by Chip Walter
We can speculate, but the truth is it has been a struggle for scientists to take behaviors such as art, sculpture, storytelling, and music seriously because each seems, from an evolutionary point of view, so impractical. They also resist cold analysis because they are hopelessly subjective. Mostly the field of evolutionary psychology has concluded that music, song, dance, and art are best explained as accidental by–products of other forces that created the extravagant human brain. Nothing more than evolutionary filigree.
But again, Geoffrey Miller begs to differ. He argues that our elaborate human behaviors evolved for the same reasons peacock feathers did, or the rainbow colors on mandrill snouts—they represent powerful personal marketing that lets the opposite sex know how extraordinarily fit the brains of their owners are, which in turn makes them great potential mates. “The healthy brain theory,” he says, “proposes that our minds are clusters of fitness indicators: persuasive salesmen like art, music, and humor, that do their best work in courtship, where the most important deals are made.”
I believe that Miller is correct, but I also believe that advertising our cerebral fitness is good for more than landing mates, as crucially important as that is. In fact, creativity of all kinds may trump sex as the most central force in human relationships because, beyond sex and sexual selection, survival is also, ultimately, about power over your environment. And fit brains not only demonstrate power, they generate it.
In 1975, Amotz Zahavi, a biologist at Tel Aviv University, conceived a theory that was fascinating because on the surface it was so counterintuitive. He thought it might explain some of the exceedingly impractical traits and behaviors we see in nature that seem to hamper animals rather than help them. Why, he asked, would peacock feathers evolve when they weigh so much and their colors risk attracting the attention of predators? Or why, when an impala senses a lion nearby, does it bound straight up in the air (something called stotting), wasting valuable seconds before it sprints in the opposite direction? Why do bowerbirds create intricate and ostentatious nests for their mates that include everything from seashells to rifle shells when a simple bundle of woven grass would do the job just as well? To answer these questions he conceived the “handicap principle.”
Zahavi already knew some of the traits and behaviors could be explained as ways to win mates. But he also knew they help establish status. The peacock isn’t simply saying, “See my remarkable feathers.” He’s also saying, “And have you noticed how strong I must be to get off the ground and fly with these enormous things weighing me down?” The point for potential mates is clear—I’m handsome and strong. But the same message is simultaneously sent to predators and other peacock competitors: “Don’t mess with me. I’m top dog. I know it. You know it. So let’s all just take our place in the pecking order and move on.”
In the same way, an impala’s pogo–stick bound before it sets out to escape from a predator may waste time and energy, but it also tells a stalking lion, “As you can see, I’m pretty healthy and rather quick. You might want to think twice before taking the time to chase me.” Often as not, the lion does a quick and primal cost–benefit analysis, walks away, and looks for a less challenging meal elsewhere. These are survival strategies, pure and simple.
The point is, even seemingly inefficient traits and behaviors have their purposes, though they might not be immediately obvious. It’s not always necessarily about sexual selection. Sometimes the traits make you attractive, sometimes they represent a sophisticated way to survive, sometimes they help reinforce status, and sometimes it’s all the above.
If ever there was an example of an organ that was costly, yet delivered an enormous payoff, the human brain is it—the ultimate peacock’s feathers. It devours enormous amounts of energy (far more than any other organ in the body), is outrageously complex, and subject to breaking down (with disastrous results). Yet what powerful messages it can send about its owner, and its owner’s fitness! This makes the human brain the most elaborate example of the handicap principle in all of nature, an extravagance that expends enormous amounts of energy illustrating how extraordinary its owner is by conjuring the most surprising and creative things it can itself conceive.
How else can you explain Beethoven’s Ninth, Picasso’s Guernica, and sculptures from Michelangelo’s Moses to the great and intricate Buddha of Kamakura, Japan. Why Fred Astaire, Kabuki Theater, James Joyce, Cirque du Soleil, Steve Jobs, Gregorian chant, and Avatar? In short, how do you explain all the seemingly impractical yet ubiquitous examples of human creativity and inventiveness?
Because the brain is invisible, unlike peacock feathers, it reveals its fitness by generating behaviors that are extra–ordinary, surprising, and impressive. To be surprising means to be different and unexpected, again, out–standing. To be impressive the behaviors have to be something others find difficult to do. The two together define creativity. The scale of human invention is broad and deep. It can encompass everything from the merely pleasing to stunning genius.
When you think about it, the brain’s capacity for generating captivating insights and behaviors is what makes each of us the unique people we are. We use it to fabricate the traits that define us—our wit, our charm, our drive, our insight, our humor and intelligence, our talent and interests. Some of us have been blessed with truly extraordinary gifts—Shakespeare, the ultimate storyteller; Leonardo, the ultimate imagineer; Einstein, the ultimate problem solver. The rest of us stake our ground somewhere between profound genius and a good one–liner.
