Massive Modularity vs. Cognitive Flexibility
Evolutionists insist that genes constrain and direct human behavior. Cultural constructivists counter that culture, embodied in the arts, shapes human experience. Both these claims are true, but some evolutionists and some cultural constructivists have mistakenly regarded them as mutually exclusive (D. S. Wilson, “Evolutionary”). Some evolutionists have either ignored the arts or tried to explain them away as epiphenomenal to the basic processes of life. Many cultural constructivists, in contrast, have sought to collapse biology into culture, eliminating “human nature” and thus turning culture into a first cause or unmoved mover. In the past few years, evolutionists in both the sciences and the humanities have broken through this impasse, arguing that the imagination is a functional part of the adapted mind. These new ideas revise an earlier model of human cognitive evolution—a model most closely associated with “evolutionary psychology” (EP) as a specific school within the evolutionary human sciences. Revising that model makes it possible for us now fully to integrate the evolutionary human sciences and literary study.
In the early phases of EP, theorists seeking to counter the concept of the mind as a “blank slate” committed themselves to the idea of “massive modularity,” the idea that the mind operates almost exclusively through dedicated bits of neural machinery adapted to solve specific practical problems in ancestral environments. Cognitive modules—the neural machinery dedicated to sight, for example—are characterized by automaticity and efficiency. The idea of massive modularity thus carried within itself a general sense of humans as adaptation-executing automata. To account for cognitive flexibility in this scheme, one could only “bundle larger numbers of specialized mechanisms together so that in aggregate, rather than individually, they address a larger range of problems” (Tooby and Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations” 113). The idea of massive modularity over-generalizes from the most hard-wired components of the brain. It is a massive oversimplification of human cognitive architecture, and it is already fading into the archives of intellectual history (Geary; Sterelny). Its residual influence makes itself felt, though, in the ongoing debate over the adaptive function of the arts (Boyd, “Evolutionary”; Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm” 119-28, “Rejoinder” 349-54; Dissanayake, “What Art Is”).
In How the Mind Works (1997), Steven Pinker locates the arts within an EP conception of human cognitive evolution (524-43). As he sees it, natural selection shaped human motives to maximize inclusive fitness within a hunter-gatherer ecology. Sociality and language were part of the human adaptive repertory. Imaginative culture was not. Creative imagination, whenever it appeared in human evolution, was just added on as a by-product of the cognitive/behavioral mechanisms that solved practical problems. To illustrate the by-product idea, Pinker draws parallels between art and pornography, psychoactive drugs, and rich foods like cheesecake. He acknowledges that fictional narratives might have informational content of some utility in providing game-plans for practical problems that could arise. All the other features of the arts, he suggests, reflect only the human capacity to exploit evolved mechanisms for producing pleasure. This sort of pleasure, detached from all practical value with respect to survival and reproduction, would be equivalent to the pleasure derived from masturbation. (In “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?” Tooby and Cosmides modified their own earlier view that the arts are non-adaptive side effects, but they did not modify the underlying conception of mental architecture with which that earlier view is concordant.)
The distinguished sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson offers a very different vision of human cognitive evolution. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998), Wilson poses the same question posed by Pinker:
If the arts are steered by inborn rules of mental development, they are end products not just of conventional history but also of genetic evolution. The question remains: Were the genetic guides mere byproducts—epiphenomena—of that evolution, or were they adaptations that directly improved survival and reproduction? And if adaptations, what exactly were the advantages conferred? (224)
Wilson’s answer to this question draws a decisive line between the mental powers of humans and other animals. Other animals are “instinct-driven” (225). Humans are not. “The most distinctive qualities of the human species are extremely high intelligence, language, culture, and reliance on long-term contracts” (224). The adaptive value of high intelligence is that it provides the means for behavioral flexibility—for generating plans based on mental representations of complex relationships, engaging in collective enterprises requiring shared mental representations, and thus producing novel solutions to adaptive problems. Behavioral flexibility has made of the human species the most successful alpha predator of all time, but achieving dominance in this way has come with a cost. Wilson speaks of the “psychological exile” of the species (224-25). To the modern human mind, alone among all minds in the animal kingdom, the world does not present itself as a series of rigidly defined stimuli releasing a narrow repertory of stereotyped behaviors. It presents itself as a vast and potentially perplexing array of percepts, inferences, causal relations, contingent possibilities, analogies, contrasts, and hierarchical conceptual structures. The human mind is free to organize the elements of cognition in an infinitely diverse array of combinatorial possibilities. And most of those potential forms of organization, like most major mutations, would be fatal. Freedom is the key to human success, and it is also an invitation to disaster. This is the insight that governs Wilson’s explanation for the adaptive function of the arts. “There was not enough time for human heredity to cope with the vastness of new contingent possibilities revealed by high intelligence. . . . The arts filled the gap” (1998, p. 225). If instincts are defined as stereotyped programs of behavior released automatically by environmental stimuli, we can say that in humans the arts partially take the place of instinct. Along with religion, ideology, and other emotionally charged belief systems, the arts form an imaginative interface between complex mental structures, genetically transmitted behavioral dispositions, and behavior.
