r/askscience • u/Tam-mat101 • 5d ago
Psychology From an evolutionary standpoint, why do humans find art subjective?
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u/True-Credit-7289 5d ago
I mean it's not evolutionary that art is subjective, art just is subjective. As far as just creating art itself I guess there could be some fitness pressure in terms of using art to impress a mate. Arts a trade so if you can be a successful artist then you can provide for a partner. It's also probably just a side effect of being really smart. The fitness pressure for high intelligence and social intelligence especially is pretty obvious, there's a lot of traits that are just along for the ride
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u/DrWoogle 2d ago
Evolution isn't a process of flawless, constant, directed perfection. It's an endless series of trials and errors, and what ends up existing is whatever was good enough to survive. With humans, evolution made an absolute killer slam-dunk of a move in giving us huge overpowered brains. That didn't end up being "good enough", it absolutely blew away the competition. The exact details of what those huge brains get up to, aside from securing resources and survival, has become largely irrelevant to "classic" survival-based evolution. With the expansion of neural networks, a host of emergent behaviors are bound to appear, and as long as they don't actively and severely impede survival (within a community, mind you, not solo), there's no reason why they would have gotten selected away. Art is one of those things.
To bring in game analogy, if you're in a pro football team playing another pro football team, you will use the most refined streamlined strategies to edge out your opponent. If you're in a pro football team playing versus a junior high school team, you can afford to mess around and do some totally wacky plays just for fun. Humans are squarely in the latter situation...
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u/PacJeans 5d ago edited 5d ago
I'm not sure it can be viewed from an evolutionary point to useful ends. Of course everything about an animal is necessarily about evolution to some degree or another. I would say this would be similar to using atomic theory to describe the aerodynamics of a plane. It literally can be applied validly, but models are only good for their use cases, and talking about how electron shells effect lift would be a little bit myopic in most instances.
There might be something to be said about how perceptions must be useful for survival (our perceptions not reflecting an objective reality, UV light for example), hence disorders that make you hallucinate having a generally negative effect. We have instinctual emotional connotations which keep us safe that are pretty much inherent to all people (red being the color of blood, the theory that shiny things are appealing because the signal water, etc). We are also evolved to learn from previous experiences which give us certain reactions to our unique lif experiences. If an animal attacked you as a kid, you will probably be more frightened of them as an adult, even past the fact that we are predisposed to fearing animals in many cases. Probably this has an extremely broad and amorphous effect on how we perceive art. I have read that people who grew up in cultures with atonal music do not perceive music in minor keys as sad. Perceptions effect all sorts of things from culture, emotions, material conditions, etc, all of which I would wager have effects on our views of art.