… Johns Hopkins conference on The Science of the Arts, the most intriguing came from a biologist who, when asked if he thought aesthetic creation and receptivity were hardwired in us for evolutionary reasons, said:
No, I don’t think so. Our brains are so powerful… art is an epiphenomenon of that power. Art has fallen out as a side-effect of our complexity and sophistication as creatures. Art is clearly about communication, which is a fairly low-level survival skill… We’re not hardwired to be appreciators of art at a Darwinian level; we’ve simply evolved an incredibly complex central nervous system out of which art appreciation has evolved. When you have levels of complexity that are extremely high, you get unexpected phenomena, like the art instinct.
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Speaking of evolution, UD notes that Leigh Van Valen, the University of Chicago scientist who originated the Red Queen hypothesis, has died.
Stephen Stearns, in a Yale course on evolution, said this about the Red Queen hypothesis:
[The hypothesis is that] all life on earth is in fact caught up in a coevolutionary web of interactions. And his evidence for that is that the long-term extinction rate is constant. If you look over the Phanerozoic, if you look over the last 550 million years, the probability that a species will go extinct, within a given period of time, has remained roughly constant.
There’s some slight evidence that maybe species have started to live a little bit longer. But, you know, broad brush, this claim is correct. Things have not gotten better at persisting, over the last 500 million years. So in some sense I think Leigh’s claim is probably true. Every time a species on earth tries to get a leg up, some other species compensates. So this is where that term comes from. This is an illustration from Through the Looking Glass by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). This–Alice is a pawn on a chessboard, and Alice is supposed to, in this mental game, march down the chessboard and get turned into a queen, when she reaches the end.
And the Red Queen, who is next to her, says, “Alice, this is a game in which you run as fast as you can and you can only stay in place.” So it’s like one of those nightmares that you have, where you’re running as fast as you possibly can, and you can’t get away. That’s Leigh Van Valen’s metaphor for evolution: everybody is running as hard as they can and they’re just staying in place; their fitness is not long-term improving.
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Further intriguing ideas from the conference, these from Pat Metheny:
It’s really all just ideas. Jazz improvisation is a narrative, linguistic experience… You’re dealing with a vocabulary and a language you work to refine in order to say what you mean, to express yourself honestly. Aesthetic success is when communicative flow happens, when a certain engagement happens.
Music is this wild thing – you can’t see it, taste it, smell it. It’s unreal. But it’s so effective as narrative, as basic communication…
What I’m getting at is elusive, and hard to quantify.
The idea exists before the instrument. If you ask me to play Funny Valentine on three different instruments, I’ll play it the same on all of them.