Cognitive / genetic basis of art

[trehinp]

Dear all,

In a post reviewing the excellent book by Jean-François Dortier "L'homme cet étrange animal",  I mentionned how insightful that book had been for me.

Doing some internet research on the basis of a new piece of information the author was providing, I've found several papers on "artistic birds" : the Bowerbirds from Australia.

These birds demonstrate an innate capability for what we intellectually call art : a production from various available elements of an aesthetic assemblage, with a purposeful choice of material and colours.
(see excerpts from Nova just for illustration : http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bowerbirds/art.html)

More scientific papers can be retrieved searching for Gerald Borgia and Bowerbird.

This link between art and birds means that some aesthetic capabilities were somewhat "harwired" in our cognitive abilities long before primates appeared on Earth and that some primates kept their genetic pool, while others lost it...

In a post, dated of April 4th 2004, on the Human Evolutionary Biology, I have pointed to some fascinating articles about the amazing similarities between birds and human genetic predispositions for learning languages. We seem to be facing the same phénomenon :

Capabilities, here with language learning, that were somewhat "harwired" in our cognitive abilities long before primates appeared on Earth and that some primates kept their genetic pool, while others lost it...

This relates with my hypothesis about the apparition of art which could be mainly linked to some innate "Savant skills" rather than on a steady evolutionary process. (See the discussion on  "Radical or progressive evolution" in this same forum).

I find these research results fascinating...

Yours sincerely

Paul Trehin

[Iain Davidson]

One of the things about birds and humans is that if you want to compare birds with humans you will find that almost everything that humans do is also done by birds (though probably not anything like symbolic communication). But no individual bird species does all of them.  If we compare birds with mammals, the comparison would be fairer.  But humans will still skew the difference towards symbols.

And that is the point about bowers.  They are not symbolic, because there is little sign that there is either arbitrariness (within a single species) or convention (meaning something that can be varied according to the convention).

So it is fun stuff, but not the answer.

Iain

[trehinp]

I agree with you in part Iain.

My main point in this post was to show that there are some birds possess the capabilities for aesthetics creations. These are definitely purposeful since the birds fly sometimes miles to collect the specific colour that they want for their creations. Coloured objects aren’t just picked up because they are bright (like magpies do) but rearranged in an elegant design. The bower that they build is not a nest, but intended to demonstrate to a potential partner the male capability of building a nest.
 
Of course, the “art” production of bower birds can’t rival with human beings, or more exactly modern man, art. But it is quite astonishing that this is the only other specie besides human beings, known so far, to be capable of aesthetics. No other primates even scratch the surface of aesthetics. My question here is why isn’t that ability more frequent in nature?

I agree with you that this behaviour is most likely not a symbolic one. But does art need a symbolic content to be called art? I come back here to another post I made in this section. There are a few autistic people who are capable of producing wonderfully aesthetic works that we all would agree to call art master pieces and yet for most of them the symbolic content is very low of most likely absent. One of the best examples of that is the exceptional work of Christophe Pillault, a young French artist who has a severe autism, is non verbal and yet produces absolutely wonderful paintings (http://www.autismarts.com/photo_album6.0.html)
That any one can call art.

In the case of my own son, who is also an autistic artist, he didn’t draw for the “public”, he was drawing as a means of remembering (giving some time stability), to things he had seen and liked. That’s how he was drawing beautiful perspectives of Manhattan avenues and skyscrapers or realistic 3D views of air line planes at age 6. Yet he was completely oblivious of the effect of is drawing abilities on the people watching his representations of Manhattan buildings or Boeing 747... Some examples of his early drawings are on his website: http://urville.com. There was nothing symbolic then in his production; does that eliminate it from the art scene? Of course his work is now a lot more symbolic, but that was learned while his drawing abilities were innate.
See http://www.wisconsinmedicalsociety.org/savant/gilles.cfm for some additional information about Gilles.

Coming back to animal aesthetics, there is a fairly large number of scientific publications on the evolutionary nature of aesthetics, in particular linked to the Darwinian sexual selection, based upon the role of partner selection on the basis of general abilities, which in men became more and more symbolic. A good sample of that work is available in the book edited by Robin Dunbar, Chris Knight and Camilla Power “The evolution of Culture”, Rutger University press 2003 [1999]. See a shorter overview “An Evolutionary Perspective on the Nature of Art”, Nancy E. Aiken, independent scholar (http://www.apa.org/divisions/div10/articles/aiken.html)

Strangely, I had never seen references to that analysis of the origins of art so far, in any of the most famous authors on prehistoric art… It was Dortier’s book that sent me on that information hunt…

Thanks again for having responded to my post. I really sincerely appreciate discussions as they are the main possibility to test the validity of one’s thinking in our domain.

Paul