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British Journal of Aesthetics Vol. 50 | Number 4 | October 2010 | pp. 333341 DOI:10.1093/aesthj/ayp071 British Society of Aesthetics 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics.

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Why Art Is not a SpandrelStephen Davies

I one views humans creation and appreciation o art as grounded in our biological nature, it might

be tempting to see art as a spandrel, as an adventitious by-product o some adaptation without

adaptive signifcance in itsel. Such a position connects art to our evolved human nature yet

apparently avoids the demands o demonstrating how art behaviours enhanced the ftness o our

ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic. In this paper I explore two arguments that count against the view

that art is a spandrel. The frst rejects the idea that the spandrel option is somehow less demanding

or controversial than the alternative view according to which art is an adaptation. The second argues

that i art behaviours came to us as spandrels, they would not remain so; their occurrence in the

usual manner would become normative because they would come to provide honest signals o

ftness.

Suppose one thinks that the creation and appreciation o art is pan-cultural, indeed, thatsuch behaviours are almost universal in humans and emerge spontaneously as part o ournormal development. And suppose one believes, in addition, that this was so rom deepinto our prehistory, and not the result o datable acts o invention, the products and practiceso which were taken up and disseminated. Admittedly, such ideas presuppose a conceptiono art more modest than that invoked under the rubric o Fine Art, but this seems rea-sonable i we see the latter as an lite, arcane institutionalization arising out o but notdisplacing its more quotidian predecessor. Given all this, one will be inclined to viewhumans creation and appreciation o art as grounded in our biological nature, and therebyas shaped by natural selection. According to the standard view, there are then two mainpossibilities: (i) art behaviours are adaptations, which is to say they emerged as transmis-sible1 capacities that increased the ecological tness o those who displayed them, so thattheir possessors parented more extensive and ar-reaching lineages; or (ii) art behaviours

1 In evolutionary theory, transmissible usually equates to genetically heritable. Alternative views are possible.

Meme theory allows or cultural transmissionL see S. Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxord: OUP, 1999).

Developmental systems theory suggests that what matters or evolution is the availablility o relevant resources toeach generation, not whether those resources are biological or cultural in origin; see Paul Griths and Russell

Gray, Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation,Journal o Philosophy, 91 (1994), pp. 277304.

Multilevel selection theory argues that the units o selection can be groups rather than individuals, which again

gives a signicant role to social transmission in evolution: see Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes

Alone: How Culture Transormed Human Evolution (Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 2005) and David Sloan

Wilson, Mark Van Vugt, and Rick OGorman, Multilevel Selection Theory and Major Evolutionary Transitions:

Implications or Psychological Science, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17 (2008), pp. 69. I do not

consider the debate between such theories here.


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334 | stephen davies

are spandrels, that is, adventitious by-products o adaptations, without adaptive signi-cance in themselves.2

In this paper, I consider the second option. At rst glance it is an attractive hypothesis,in that it connects art to our evolved human nature yet apparently avoids the demands odemonstrating how art behaviours enhanced the tness o our ancestors in the Upper

Palaeolithic. The point is not merely that the art-as-spandrel position comes cheap, becauseit requires less argument. It is that arguments in avour o the alternative art-as-adaptationhypothesis are inevitably controversial and inconclusive. In considering which currenteatures o human behaviour are outcomes o prehistoric adaptations, evolutionary psy-chologists speculate about challenges aced by our prehistoric ancestors and about howthese could have been answered by the emergence o such behaviours. It is alleged that thissort o reverse engineering results in the production o Just So stories.3

Despite the initial attractiveness o the art-as-spandrel approach, in this paper I questionits plausibility. Beore I get to that, I indicate how the notion o spandrels is applied in thediscussion o biological evolution and I mention some o the theorists who claim that art,

or some particular art orm, is an example o a spandrel.