Why is this need and appreciation for creativity so deeply plaited into us? Because the advantage of a brain that can do surprising, remarkable, or outrageously pleasing things is that it gets attention, or rather its owner does, and that attention can be translated into fame, influence, goodwill, leadership, sex, and, in modern society, money. Look at the people we admire or reward across all cultures. Dancers, singers, thinkers, comedians, actors, political leaders, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople, even an occasional scientist or journalist. (I am not including athletes here because we don’t reward them for their intelligence, though their intelligence may certainly contribute to their success.) All of these people display unusually fit brains because they are both inventive and able to effectively communicate their inventiveness. Whatever else we may think of them, we have to at least agree that they are not boring and or predictable. They stand out, and in standing out, they aggregate the most important human commodity of all—power.
We often think of power as a bad thing, possibly because it can be abused with depressing effect. But in nature acquiring power is crucial to survival. All living things seek it because without it they will die. Plants may acquire it in the form of nutrients from the soil and the sun. A silverback gorilla or bighorn sheep may acquire it with raw strength. With most animals power flows to them in direct proportion to how well the genes they inherited match their environment. Penguins would be powerless in the tropics, and Komodo dragons would be equally helpless in the arctic. Cheetahs maintain power with speed, wildebeests in numbers, and condors with flight.
But we humans apply our brains, not simply our genes, to acquiring power, and because we are so genial, we seek it not only to survive our physical environment, but our social one, too. Survival in a social context isn’t quite as literal as it is in a physical one. If you don’t survive physically, you die. If you don’t survive socially, it means you don’t matter, and that is, in it’s own way, also deadly.
Mattering is itself relative because in today’s world we can live in a wide variety of social circles. We can’t all matter as much as those examples I mentioned earlier, Aristotle or Confucius or Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Shakespeare—people whose creativity made an indelible mark on human history. But we can matter to our city or officemates or family or Facebook friends—the modern equivalents of the tribe—and that is important because how we stand with our tribe deeply affects how we feel about ourselves. Today we can even have multiple tribes to c
hoose from, and the World Wide Web allows us to create instant new tribes to whom we can display our cerebral fitness. The important thing is that we matter, to someone. Because if we don’t, the alternative is chronic depression, or worse.
Creativity isn’t the only way we strive to matter and gain power, but it’s the most functional, sensible way. It doesn’t require greed or jealousy, envy or outright violence, all of which can be highly effective, if immensely damaging, methods for gaining power. But these don’t reveal a fit brain. Creativity does. It is the most impressive way to earn the attention of others. And thankfully, over the long haul, it works; otherwise it would long ago have been swept from the index of our behaviors. We would be without art, music, and dance; there would be no pyramids at Giza, no Taj Mahal, no Brahms, Voltaire, Goethe, Yeats; only brutality and violence, and therefore, very likely, no humans.
The idea that the foundations of human civilization are largely an unintended consequence of complex brains wired to draw attention to their owners is both paradoxical and startling. Brains did not evolve to be creative, they are creative by the accident of evolution. And in becoming so, the exciting and innovative sideshow that bubbled up from our primal need to matter to the opposite sex, our competitors, loved ones, and everyone else in our tribe eventually took center stage. Now, after thousands of years of our brains’ showing off, we find ourselves enmeshed in this massively complicated, rich, and remarkable thing called human culture, sometimes revealing the evil in us, sometimes the divine, but always surprising and innovated because we have become utterly incapable of living without originality. There is no getting around the conclusion that creativity, though it may once have been evolutionary filigree, has become the force that defines our species, and the behavior that separates us from all other living things.
As creative as we are, we haven’t yet solved the elusive question of when, or how, we managed to get this way. It’s not as though evolution one day snapped its fingers and we were smitten. The cerebral infrastructure that makes such a thing possible has been long in the making. Nevertheless, evidence of human creativity in the sense we are talking about has been scarce until quite recently, if you can consider recently within the past seventy thousand years. It’s true tools and other technologies had been around millions of years, and they require creativity, but they are not examples of self–expression or symbolic thinking the way a piece of sculpture, a painting, language, or a song are. The timing of this matters because creative self–expression of this kind only became possible when our brains reached a certain critical, but as yet undefined, level. Its emergence marks a watershed event in human evolution, arguably the watershed event.
Most paleoanthropologists agree, for the time being at least, that Homo sapiens emerged 195,000 years ago. By this they mean creatures that were anatomically modern—they looked like us. The oldest Homo sapiens fossils were found in Ethiopia in 1961, but sadly no trace of symbolic thinking was found with them, no tangible demonstrations of brain fitness. This has created the underlying suspicion among scientists that though these people looked like us, they may not have acted altogether like us. They made tools that were incrementally better than the tools of those who came before them. They certainly lived rich and complicated social lives. But all the fossil and genetic evidence indicates that mostly they still roamed the same grasslands in East Africa, hunting game and struggling to survive, as so many of their ancestors before them.
For over a hundred thousand years the first of our kind lived this way, resembling you and me physically, and perhaps in many ways emotionally, but apparently not mentally. It was as if the brain had reached regulation size, but hadn’t yet completed all the wiring and biological alchemy needed to summon up a mind that saw the world quite the way we do. This has been a gnarly problem for scientists because you cannot fathom the minds of creatures with whom you haven’t the luxury of sitting down and talking.