High human intelligence is part of a larger, systemic structure of species-typical adaptations that can be analyzed under the rubric of “human life-history theory,” that is, the analysis of the distribution of effort across the human life cycle. Human life history includes altricial birth, extended childhood, male-female bonding coupled with male coalitions, dual parenting, post-menopausal survival, longevity, the development of skills for the extraction of high-quality resources, an enlarged neocortex that enhances powers for suppressing impulses and engaging in long-term planning, symbolic capacities enabling identification with extended social groups (“tribal instincts”), egalitarian dispositions operating in tension with conserved dispositions for individual dominance, and the power to subordinate, in some degree, impulses of survival and reproduction to the formal dictates of imagined virtual worlds (Baumeister; Boehm; Flinn, Geary, and Ward; Geary; Hawkins; Kaplan et al.; Richerson and Boyd; D. S. Wilson, Evolution).
The early EP conception of the mind supposes a sequence in which automatic cognitive processes evolved to solve adaptive problems specific to Pleistocene ecology, with the arts tacked on as side effects. The alternative vision formulated by Wilson supposes that human cognitive capacities evolved specifically for the purposes of generating adaptive flexibility. (Also see Carroll, “The Human Revolution”; Foley; Irons; Mithen; Potts; Sterelny; Wade.) In that alternative evolutionary scenario, dispositions to produce and consume works of imagination co-evolved in functional interdependence with high intelligence. The affective neuroscientists Jules and Jaak Panksepp vividly evoke this vision of an integrated, systemic evolution of human cognitive powers:
What those vast cerebral expansions that emerged during the Pleistocene probably provided was a vast symbolic capacity that enabled foresight, hindsight, and the brain-power to peer into other minds and to entertain alternate courses of action, thereby allowing humans to create the cultures that dominate our modern world. . . .
What makes humans unique, perhaps more than anything else, is that we are a linguistically adept story-telling species. That is why so many different forms of mythology have captivated our cultural imaginations since the dawn of recorded history. (126-27)
We are a linguistically adept story-telling species because telling stories is one of the chief ways we give shape to our experience and thus ultimately direct our behavior. As Terrence Deacon puts it, “We tell stories about our real experiences and invent stories about imagined ones, and we even make use of these stories to organize our lives. In a real sense, we live our lives in this shared virtual world” (22).
Dispositions for creating and enjoying art form part of the larger evolutionary process known as “gene-culture co-evolution.” “Culture” includes technology and social organization as well as art, religion, and philosophy. Conceiving culture in this broader sense, evolutionary anthropologists often cite lactose tolerance as an instance of gene-culture co-evolution (Cochran and Harpending; Richerson and Boyd; Wade). Through natural selection, herding peoples have evolved enzymes that enable adults to digest milk. The cultural practice of keeping cattle serves as a selective force that alters the gene pool in a given population, and in turn the altered gene pool encourages the expansion of a pastoral economy. Language offers another clear instance of this kind of selective pressure. At some point in the ancestral past, humans had no power of speech. Mutations enabling rudimentary forms of “proto-language” (Bickerton) would have given some selective advantage to those who possessed them. That advantage would have increased the representation of those genes in the population at large, and the increase in those genes would have enhanced the linguistic character of the cultural environment, intensifying the selective advantage conferred by genes promoting the use of language.
A similar logic applies to imaginative culture. Developing the power of creating imaginative virtual worlds must have had adaptive value for our ancestors. Otherwise, capacities for imaginative culture would not now be human universals; artistic behavior would not spontaneously appear in all normally developing children; and humans would not display cognitive aptitudes specifically geared toward the production and reception of art—dispositions, for instance, for organizing pitched sounds in rhythmically and emotionally expressive sequences, for constructing visual designs that produce distinct moods and states of contemplative attention, and for constructing fictional narratives that generate excited, empathic responses in audiences (Boyd, On the Origin; Brown; Dissanayake, Art; Dutton; Scalise-Sugiyama; Tooby and Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build”; Salmon and Symons). These three factors—universality, reliable spontaneous development, and dedicated cognitive aptitudes—all suggest that dispositions for the arts were adaptive. If that is in fact the case, dispositions for producing and consuming the arts would have served as a selective force on the population, altering the gene pool, favoring those genes that facilitate producing and consuming works of art.
Somewhere between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, there was a transformation in human culture that anthropologists designate “the Human Revolution” (Carroll, “The Human Revolution”; Cochran and Harpending; Klein; Wade; Mellars et al.; Mellars and Stringer.). Archeologically preserved forms of imaginative culture—art, decoration, ceremonial burial—appeared for the first time, and along with them, complex multi-part tools, sewn clothing, and extended forms of trade, implying more complex forms of social organization. In The Prehistory of the Mind (1996), Steven Mithen forcibly drew attention to the magnitude of this transformation and used it as evidence against the narrow-school EP conception of the massively modular mind. Countering the theory that cognitive flexibility arises from the multiplication of modules, all working automatically in response to regularities in the ancestral environment, he argued that the Human Revolution was generated by a genetically based cognitive transformation, a mutation involving language, that gave humans a vastly expanded flexibility in symbolic representation. His concept of “cognitive fluidity” is essentially a concept of metaphor: the power of linking images and ideas across diverse domains. To that power he attributes the sudden efflorescence of technological innovation and artistic production that characterizes the Human Revolution. Other theorists have argued for a more gradual evolution of human cognitive capacities (Deacon; Smail; Sterelny). I think the advocates of the Human Revolution will ultimately have the better part in this argument. In any case, at whatever pace it came about, there can be little doubt that modern symbolic culture—the culture of the past 100,000 years—differs in radical ways from the culture of the early and middle phases of hominid evolution.