I

The term spandrel reers to an architectural eature, namely the tapering triangularspaces ormed by the intersection o two rounded arches at right angles. They are aninstance o an architectural by-product (one among many) that need have no unctional

2 A third possibility is that art behaviours are vestiges, that is, ormer adaptations that have lost their original adaptive

unction. Both G. W. F. Hegel and Arthur C. Danto have produced accounts o art according to which contemporaryart is vestige-like. They suggest that art had an historical unction that it has now discharged, so that it persists in a

post-historical phase. Nearer to the view that art behaviours are vestiges let via biological evolutionin other words,

that they hang on (and perhaps wither), despite no longer serving their original, adaptive unctionis the position o

Ellen Dissanayake in What Is Art For? (Seattle: University o Washington Press, 1988). She maintains that post-eighteenth-

century Fine Art no longer builds community, which is arts evolutionary purpose on her view. In any case, all these

writers have as their target Western Fine Art. Provided we take the broad view o art that I recommended earlier, one

including domestic, decorative, olk, and popular art, it is apparent that art is created, valued, and enjoyed with a

vigour that suggests it has not lost the evolutionary signicance we are supposing it to have had or our ancestors.

3 S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, in The Spandrels o San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique o the

Adaptationist Programme, Proceedings o the Royal Society o London, B205 (1979), pp. 581598, criticised the story

telling o adaptationists. H. D. Schlinger in How the Human Got its Spots: A Critical Analysis o the Just So Storieso Evolutionary Psychology, Skeptic, 4 (1996), pp. 6876, made the comparison with Rudyard Kiplings stories o

how animals acquired their distinctive characteristics. This style o objection is widely regarded as the most damning

to the explanations oered by evolutionary psychologists. Reverse engineering can be deended as an acceptable

orm o abductive reasoning, however: see Harmon R. Holcomb III, Just So Stories and Inerence to the Best

Explanation in Evolutionary Psychology, Minds and Machines, 6 (1996), pp. 525540. And evolutionary psychologists

sometimes also employ other methods to validate their hypotheses, such as study o primates, o children, and o

present-day hunter-gatherers, and research on neural structures and their history (including research on autism and

selective brain decits).


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Why art is not a spandrel | 335

signicance on its own.4 In human terms, the best equivalent probably is the armpit, astructure inevitably ormed where an articulable member joins the bodys trunk. Otherexamples sometimes oered are the navel and male nipples. Applications o the term arenot conned only to structural eatures, however. Both the redness o blood and the white-ness o bone are regarded as spandrels; in these cases they are non-unctional by-products

o the chemical constitutions respectively o blood and bone. And the notion can beextended to reer to aspects o culture and society. According to Stephen Jay Gould, withonly 10,000 years o history behind them, both writing and reading are spandrels. Indeed,he regards human culture and technology generally as by-products o the oversized human

brain, which evolved to address now unknown problems aced by our ancestors.5

Several theorists have suggested that art is a spandrel.6 In The Prehistory o the Mind,Steven Mithen discussed the way human general intelligence was spectacularly enhanced

by a breaking down o the modularized isolation o mental domains specializing in naturalhistory, social relations, technology, and language.7 His discussion suggests that the appear-ance at the most general level o art, religion, and science some 30,000 years ago was a

by-product o these cognitive developments. Others make the claim not about art in gen-eral but about particular art orms. Alred Russel Wallace, in Darwinism, regarded musicand dance as by-products o our brain power and excessive vitality.8 According to StevenPinker: [o the arts] music . . . shows the clearest signs o not being [an adaptation]. Hecoins a striking metaphor: I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite con-ection crated to tickle the sensitive spots o at least six o our mental aculties, these

being language (when the music has lyrics), auditory scene analysis, emotional calls,habitat selection (as expressed in musical tone painting), motor control (when musicleads to dancing), and something else that makes the whole more than the sum o theparts.9 In other words, senses and capacities evolved or non-musical purposes are

4 The architectural term spandrel was rst applied to biological eatures by Gould and Lewontin in The Spandrels o

San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm. They characterized spandrels as necessaryby-products o the structures on

which they are based, but this aspect o the view has been challenged: or example, see Daniel C. Dennett, Darwins

Dangerous Idea (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 272273 and Alasdair I. Houston, San Marco and

Evolutionary Biology, Biology and Philosophy, 24 (2009), pp. 215230.

