This is made in

This is Aesthetics Bites, a series for philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds

Aesthetics Bites is made in association with the London Aesthetics Forum and made possible by a grant from the British Society of Aesthetics.

All cultures have forms of artistic expression.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this seems a bit odd.

After all, it's not obvious what evolutionary advantage there is to writing poetry,

or even just appreciating poetry.

Stephen Davies, welcome to

hishetics bites. Thank you for having me. The topic we're going to talk

about is art and evolution. So what's a connection? How are art and evolution related?

Different people have different theories about this, but there are three positions that I distinguish.

The first is that art is an adaptation that is to say it's a measure of fitness and it predicts who will have more children or better children.

Another possibility is that it's a byproduct of an

adaptation but it doesn't contribute anything biologically of its own. And the third position

is that it's a cultural technology. Of course like everything it

will depend in the end on evolution but it'll be sufficiently removed from it that

we can think of it as a cultural creation.

So we're talking about why it is from an evolutionary perspective that art evolved and artists

started making things.

And so if it's an adaptation, what sort of

candidates are there? What sort of adaptation would

painting pictures on a wall or carving stag's antlers? What sort of

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