A rigorous evolutionary account would … need to explain how our artistic faculties developed: which neurological adaptations came first, and how were they produced by a heritable genetic variation? Why did we evolve the capacities for fiction, narrative, and rhyme that we now possess, rather than some other methods of categorization and communication that could have solved the same adaptive problems? Above all, how did some genetic or neurological difference cause the categorical leap from the mere use of signs to the human use of symbols, and why was this mutation favored in the evolutionary struggle for existence? The book does not ask these questions, perhaps because the methodology of this kind of science is ill-suited to addressing them.
Perhaps mythopoesis allows us to grasp a feature of reality that eludes logic, mathematics, and science, and that is every bit as important, perhaps even more important, than what they reveal to us.
Our ability to tell stories did directly benefit our ancestors, however, by increasing their memory capacities, by developing their abilities for imaginative speculation, by aiding decision-making, and by increasing a tribe’s social cohesion through forcing them to attend to the lives of others. And the competition for an audience, Boyd suggests, led storytellers to alter their tales to increase their emotional impact. It is this competition for the attention of others that led to the birth of fictional narratives.
How do we know that memory is not simply capacious on its own, and that a capacity for imaginative speculation is not simply a characteristic of being human? As for taking interest in the lives of others, that certainly seems to come naturally. You can't increase the capacity of something, or develop an ability, that does not exist in the first place. You can use your hand to do certain things because those are the kinds of things that can be done by hand. Do enough of them often enough and your hand becomes especially skillful at doing them. But the nature of the hand would seem to be a given, and came first.
In Boyd’s view, if something is a human universal, it “needs a biocultural explanation,” one that involves our evolutionary history and biology. Yet he glosses over two human universals that would seem to be inextricably intertwined with the origins of art and fiction: the birth of self-awareness and of the symbolic use of signs (exemplified by but not limited to language). Until these and other changes necessary for art can be explained in strictly biological terms, all evolutionary efforts to account for the development of the higher-level processes of the brain — language, consciousness, and moral values — will remain themselves simply stories.
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