5 S. J. Gould, Evolution: The Pleasures o Pluralism, New York Review o Books, 44 (26 June 1997), see paragraphs

4243; see also The Exaptive Excellence o Spandrels as a Term and Prototype, Proceedings o the National Academy o

Science USA, 94 (1997), pp. 1075010755.

6 For some recent examples, see Eckart Voland, Aesthetic Preerences in the World o ArtiactsAdaptations or the

Evaluation o Honest Signals? in E. Voland and K. Grammer (eds), Evolutionary Aesthetics (Berlin: Springer Verlag,2003), pp. 239260; Merlin Donald, Art and Cognitive Evolution, in M. Turner (ed.), The Artul Mind: Science and

the Riddle o Human Creativity(Oxord: OUP, 2006), pp. 320; Terrence Deacon, The Aesthetic Faculty, in Turner,

Artul Mind, pp. 2153; Semir Zeki, The Neurology o Ambiguity, in Turner,Artul Mind, pp. 243270.

7 S. Mithen, The Prehistory o the Mind: A Search or the Origins o Art, Religion, and Science (London: Thames & Hudson,

1996).

8 A. R. Wallace, Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1889).

9 S. Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), the quotations are rom pp. 534 and 538. See also

Ragnar Granit, The Purposive Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).


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stimulated by music in a ashion that we nd enjoyable, though not to any evolutionarypurpose.10

II

In this section I oer arguments querying the claim that the art-as-spandrel option is easieror less controversial to support than is the art-as-adaptation alternative.

I asked, most people would identiy eathers as an adaptation or avian fight. They arewrong to do so. The rst eathers evolved or thermoregulation11 and the descendants osome ancient bird types, such as emus and penguins, have no eathers suitable or fight.Even in fighted birds, the vast majority o their eathers play no role in their taking to thesky. So, is fight a spandrel, is it merely a non-adaptive by-product o avian thermoregula-tion? Obviously not. Although fight comes at a cost (which is why rail species revert sooten to fightlessness on islands without ground predators), it provides a mode o mobilitythat produces many benets toward survival and reproduction. But i it is an adaptation,

where do we locate that? We do so not in the origins o eathers, but in certain modica-tions to specic eathers that (along with other fight-acilitating changes in bone structure,musculature, and the like) made avian fight possible

A yet more extreme example helps make the point. The cochlea o the human inner ear,with which dierences in the pitches o sounds are detected, developed rom the lagena, a

bulging organ on the posterior section o the sacculus o sh that detects aquatic vibrationand thereby locates the presence o other sh.12 But this does not mean that humans pitchdetection, which is important or auditory scene analysis and the appreciation o semanticand aective content in utterance, is merely a spandrel o an ancient piscean adaptation. Inaccounting or the adaptiveness o the human cochlea, we should look not to the origins othe relevant organ but to changes in it that made it useul or (that is, that enhanced thetness o) terrestrial creatures.

As these examples show, evolution never begins aresh but builds instead on whatalready exists. The result, even i it is adaptive, sometimes exhibits an improvisatory,

jury-rigged character. Bipedalism was adaptive or our ancestors, but we are also heirto the back problems and pains that go with it. All this helps to explain why so little othe possible design space is exploited by evolution; or instance, it explains why so manyliving creatures display similar basic body plans.

10 Commentators have been rightly puzzled by Pinkers metaphor; or instance, see Joseph Carroll, Steven Pinkers

Cheesecake or the Mind, Philosophy and Literature, 22 (1998), pp. 478485. The desire oHomo sapiens or sweet,atty oods was adaptive on the savannahs o the Upper Palaeolithic, when such nourishing oods could be hard to

come by. Now, when every street corner has a burger outlet and coee store, the taste may have become

maladaptive. But in neither environment does a desire or sweet, atty ood (or cheesecake) unction as a spandrel.

