Talking about art and evolution I have a song that I wrote and recorded called Darwin if you have few minutes to check it out.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Zara’s Darwin song is very nice as is the album (if I can still use that word) it is on. I recommend checking her work out on iTunes and/or checking out her blog: http://www.zarakershaw.co.uk/

Support artists that do stuff with evolution!

-gtl

As human consciousness evolves, so does our complexity and therefore our artistic skills, sporting skills, language skills and other *meaningful* cognitive skills.

Why did we loose our penile spines? Because we no longer make the mistake of sticking our precious bit of food in a hole that is pretending to be a human vagina.

Successful predators are lazy. Why chase food, when you can get it to come to you and stick itself in your mouth? Why chase a cat when you can wave a sock?

Hence, any sub-hominidae has penile spines, to avoid the obvious. The raking of the inside of the vagina was a later adaptation, making sure that any offspring only came from a father who was sensible enough to guard his precious meat with spikes.

So…

Cave paintings, early art – food education.

But humans are food too. How do we tell the civilised from the cannibal? How does the continually evolving dance of predator and prey play itself out between the humans who eat humans, and the humans who would rather not be eaten?

If I was a cannibal, I would pretend to be a vegetarian, then when I had a real vegetarian on her own, I would eat her, and make sure the other vegetarians were told that ‘god did it’. An old trick.

The threat of cannibalism isn’t really around anymore, and has not been a problem in the UK since the little ice-age of the 1750s (hiding in the reeds waving a swan at closing time, hoping a drunken chap will wade in to grab his ‘meal’, a swan ‘caught’ in the reeds, only to find my great-greatx12 grandmother hiding in the reeds, ready to eat both man and swan).

Ever wondered why weddings are such extravagant events? To exclude vagrants.

The invite is in latin, the uniform is expensive. A wedding is one of the best sources of food for a cannibal (think ‘grendel from beowulf’).

A wedding is two families and all the calories they control, all their horses, all the food they can gather. Excluding unwanted guests was of paramount importance. Brides are tasty.

How do we know when to stop? Fear of predation by other human beings is the darkest part of the subconscious. It is the thing that drives art and all the other anti-predator adaptations we use on each other. Art goes on and on.

Ever seen what happens when the cool kids like a band, then the uncool kid likes the band, then the cool kids have to like a different band?

It is well known, that the woman you would most like to copulate with is the woman who looks the ‘tastiest’.

It’s all in the Bible and the fossil record and the history of Europe if you know what you’re looking for and you waive your bias against the null hypothesis 🙂

I tend to think of any “art” as that portion of human activity that isn’t readily reducible to some sort of algorithm, but has a sense of fleeting feelings, impulses or insights. In visual art, there is often talk of whether a piece has a sense of being “aiive”, “numinous”, “luminous” or that sort of thing. It is of course partly communication and may also be at root a way to evoke perceived intention in nature. Possibly it’s a reflection of (or reflection on) symmetries, tensions, harmonies, etc. at work in the brain. Arnheim’s essay “Entropy and Art” sort of speculates about the latter, for instance.

How any form of communication drives evolution should probably look at how it uniquely functions and the role of its illusions. We do have a lot of brain space devoted to vision. And there does seem to be something in visual art that is linked to seeing mysterious intent and patterns in the physical world: a rutabaga shaped like the Virgin Mary for example. So it may have played a role in the development of religious thinking.

Is your Black Dog Cafe discussion with Abbi Allen going to be podcast? Because this niche discussion is actually on a topic very important to me, and I am totally not physically able to be in St Paul, Minnesota in order to directly participate in the communal social ritual we call, “a public discussion.”

But I would love to experience it vicariously via modern recording technology, at an arbitrary spatial and temporal remove.