Around seventy–two thousand years ago, on December 27 in the Human Evolutionary Calendar, we begin to see the evidence of a change in what might have been a hotbed of rapid human, intellectual development—those coastal cave communities of South Africa where, according to Curtis Marean, small Homo sapiens communities found themselves within a gnat’s eyelash of total annihilation.
At Blombos Cave the evidence tells us that a small handful of Homo sapiens were decorating tiny nodules of hematite, a kind of iron rock, with geometric designs, cross–hatchings that may have represented some kind of symbol, still indecipherable to us. In the same cave, but later in time, scientists have also unearthed perforated ornamental shell beads, arguably the first evidence of human–made jewelry. These discoveries were made in the 1990s and early 2000s, but then in 2010 a team of paleoanthropologists reported finding nearly three hundred fragments of decorated ostrich eggs in the Diepkloof Rock Shelter, another South African cave complex. Each shell is sixty thousand years old, and each was painstakingly etched with precise crosshatched designs, proof, the team believes, that the people who made the markings considered them important symbols. If this theory is correct, the cross–hatchings found on rocks twelve thousand years older may be more than meaningless doodles, as some scientists suspected when they were first found. Did they contain some secret message? Words, perhaps? Or calculations? An early form of sheet music, maybe? Or someone’s grocery tab? Their significance remains elusive, but enticing.
Despite these clues, and some scattered signs that Neanderthals in Europe had attained a semblance of symbolic thinking, the evidence for creativity of the indisputably modern human variety doesn’t begin to appear until around forty thousand years ago, and by then the evidence is both stunning and global. By this time Homo sapiens had made their way out of Africa for good and were busily populating Europe, east and south Asia, and making their way through Indonesia clear to northern Australia. There on the rock walls of Australian caves, ancient humans began to paint symbolic figures and animals, having improved, perhaps, on the creative habits of their ancestors from Africa who had found and used ocher or cryptically symbolized their feelings and insights on the shells of ostrich eggs.
Afterward more proof of symbolic thinking begins to surface. Archaeologists have found small but remarkable sculptures, sometimes of penises, but more often of large–breasted, pregnant women carved by talented artists, beginning thirty–five thousand years ago. They call these Venus figurines because they seem to be talismans of fertility, a trait undeniably crucial to a species who certainly found strength in numbers, but whose life spans rarely reached beyond their thirties. Most of the objects are small and portable, custom–made, perhaps, for magically connecting with the mysterious forces of nature. From Western Europe to Siberia anthropologists have found these small sculptures, and along with them figurines of chimeras—half–human, half–animal—all astonishing indications of a mind unlike anything the powers of life had produced in the long course of their 3.8 billion years of existence. Creatures that could not only imagine other worlds, beings, and forces, but express their imaginings, in the hope, somehow, that they could tap the strength of those mysteries.
Some of the most breathtaking art was created by the Leonardos and Michelangelos of their time deep in caves in Lascaux and Chauvet, France, and Altamira, Spain, as the last great ice age began to release its frigid grip on Europe. These images would be the envy of art galleries around the world today, or Madison Avenue marketeers—rich, vibrant, and ingenious. You can almost see them move and ripple in the flickering firelight that once illuminated the cave walls as the Cro–Magnon artists stood with their palettes of primordial paints and dyes, dabbing the walls, extracting the beasts from their minds and applying their images to the rock. What powerful magic this must have been to the painter and those who witnessed the work. How could any creature imagine such things and then make them appear right before your very eyes? What hidden powers could enable a living thing to consciously and purposefully create beauty out of nothing more than the popping
of the synapses in his head?
So far more than 150 caves have been found in Western Europe, primal cathedrals where the walls have been saturated with the conjurings of artist humans showing off the startling fitness of their brains. We can only imagine how revered people like these must have been, made powerful because from their fingers flowed the symbols of the beasts that fed and clothed and killed these itinerant hunters. How out–standing they must have seemed.
The purpose of these paintings remains a mystery. Colored footprints of both children and adults that show up on the floors of some caves signify, for some, that rites of passage were performed here as boys made their transition to manhood, or girls became capable of bearing children. Others seem to have been a kind of play school for ancient human children dabbling in the art of art.
Some have wondered if the images became a way to control the creatures they depicted, or to draw out and drink in their predatory strength. Maybe these were the theaters of their day, where great stories were told of heroes and their exploits, or a place where men hunted, virtually, in a kind of primeval video game, imagining with their paintings the ways they would bring down prey when, at last, the long and punishing winters ended. Strangely, the cave paintings almost never depict a human form, and when they do, the figures are sticklike, as if humans are minor players in a larger drama. Are these the remnants of a creeping epidemic of human creativity, isolated breakouts of beauty? Are they examples of a new kind of mind, self–aware, curious, and brimming with ideas and emotions, that had no choice but to express itself for the pure joy of it, like a child playing with crayons, or a graffiti artist saying, “I’m here! And I matter.”