Not long ago in Africa, I camped in what seemed like one of the perfect places on Earth, at the edge of a stand of trees overlooking a floodplain. The stars were spangled across the sky in smoky clusters of light, and I lay in my tent listening to the distant rumble of lions and the doleful keening of jackals. In the morning, my companions and I squatted around an open fire and watched the night fade gradually into dawn on the open plain. It might have been 100,000 years ago, when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. It might have been millions of years ago, when we were apes.
It felt like home, and the biologist I was visiting suggested that perhaps our evolution in a landscape like this had shaped much more than the way our hips articulate or our hands grasp. Maybe evolution influences what we like, he said. Maybe we like glassy, sparkling surfaces because they suggest close proximity to water. Maybe we take comfort in a certain branchy tree shape because our Pleistocene forebears roosted in such trees at night for safety from predators. Perhaps things we regard as purely cultural and artistic—like the graceful way a ballerina’s ankle unbends when she is on point, in a way few men can manage—are actually products of anthropoid evolution. A woman’s ankle can rotate through a much greater arc, one biologist has suggested, because our early female ancestors had to stretch from one branch to another while foraging in the trees and bushes, whereas heavier-bodied males tended to stick to flat land.
The idea that there might be a natural history of aesthetics turned out, when I got home and began to read, to be more than idle campfire talk. Richard Coss, now a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis, largely invented the idea of evolutionary aesthetics in a paper he wrote 30 years ago as a young graduate in industrial design. Coss made the startling suggestion that we respond to art, and to our visual world, not just as aesthetes (or even Philistines) but as animals. Among other examples, he cited an abstract painting by Paul Klee, The Snake Goddess and Her Enemy. Coss noted that butterflies and other creatures often use false eyespots to produce alarm in predators. He suggested that Klee was eliciting an innate biological response in his viewers through similar “releasing mechanisms”—the S-shape of the snake and the use of a mask with two prominent eyes.
The idea of looking at art from the perspective of animal behavior also occurred to Gordon Orians at the University of Washington. Orians was studying how blackbirds choose where to live when he noticed that humans also select their habitat according to specific criteria, like the presence of water, large trees, open space, and distant views—criteria evoking the savanna where humans evolved. Moreover, when Orians asked test subjects to rate landscape paintings, they tended to prefer the ones that met those criteria. A John Constable landscape like Dedham Vale appeals to us, Orians argued, at least partly because it gives the viewer clues to finding resources and avoiding danger. Looking at it is an unconscious exercise in habitat selection: Could I live here? Is it safe to explore? Should I turn and run?
