Geoffrey Miller, “The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature”

Satin Bowerbird

If you could interview a male Satin Bowerbird for Artforum magazine, he might say something like «I find this implacable urge for self-expression, for playing with color and form for their own sake, quite inexplicable. I cannot remember when I first developed this raging thirst to present richly saturated color-fields within a monumental yet minimalist stage-set, but I feel connected to something beyond myself when I indulge these passions. When I see a beautiful orchid high in a tree, I simply must have it for my own. When I see a single shell out of place in my creation, I must put it right. Birds-of-paradise may grow lovely feathers, but there is no aesthetic mind at work there, only a body’s brute instinct. It is a happy coincidence that females sometimes come to my gallery openings and appreciate my work, but it would be an insult to suggest that I create in order to procreate. We live in a post-Freudian, post-modernist era in which crude sexual meta-narratives are no longer credible as explanations of our artistic impulses».

Fortunately, bowerbirds cannot talk, so we are free to use sexual selection to explain their work, without them begging to differ. With human artists things are rather different. They usually view their drive to artistic self-expression not as something that demands an evolutionary explanation, but as an alternative to any such explanation. They resist a «biologically reductionist» view of art. Or they buy into a simplistic Freudian view of art as sublimated sexuality, as when Picasso repeated Renoir’s quip that he painted with his penis. My sexual choice theory, however, is neither biologically nor psychologically reductionist. It views our aesthetic preferences and artistic abilities as complex psychological adaptations in their own right, not as side-effects of a sex drive. Bowerbirds have evolved instincts to construct bowers that are distinct from the instinct to copulate once a female approves of the bower. We humans have evolved instincts to create ornaments and works of art that are distinct from the sexual instincts behind copulatory courtship. Yet both types of instinct may have evolved through sexual selection.