ideas. And today a new field of study has sprung up where she pioneered. Suppose, in addition, that some people think a schol11 For an accoun t of cultural biology see Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are, by Steven R. Quartz an d Terren ce J. Sejnowski ( New York, 2002) . THEHUDSO N REVIEW arly framework based on her insights will displace much of current aesthetic theory—that future generations will understand literature and the arts as she does, thereby reconciling the humanities to the science of human nature.12 Th is h eterogen eous, offbeat life is deeply relevan t to Dissan ayake’s in d ep en d en t th in kin g an d research , sin ce sh e falls in n eith er with th e orth odoxies of academic departmen ts n or th e preferred th emes of th e cogn itive scien ces, startin g out with a broader experien ce of felt life, of th e affect of beh avior, th an most th eorists wh ose in formation depen ds largely on books. A Darwinian adaptationist, she connects also with human ethology, sociobiology, evolution ary psych ology, psych olin guistics, n euroscience, ethnomusicology, biopoetics, developmental psychology, and much else, and her chief interest, aesthetics, takes account of a wid er ran ge of h u m an beh avior th an th e trad ition al ap proaches. A passage from h er 1992 book, Homo Aestheticus, could well serve as starting point in an account of her work. Writing about the “scriptocentric” bias of modern life, she remarks: It seems more accurate to view thought and experience as occurring beh in d or ben eath spoken words, as bein g someth in g th at sayin g helps to adumbrate and communicate and that writing ( or rewriting) falsifies to th e exten t th at it turn s th e n atural products of men tation —fluid, layered, den se, episodic, too deep an d rich for words —in to som eth in g u n n atu rally h ard -ed ged , lin ear, p recise, an d refin ed . We “th in k” like logician s p rim arily on ( an d becau se of) paper. If we assume that thought and experience are made wholly of lan guage it is on ly because, as twen tieth -cen tury h yperliterates, we read and write reality more than we live it. If writin g h as been aroun d for on ly 6000 years, an d if people per form such complex activities as driving cars and playing the piano with minimal conceptualizing or attention, there’s a great deal of cognition going on before the mind gets around to the discursive orderlin ess of speech , let alon e writin g. O r to put it more extremely, there’s another life going on beneath the life we think we are living. And perhaps that other life is the really real one even if, or because, it can’t be expressed in words. 12 Lingua Franca, October 2001. Dissanayake’s books are: What Is Art For? ( Seattle, 1988) and subsequent paperbacks; Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why ( New York, 1982) , p ap erback ed ition ( Seattle, 1995, 1996) ; Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began ( Seattle, 2000) . HARO LD FROM M Expression not in words is the starting point of Dissanayake’s biological conception of where art comes from. In the punningly titled “Aesth etic In cun abula,” both th e cradle of aesth etics an d th e cradle of an in fan t ( see n ote 10) , Dissan ayake presen ts h er foundational theme of baby talk as the primordial expression of the arts ( developed further in a series of articles and in her most recent book, Art and Intimacy) . “Babies in every culture show the same or similar cogn itive abilities an d preferen ces.” Th e in teractive baby talk in the mother-child relationship may use words, which of course the infant cannot understand at all, but it is not the words as meanings that produce the interaction; rather it is the words delivered as a form of music/ poetry/ dance per formance, a primal aesthetic experience for both mother and baby, a d u et, as Dissan ayake calls it, fosterin g em otion al con n ection . Examining in detail a transcription of a mother’s baby talk to her infant, Dissanayake reveals that beyond the infant’s inborn capacity for face recogn ition , preferen ce for h uman s, respon siven ess to colors and sounds, and the adult’s unpremeditated musicality of utterance to the baby, the foundations of the basic ingredients of art works are being established: I suggest that what artists do in all media can be summarized as d eliberately p er form in g th e op eration