For other (not entirely convincing) criticisms o Pinker on music, see Daniel J. Levitin This Is your Brain on Music: The

Science o Human Obsession (New York: Dutton, 2006).

11 S. J. Gould and E. Vrba, Exaptation: A Missing Term in the Science o Forms, Paleobiology, 8 (1982), pp. 415.

12 For discussion, see Charles O. Nussbaum, The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 2007), p. 52.


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Here is the relevant moral: demonstrating that something is a spandrel involves armore than identiying it as a by-product o some prior adaptation rom which it operatesvery dierently. So, even i it is true that art is a by-product o Homo sapiens develop-ment o a fexible, general intelligence, or instance, this does not show that art is not anadaptation. In consequence, the art-as-spandrel approach does not have the possible

advantage claimed or it earlier: it does not require less supporting argument than theart-as-adaptation model. Spandrels can be condently identied as such only ater thepossibility that they are adaptations in their own right is tested and deeated. Whenthe investigation is closed, art may turn out to be a spandrel ater all, but beore we getto that conclusion we have to go down the same hard road as that taken by the personwho hopes to show that art is an adaptation. A second consequence is this: i, as I sug-gested, arguments or the adaptiveness o art are properly regarded as questionable andspeculative, arguments or the art-as-spandrel model will inherit these same qualities,

because they must ollow the same path.

III

I now oer rather general reasons or thinking that art is not best regarded as a spandrel,even i it originates there. This second and more compelling objection to the art-as-spandrel hypothesis can be summarized in the slogan:orm becomes norm.

Structural integritysymmetry, proportion, balance, and a normal disposition oelementsis an indicator o itness. It signals a history o health and immunity romdisease. And, or this reason, structural integrity is appreciated as an aspect o humanattractiveness. For instance, the degree o symmetry o human aces correlates with

judgements o their beauty.13 (Note, however, that though we are attracted to hyper-normalcy in acial eatures and the like, we can be attracted more to what is unusualprovided it remains within the bounds o a normal distribution. In other words, we

13 On acial symmetry, see Judith H. Langlois and Lori A. Roggman, Attractive Faces Are only Average,

Psychological Science, 1 (1990), pp. 115121; D. Symons, Beauty Is in the Adaptations o the Beholder: the

Evolutionary Psychology o Human Female Sexual Attractiveness, in P. R. Abramson and S. D. Pinkerton (eds),

Sexual NatureSexual Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), pp. 80118; and Patrick Hogan, Science,

Literature, and the Arts: A Guide or Humanists (New York: Routledge, 2003). On the equation o beauty and

symmetry, see Colin Martindale, Cognition, Psychobiology, and Aesthetics, in F. Farley and R. Neperud (eds),

The Foundations o Aesthetics, Art, and Art Education (New York: Praeger, 1988), pp. 742; Vilayanur Ramachandran

and William Hirstein, The Science o Art: A Neurological Theory o Aesthetic Experience,Journal oConsciousness Studies, 6 (1999), pp. 1551; and Randy Thornhill, Darwinian Aesthetics Inorms Traditional

Aesthetics, in Voland and Grammer (eds), Evolutionary Aesthetics, pp. 935. On symmetry as a health indicator,

see Dahlia Zaidel, Shawn M. Aarde, and Kieran Baig, Appearance o Symmetry, Beauty, and Health in Human

Faces, Brain and Cognition, 57 (2005), pp. 261263. On beauty as honest signalling or tness, see A. Zahavi and

A. Zahavi, The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece o Darwins Puzzle (New York: OUP, 1997); Georey Miller, The

Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution o Human Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2000); and Uta

Skamel, Beauty and Sex Appeal: Sexual Selection o Aesthetic Preerences, in Voland and Grammer (eds),

Evolutionary Aesthetics, pp. 173200.


