Are the Arts Just Byproducts? Rethinking Art's Evolutionary Roots

Julia

Right, let’s jump straight in. One of the things that always kind of trips people up is this idea that, you know, prehistoric people—or even, like, today’s really traditional hunter-gatherers—were obsessed with “aesthetics” in the same way we are. But, really, that’s not really borne out by what we know. There’s this tendency—especially among us Western types—to look at cave art or ancient objects and rave about their beauty. But if you examine the actual archaeological record, most of it isn’t polished or perfectly ordered. In fact, a lot of it is, well, haphazard, unfinished, or even intentionally obliterated—think about the mess of superimposed animals at cave art sites in France and Spain. For ancient hunter-gatherers, the concept of “art” blended right into both daily life and ritual. The arts weren’t about detached contemplation or high-minded beauty, but about objects that had a kind of power… or served a purpose in ritual, supernatural thinking, or magical beliefs.

Julia

And even the way we use the word “functional” now—it’s totally different from how these communities saw it. For us, something’s functional if it gets the job done, empirically, right? But for a hunter-gatherer from the stone age, an item might have been “functional” because it helped sway the spirits or kept the weather in check through ritual. Which, um, isn’t exactly a testable outcome nowadays, but it made sense in the context of their worldview.

Julia

Okay, a couple of good archaeological early Neolithic examples really show this: let’s take Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe. Both these sites are absolutely riddled with ritual significance. At Çatalhöyük, for example—about 9,000 years old—houses were tied up in all sorts of ritual activities and myths—the practical and the spiritual were all woven together. And, at the 11,500 year old site of Göbekli Tepe, you’ve got hunter-gatherers, not farmers, investing huge amounts of energy building and then sometimes burying these massive “temples.” Why would they do all that? It’s all tied to ritual.

Julia

And this isn’t just limited to the Neolithic. When I visited one of those deep caves in southwestern France, I remember feeling almost spooked by how far the animal images were from any natural light or easy access. Clearly, whoever made them wasn’t aiming for easy spectatorship. It was about ritual, about entering a different kind of space. If I’m, uh, rambling a bit, it’s just—I remember standing there, thinking how these images were probably never meant for casual enjoyment. They’re hidden, fragmentary, sometimes even smashed. That tells us something huge about what “art” meant.

Julia

So, where does this leave us when we ask: why did the arts evolve at all? Are they adaptations—a genetically wired trait that boosts our evolutionary fitness? Or are they exaptations, meaning we tweaked some old abilities for new purposes? Or, and here’s where Hodgson really takes a stand, are the arts actually just by-product—basically, side effects of cognitive features that evolved for other reasons entirely?

Julia

There’s a really important distinction in evolutionary theory: a trait only gets classed as an adaptation if there’s solid proof it actually improves reproductive success through genetic selection. But with the arts, the evidence isn’t there. If anything, a lot of art-linked ritual behaviour can seem costly to such an extent it can potentially become maladaptive. Rapa Nui, once known as Easter Island, is a go-to example here: people devoted huge resources to building monuments for ritual purposes despite the limited natural assets, such as wood, on a relatively small isolated island.

Julia

There are some efforts—Tooby and Cosmides, for example—to argue that the arts evolved as adaptations tied to imaginative problem-solving. Others, like Brian Boyd, suggest animal play behaviour morphed into art, which could be adaptive. And Steven Pinker—this always gets a laugh—calls the arts “cheesecake for the mind.” The point being: they’re a tasty by-product, just exploiting our pleasure systems, but that view tends to trivialise such an important human behaviour as art.

Julia

But, I mean, the critiques of those views are persuasive. Hodgson, and others, say that just because something is pleasurable and universal, that doesn’t make it adaptive. Look at drugs and gambling for example. They tickle our brains, but nobody’s suggesting heroin and gambling is an evolutionary adaptation… right? They might tap into some of our evolutionary adaptive domains by triggering behaviour but this often becomes maladaptive if not destructive.

Julia

So, the real challenge is working out whether the arts are properly adaptations, useful exaptations, or just persistent by-products. Hodgson concludes that, until we see robust evidence of fitness benefits and not just popularity or ubiquity, we really ought to treat the arts as a cultural by-product—kind of an inevitable side effect of brains and culture colliding, not something evolution directly crafted “for” us.

Julia

Let’s talk about sensory bias—this is a fascinating bit of the story. There’s this idea, and I really like it, that the arts latch onto neural circuits that originally evolved for very different purposes, like face recognition or pattern search behaviour. In other words, our brains were shaped by survival challenges: finding food, recognizing friends or foes, communicating, all that practical stuff. But then, arts and rituals sneak in and “hijack” these circuits, giving us deeply satisfying, but not necessarily useful, experiences.

Julia

A great way to test the by-product hypothesis is to look at our close relatives. Studies in chimpanzees are really telling. Chimps in captivity, with access to mark-making tools, show a spontaneous enjoyment in drawing lines or shapes on surfaces—even as young as eleven months old. But here’s the kicker: they don’t seem to do anything similar in the wild, presumably because their environment doesn’t provide the means or, well, the cultural context. They don't even save the marks made or show them to other chimps, so they are not really valued in any way. So, in chimps, the pleasure in “art-like” activity is just an extension of basic sensory and exploratory behaviour.

Julia

There’s similar research in musicality. Monkeys don’t sing pop songs, obviously, but tamarins, for instance, react more positively to "music" composed from their own species calls than they do from human music. We see some rhythmic responses—like a chimp tapping along to a beat in lab experiments—but this doesn’t show up naturally. It’s as if the underlying ability is there, adapted for, like, survival, but the “art” bit kicks in only when the right culture, neural networks and context collide as in humans.

Julia

What really stands out to me here is how these mark-making and musical responses are “pleasure buttons” exposed by culture. Humans just take that much further, layering on ritual, anxiety relief, group cohesion... all sorts of social functions, but also, sometimes, self-destructive behaviours. The transmission of art through culture allows it to become increasingly complex—and sometimes, to be candid, a bit costly or maladaptive. I keep coming back to this: are we just, sort of, stuck with art because of how our brains and our cultures evolved together, with rituals springing up as a side effect of our capacity for anxiety, play, social games, and imitation?

Julia

I don’t know if we’ll ever have a final answer, but Hodgson’s by-product hypothesis is compelling because it explains why the arts can persist even when they don’t obviously benefit us, or might even get us into trouble. For now, though, I think it’s a powerful reminder that art is both deeply human—and a little bit mysterious. Thanks for joining me to rethink where art comes from, and why it might be less about evolution’s design, and more about what happens when brains, culture, and ritual all tangle up together. See you next time.