“Aesthetic Primitives”: Fundamental Biological Elements of a Naturalistic Aesthetics

Aesthetics, like other philosophical subjects, has historically made use of «top down» (mentalistic, analytic, and linguistic) methods. Recent discoveries in genetics, evolutionary psychology, paleoarchaeology, and neuroscience call for a new «naturalistic» or «bottom up» perspective. Combining these fields with behavioral biology and ethnoarts studies, I offer seven premises that underlie a new understanding of evolved predispositions of the brain/mind that all artists use to attract attention, sustain interest, and create, mold, and shape emotion. I describe aesthetic «primitives» in somatic and behavioral (as well as psychosensory) modalities, suggesting that these were present in early sapiens and continue to influence human art making and aesthetic response today. Keywords: Aesthetic Mind; Neuroaesthetics, evolutionary aesthetics, cognitive aesthetics, evolution of art

Hipoteza artyfikacji i jej znaczenie dla kognitywizmu, neuroestetyki i estetyki ewolucyjnej

The artification hypothesis presented in this paper is based on the assumption that small children have the ability not ju st to persuade other to give them physical safety but also to initiate social bonds and emotional interaction. Thus the interactions between the child and mother are adaptive in their character and as such they were not considered by evolutionary psychologists. The other factor of artification is the ritualization of those interactions. The article delivers many examples of proto aesthetic actions and artifications stressing out also the religious aspect of the phenomenon. The author concludes with the notion that artification and aesthetic agency are adaptive as such and they were just as important in the human evolution as nonverbal information transmission

Predator traits determine food-web architecture across ecosystems

Predator–prey interactions in natural ecosystems generate complex food webs that have a simple universal body-size architecture where predators are systematically larger than their prey. Food-web theory shows that the highest predator–prey body-mass ratios found in natural food webs may be especially important because they create weak interactions with slow dynamics that stabilize communities against perturbations and maintain ecosystem functioning. Identifying these vital interactions in real communities typically requires arduous identification of interactions in complex food webs. Here, we overcome this obstacle by developing predator-trait models to predict average body-mass ratios based on a database comprising 290 food webs from freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecosystems across all continents. We analysed how species traits constrain body-size architecture by changing the slope of the predator–prey body-mass scaling. Across ecosystems, we found high body-mass ratios for predator groups with specific trait combinations including (1) small vertebrates and (2) large swimming or flying predators. Including the metabolic and movement types of predators increased the accuracy of predicting which species are engaged in high body-mass ratio interactions. We demonstrate that species traits explain striking patterns in the body-size architecture of natural food webs that underpin the stability and functioning of ecosystems, paving the way for community-level management of the most complex natural ecosystems

Creativity, art, and psychoanalysis

Abstract: Four important themes in self psychology as developed by Heinz Kohut are remarkably congruent with current theoretical constructs in the field of evolutionary (Darwinian) psychology: (1) the concept of narcissism; (2) the claim for the innate human capacity for empathy; (3) the recognition of the importance of group cohesion and (4) the belief that individual psychological distress is produced by a changed environment rather than a dysfunctional self. By recasting Kohut's themes in a Darwinian framework and interpreting them with personal views of the phylogenetic origin and nature of the arts As one who writes about the arts from the Darwinian framework of evolutionary psychology, I have been intrigued to discover interesting and possibly fruitful correspondences between my ideas and selfobject theory as articulated by Heinz Kohut and others who, like him, have antecedents in the British psychological tradition called object relations. In Art and Intimacy (Dissanayake, 2000), I described exquisite inborn capacities of infants as young as eight weeks of age that predispose them to social and emotional interaction with others, capacities that, as a package, have been termed by psychologists "intersubjectivity" or "attunement." I propose that these sensitivities can be viewed as the biological fons et origo of the selfobject relationship as elucidated by Kohut and his followers, of John Bowlby's earlier notion of attachment, and-in a Darwinian or evolutionary sense-of later experiences of the arts. In this paper I suggest that Kohut's concept of narcissism, his claims for the innate human capacity for empathy, his recognition of the importance of group cohesion, and his belief that individual psychological distress is produced by a changed environment (not a dysfunctional self) all gain in plausibility and relevance when supported with related concepts from Darwinian-what is today called evolutionary-psychology. What the evolutionary view adds to self psychology is to make clear the central importance of the arts (that is, of art experience) to the developing selfobject relationship, as well as to the evolution of the human species. Narcissism and Self-Interest Imply Intersubjectivity Darwin . . . perceives that human beings are social animals and that their whole motivational and emotional organization is geared toward interdependent interaction with other humans (J. Carroll, 2003:32-33). Kohut (1972:127) admitted that narcissism, an important concept in self psychology, has a pejorative connotation both popularly, where it suggests childish vanity, and in psychology derived from Freud, where it is considered a product of regression or defense. In contrast

Roots and Route of the Artification Hypothesis

Over four decades, my ideas about the arts in human evolution have themselves evolved, from an original notion of art as a human behaviour of “making special” to a full-fledged hypothesis of artification. A summary of the gradual developmental path (or route) of the hypothesis, based on ethological principles and concepts, is given, and an argument presented in which artification is described as an exaptation whose roots lie in adaptive features of ancestral mother–infant interaction that contributed to infant survival and maternal reproductive success. I show how the interaction displays features of a ritualised behavior whose operations (formalization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration) can be regarded as characteristic elements of human ritual ceremonies as well as of art (including song, dance, performance, literary language, altered surroundings, and other examples of making ordinary sounds, movement, language, environments, objects, and bodies extraordinary). Participation in these behaviours in ritual practices served adaptive ends in early Homo by coordinating brain and body states, and thereby emotionally bonding members of a group in common cause as well as reducing existential anxiety in individuals. A final section situates artification within contemporary philosophical and popular ideas of art, claiming that artifying is not a synonym for or definition of art but foundational to any evolutionary discussion of artistic/aesthetic behaviour

If music is the food of love, what about survival and reproductive success?

  This article departs from many discussions of the origin, evolution, and adaptive function(s) of music by treating music not as perceptual qualities (pitch, timbre, meter), formal elements (prosody, melody, harmony, rhythm), performed activity (singing, drumming), or genre (lullaby, song, dance). Rather, music is conceptualized as a behavioral and motivational capacity: what is done to sounds and pulses when they are "musified" made into music and why. For this new view, I employ the ethological notion of ritualization, wherein ordinary communicative behaviors (e.g., sounds, movements) are altered through formalization, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration, thereby attracting attention and arousing and shaping emotion. The universal sensitivity of infants as young as 8 weeks to such alterations of (or operations on) voice, facial expression, and body movements, when these are presented to them by adults in intimate dyadic interactions within a shared temporal framework, suggests an evolved, adaptive capacity that enabled and reinforced emotional bonding. Such proto-aesthetic (proto-musical) operations existed as a reservoir from which individual cultures could draw when inventing art-saturated ritual ceremonies that united groups temporally and emotionally as they did mother-infant pairs. Music in its origins and evolution is assumed to be multimodal (visual and kinesic, as well as aural) and a social not solitary activity. An appendix describes important structural and functional resemblances between music, mother-infant interaction, ceremonial ritual, and adult courtship and lovemaking (as differentiated from copulation). These resemblances suggest not only an evolutionary relationship among these behaviors but argue for the existence of an evolved amodal neural propensity in the human species to respond cognitively and emotionally to dynamic temporal patterns produced by other humans in contexts of affiliation.