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like what is average, but we might like more what lies nearer the extremes o what isnot regarded as transgressive.14)

Now, navels and male nipples count along with eyes, noses, ears, chins, and the liketoward structural integrity. They have to be present in the usual number, proportion, andplaces i a person is to display at least an average amount o tness. Perhaps that is one

reason why young women wear short tops and low-slung jeans, why they decorate theirnavels with studs or jewellery, and why belly dancing developed: these behaviours advertisehealth and attractiveness. Ask yoursel, how would you eel i your son wanted to marry ayoung woman who has no navel and who claims to have comewhatever that wouldmeanwithout one?15 How would you eel i your daughter wanted to marry a young manwho was born with neither nipples nor navel? And would you welcome as an in-law someonewith blue bones and green blood? As he fashed a blue-toothed grin in the attempt to distractattention rom the spreading chartreuse fush that betrayed his embarrassment, one could nothelp wondering i he is genuinely human and what kind o ospring he might ather.

The point extends to all aspects o human behaviour. A ailure to develop in the custom-

ary ashionor instance, dysunctionality in language acquisition and usewill be per-ceived by others as signalling neural or other problems. The same goes or aspects o social

behaviouror instance, a sense o justice and a commitment to co-operationthat madelie in the Upper Palaeolithic possible. And i the creation and appreciation o art wasprehistorically as widespread as I claimed initially, a person who showed no interest in anyorm o art would be as unappealing as someone who is without intelligence, humour,social grace, care or others, and a navel.

I navels and art behaviours came to us as spandrels, they would not remain so. Theiroccurrence in the usual manner would become normative because they provide honest,though cheap, signals o tness. They are cheap in the sense that their occurrence in theusual manner is so prevalent that it is only departures rom this that assume importance.Such departures would take on signicance or sexual selection and social integration. Ingeneral, any transmissible human orm or behaviour that was recognized as signiying well-ormedness and developmental normalcy would not only become statistically average as itsuccessully spread through the population, it would become normative in the evaluativesense, whether it rst emerged as an adaptation or as a spandrel.

IV

In this nal section I respond to concerns that might be raised against the previous objec-tion to the view that art could be a spandrel.

14 See Symons, Beauty Is in the Adaptations o the Beholder; Thomas R. Alley and Michael R. Cunningham,

Averaged Faces Are Attractive, but Very Attractive Faces Are not Average, Psychological Science, 2 (1991), pp.

123,125; and Michael R. Cunningham and Stephen R. Shamblem, Beyond Nature versus Culture: A Multiple

Fitness Analysis o Variations in Grooming, in Voland and Grammer (eds), Evolutionary Aesthetics, pp. 201237.

Ramachandran and Hirstein, The Science o Art, generalize this result, the peak shit eect, to art.

15 Surgery can result in the absence o a belly button. A reduced one can be the outcome o a lotus birth or premature

caesarean.


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aord to become a narrow specialist at great personal cost in energy, cognitive invest-ment, and expense, provided enough others are like-minded, and what counts asenough might be only a small portion o the total population i that total is high.Relevant art behaviours can serve as reliable signiiers o itness, then, though theremay be high variability and competition between the many types and expressions o

art expertise that are possible.The second concern provoked by the idea that orm becomes norm is one that detects

hints o social Darwinism in the idea that arbitrary aesthetic tastes that do not identiyreliable signs o tness can, by becoming widespread, later dictate what counts as tness. Itlooks as i some aesthetic standard would become evolutionarily normative i it could beimposed suciently widely, with the result that an evolutionary sanction could be claimed,say, or racial and sexual discrimination, or oot-binding, ritual scarication, homophobia,and enslavement o ethnic minorities.

