Reflections on Art Making and Evolutionary Psychology

This paper outlines a case for suggesting that all human beings have an innate need to create and confer aesthetic significance. It argues that beauty is important for us and that humans have an innate sense of aesthetic “rightness”; we confer aesthetic significance on a wide range of phenomena, but “art” has a particular role to play. Drawing upon the work of Denis Dutton and Ellen Dissanayake, a working definition of “art” from the perspective of evolutionary psychology is given, and an argument is presented based on the notion that art making (in its broadest sense) and its appreciation are inherited predispositions and are not necessarily culturally determined. The author contends that the thing that sums up our fundamental character is our innate capacity for creating and conferring aesthetic significance and that to deny young people the opportunity to do this would be to deny their essential humanity.