s th at occu r in stin ctively d u rin g a ritu alized beh avior: th ey sim p lify or form alize, rep eat ( sometimes with variation) , exaggerate, and elaborate in both space and time for the purpose of attracting attention and provoking and man ipulatin g emotion al respon se. “Artification ,” like ritualization , attracts atten tion an d sh ap es an d m an ip u lates em otion . Ju st as in fan ts recogn ize, atten d to, an d resp on d to regu larization an d simplification , repetition , exaggeration , an d elaboration in vocalvisual-gestural modalities when interacting with adults, so do adults attend to and respond to these features as presented to them aurally, visually, and kinaesthetically in the various arts. What Dissanayake calls “artification” here, she elsewhere characterizes as “making special.” And what she consistently means by “art” is rarely elite h igh art of th e West so m u ch as a typ e of behavior. “By calling art a behavior, one also suggests that in the evolu tion of th e sp ecies, art-in clin ed in d ivid u als, th ose wh o possessed this behavior, survived better than those who did not.”13 Her sense of art as “making special” was heightened by years in 13 Homo Aestheticus. ( See note 12.) THEHUDSO N REVIEW cou n tries su ch as Sri Lan ka an d Pap u a New Gu in ea wh ere customs and rituals were not as heavily overlaid by the Industrial Revolution ’s tran sformation s of con temporary life in th e West. Beyon d an cien t cave drawin gs, orn amen tation s on ston e tools and handles, and the production of artifacts more beautiful than utility demanded, she calls to our attention that “each of the arts can be viewed as ord in ar y beh avior m ad e sp ecial ( or extraordinary) .” This is easy to see in dance, poetry, and song, which share the salient features of play and ritual, forms of exaggerated stylization of ordin ary beh avior. To illustrate on e in stan ce, “In son g, th e p rosod ic ( in ton ation al an d em otion al) asp ects of everyday language—the ups and downs of pitch, pauses and rests, stresses or accen ts, crescen dos an d dimin uen dos of dyn amics, acceleran dos an d rallen tan dos of tempo—are exaggerated . . . patterned, repeated, varied, and so forth—made special.”14 There is more here than a rapid survey can convey, but the force of her argumen t an d th e particularity of h er eviden ce grow on you as you read a book like Homo Aestheticus. “Back to Nature, Again ” is, of course, sh eer iron y. You can ’t return to something you can’t leave. Siamese twins, although they may not be an ideally viable life form, are as “natural” as you and I, produced by the same “laws” of chemistry, biology, and physics. There aren’t any others. All of “us” who survive are “mutations” who have been turned into members of a species because of the serendipity of “our” adaptability. I envision a cartoon in which a grou p of ch im p s, ou r closest cou sin s, beh old th e first H om o sapiens and exclaim, “WOW! Like weird, man!” The view that we are not, in some respect, “weird” but that everything else is—as th ey all strive to evolve in to paragon s like us—is simply h uman arrogan ce an d blin dn ess. All life forms are th e most n atural of freaks. And our own particular freakishness is the raw material of the arts and humanities. Because they are so aware of all this, the Dar win ian s strike m e as m ore “religiou s” th an con ven tion al religion s, lackin g th e n arcissism an d h ubris th at can for a mom en t su p p ose th at fifteen billion years of th e u n iverse an d quin tillion s of creatures born an d dead—million s at th is ver y moment crawling all over my exterior and interior, without whom I wouldn’t even exist—were produced in order to immortalize my 14 “‘Making Special’—An Undescribed Human Universal and the Core of a Behavior of Art,” in Biopoetics. ( See note 9.) HARO LD FROM M “transcendent” little soul. ( Does the universe really need my soul around forever? Do I need it?) Everything is “nature,” produced from the finite materials of our planet and shaped by an aimless h istor y with n o favorites. Cu ltu re is ju st n atu re in artfu l an d elaborate drag. In remin din g us of our origin s, in con n ectin g ourselves and our arts to our biological development instead of to the heavens, the Darwinians, for me at an y rate, are en gaged in a long overdue hubris-crunching mission of natural piety.