Admittedly, the position deended earlier holds that what become normative are onlythose transmissible human orms or behaviours that are recognized as signiying well-

ormedness and developmental normalcy, but now the worry can be articulated as one abouthow vulnerable and corruptible are these notions. Most societies tolerate many individualdierences as normaldierences in hair and eye colour, in hair distribution or curlinessor straightness, in skin pigmentation, in height, in intelligence. But suppose the govern-ment o a populous society enorced a decree against let-handedness to the point where itscitizens regarded let-handedness as an abnormality. Rather than accepting that their beliechanges the standard or normalcy, at least in their own society, should we not regard their

belie as mistaken?A rst reply to this concern notes that the preerences under discussion are ones that

shaped the lives o our distant ancestors; they are an aspect o the human nature we inher-ited rom our orebears. As such, they will not easily be changed by government edicts,though such edicts might succeed in suppressing or distorting their expression. Here wemight draw an analogy with humans selective breeding o non-human animals. We breedthem or traits we choose, sometimes to the detriment o the animals normal unctioning,

but this external control does not necessarily change their underlying nature or the preer-ences that are indigenous to their species. It is not the case, or instance, that Labradors aresexually attracted only to other Labradors. In the human case, we know that locally arbi-trary conditions can conspire with human preerences that go on to aect what counts asstatistically normal at a given place and time with respect to such actors as neck length,height, weight, tooth whiteness, and the like, but again, it is not as i intercultural or inter-racial marriage is unheard o. So, the basic character o the preerences we are discussing

runs deep.Moreover, it is worth recalling that, even i human nature includes a common core, it is

also a crucial aspect o human nature that individuals dier. As ootnoted earlier, we aredrawn to what is unusual as well as to what is average, and this works to preserve diversity.In act, evolution is driven by individual dierence; there is not uniormity but a varieddistribution o traits across the species population and an equally varied distribution opreerences or particular traits. The point here is that developmental normalcy does notand could not correspond to developmental sameness.


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Although I have supposed that the creation and appreciation o art is universal, I havealso indicated the variety o ways in which artistic creation and appreciation can ndexpression. Not only are there dierences in the art practices o distinct cultures, there isa signicant diversity o art practices within each culture. And or any given art practice,there is likely to be a spread o levels that accommodates many degrees o competence

among the participants. All this means that there are many ways that individuals can seekthe artistic development o their distinctive talents as creators or appreciators. Nothing inthe orm-becomes-norm idea requires or predicts uniormity or regimentation when itcomes to a social practice like art, with its long historical development, advanced sophisti-cation, and scope or virtuosic originality. Indeed, it is precisely the multiplicity o artspossibilities that make it such an inormationally nuanced signal o tness.

The actors that dictate our preerences can develop and alter over time, o course, andthis may shit what counts as well-ormedness and developmental normalcy. To return todogs, their association with humans has altered their previously wolsh nature, so that nowthey are among the ew animal that nd human yawning contagious and that look where

the nger points and not at the pointing nger. But this is not a result that could have beenachieved by a regime o training alone; it also required the selective evolution o neuralstructures that might make such training eective. And while humans are highly unusual inthe cognitive and social plasticity o their desires and norms, and this is certainly relevantto their capacity to adjust to an extraordinary range o environments and circumstances, itis not plausible that law, religion, or other orms o external social control can alonechange our natures to any radical, dramatic extent.

V

In this paper I have argued that the thesis that art is a spandrel does not provide an easyroute to establishing a connection between human art behaviours and our evolved Homosapiens natures. Indeed, supporting that hypothesis is not simpler or more conclusive thanarguing or the controversial alternative that identies our creation and appreciation o artas an adaptation. In addition, I suggested that characteristics and eatures that displaywell-ormedness and developmental normalcy (or departures rom these), even i theyoriginate as spandrels, take on the unction o honestly signalling tness (or untness) andthereby acquire adaptive signicance. I interest in art emerges spontaneously as part o ournormal development and thereby comes to signiy that normalcy, and i there is then selec-tion or the art behaviours relative to that normalcy, then the art behaviours that resultcould not count merely as spandrels. In act, the variety o art interests and specializations

make art potentially a rich indicator o many dierent tness-enhancing capacities.

Stephen DaviesUniversity o [email protected]

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