The very existence of modern symbolic culture runs counter to the EP conception of human cognitive evolution—to massive modularity and the massively homogeneous character of the ancestral environment. Hence the virtual necessity, for acolytes of EP, for explaining away modern symbolic culture, treating it as merely a side-effect to the adaptive structures that solved challenges supposed constant throughout the whole of the Pleistocene.
“Human nature” means that humans share species-typical dispositions: basic motives tied closely to the needs of survival, mating, parenting, and social interaction (Carroll, “An Evolutionary Paradigm,” 111-15; Flinn, Geary, and Ward; Kaplan et al.). Cognitive and behavioral flexibility are part of human nature, but they have not eliminated the underlying regularities in basic motives. In different ecologies and different forms of social organization, the elements of human nature combine in distinctive ways, but “culture” cannot build structures out of nothing. It must work with the genetically transmitted dispositions of an evolved and adapted human nature. The arts give imaginative shape to the experiences possible within any given culture, reflecting its tensions, conflicts, and satisfactions. One chief aim for evolutionary studies in the humanities is to analyze the way any given culture organizes the elements of human nature, evaluate the aesthetic, emotional, and moral qualities inherent in that organization, and probe the way it influences—by conformist pressure or antagonistic stimulus—specific works of literature.
Making Sense of the Arts
To formulate plausible and testable hypotheses about the adaptive function of the arts, we have to satisfy three criteria: (a) define the arts in a way that identifies what is peculiar and essential to them—thus isolating the behavioral disposition in question; (b) identify the adaptive problem this behavioral disposition would have solved in ancestral environments; and (c) identify design features that would efficiently have mediated this solution (Pinker, “Towards”). We can define art as the disposition for creating artifacts that are emotionally charged and aesthetically shaped in such a way that they evoke or depict subjective, qualitative sensations, images, or ideas. Literature, specifically, produces subjectively modulated images of the world and of our experience in the world. The disposition for creating such images would have solved an adaptive problem that, like art itself, is unique for the human species: organizing motivational systems disconnected from the immediate promptings of instinct. The design features that mediate this adaptive function are the capacities for producing artistic constructs such as narrative and verse and emotionally modulated musical and visual patterns.
Consider the reality of our experience. We live in the imagination. For us, humans, no action or event is ever just itself. It is always a component in mental representations of the natural and social order, extending over time. All our actions take place within imaginative structures that include our vision of the world and our place in the world—our internal conflicts and concerns, our relations to other people, our relations to nature, and our relations to whatever spiritual forces we imagine might exist. We live in communities that consist not just of the people with whom we come directly into contact but with memories of the dead, traditions of our ancestors, our sense of connection with generations yet unborn, and with every person, living or dead, who joins with us in imaginative structures—social, ideological, religious, or philosophical—that subordinate our individual selves to some collective body. Our sense of our selves derives from our myths and artistic traditions, from the stories we tell, the songs we sing, and the visual images that surround us.
We have all had moments in which some song, story, or play, some film, piece of music, or painting, has transfigured our vision of the world, broadened our minds, deepened our emotional understanding, or given us new insight into human experience. Working out from this common observation to a hypothesis about the adaptive function of literature requires no great speculative leap. Literature and the other arts help us live our lives. That is why the arts are human universals (Brown). In all known cultures, the arts enter profoundly into normal childhood development, connect individuals to their culture, and help people get oriented to the world, emotionally, morally, and conceptually (Boyd, On the Origin; Carroll, Literary Darwinism 65-69; Carroll, Gottschall, Johnson, and Kruger; Dissanayake, Art; Dutton; Tooby and Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build?”).
If it is true that the arts are adaptively functional, they would be motivated as emotionally driven needs. The need to produce and consume imaginative artifacts would be as real and distinct a need as hunger, sexual desire, maternal and filial bonding, or the desire for social contact. Like all such needs, it would bear within itself, as its motivating mechanism, the pleasure and satisfaction that attend upon the fulfilling of desire. That kind of fulfillment would not be a parasitic by-product of some other form of pleasure, nor merely a means for fulfilling some other kind of need—sexual, social, or practical. Like all forms of fulfillment, the need for art could be integrated with other needs in any number of ways. It could be used for sexual display or the gratifications of sexual hunger or social vanity, and it could be used as a medium for social bonding. Nonetheless, in itself it would be a primary and irreducible human need.
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