Tropical mormyrid fishes use electric pulses to orient and
communicate in opaque murky water, having evolved to high efficiency a
sensory modality entirely lacking in humans. Also, unfelt by us is
Earth’s magnetic field, which is used by some kinds of migratory birds
for orientation. Nor can we see the polarization of sunlight from
patches of the sky that honeybees employ on cloudy days to guide them
from their hives to flower beds and back.
Our greatest weakness, however, is our pitifully small sense of taste
and smell. Over 99 percent of all living species, from microorganisms
to animals, rely on chemical senses to find their way through the
environment. They have also perfected the capacity to communicate with
one another with special chemicals called pheromones. In contrast, human
beings, along with monkeys, apes, and birds, are among the rare life
forms that are primarily audiovisual, and correspondingly weak in taste
and smell. We are idiots compared with rattlesnakes and bloodhounds. Our
poor ability to smell and taste is reflected in the small size of our
chemosensory vocabularies, forcing us for the most part to fall back on
similes and other forms of metaphor. A wine has a delicate bouquet, we
say, its taste is full and somewhat fruity. A scent is like that of a
rose, or pine, or rain newly fallen on the earth.
We are forced to stumble through our chemically challenged lives in a
chemosensory biosphere, relying on sound and vision that evolved
primarily for life in the trees. Only through science and technology has
humanity penetrated the immense sensory worlds in the rest of the
biosphere. With instrumentation, we are able to translate the sensory
worlds of the rest of life into our own. And in the process, we have
learned to see almost to the end of the universe, and estimated the time
of its beginning. We will never orient by feeling Earth’s magnetic
field, or sing in pheromone, but we can bring all such information
existing into our own little sensory realm.
By using this power in addition to examine human history, we can gain
insights into the origin and nature of aesthetic judgment. For example,
neurobiological monitoring, in particular measurements of the damping
of alpha waves during perceptions of abstract designs, have shown that
the brain is most aroused by patterns in which there is about a 20
percent redundancy of elements or, put roughly, the amount of complexity
found in a simple maze, or two turns of a logarithmic spiral, or an
asymmetric cross. It may be coincidence (although I think not) that
about the same degree of complexity is shared by a great deal of the art
in friezes, grillwork, colophons, logographs, and flag designs. It
crops up again in the glyphs of the ancient Middle East and Mesoamerica,
as well in the pictographs and letters of modern Asian languages. The
same level of complexity characterizes part of what is considered
attractive in primitive art and modern abstract art and design. The
source of the principle may be that this amount of complexity is the
most that the brain can process in a single glance, in the same way that
seven is the highest number of objects that can be counted at a single
glance. When a picture is more complex, the eye grasps its content by
the eye’s saccade or consciously reflective travel from one sector to
the next. A quality of great art is its ability to guide attention from
one of its parts to another in a manner that pleases, informs, and
provokes.
In another sphere of the visual arts there is biophilia, the innate
affiliation people seek with other organisms, and especially with the
living natural world. Studies have shown that given freedom to choose
the setting of their homes or offices, people across cultures gravitate
toward an environment that combines three features, intuitively
understood by landscape architects and real estate entrepreneurs. They
want to be on a height looking down, they prefer open savanna-like
terrain with scattered trees and copses, and they want to be close to a
body of water, such as a river, lake, or ocean. Even if all these
elements are purely aesthetic and not functional, home buyers will pay
any affordable price to have such a view.
People, in other words, prefer to live in those environments in which
our species evolved over millions of years in Africa. Instinctively,
they gravitate toward savanna forest (parkland) and transitional forest,
looking out safely over a distance toward reliable sources of food and
water. This is by no means an odd connection, if considered as a
biological phenomenon. All mobile animal species are guided by instincts
that lead them to habitats in which they have a maximum chance for
survival and reproduction. It should come as no surprise that during the
relatively short span since the beginning of the Neolithic, humanity
still feels a residue of that ancient need.
If ever there was a reason for bringing the humanities and science
closer together, it is the need to understand the true nature of the
human sensory world, as contrasted with that seen by the rest of life.
But there is another, even more important reason to move toward
consilience among the great branches of learning. Substantial evidence
now exists that human social behavior arose genetically by multilevel
evolution. If this interpretation is correct, and a growing number of
evolutionary biologists and anthropologists believe it is, we can expect
a continuing conflict between components of behavior favored by
individual selection and those favored by group selection. Selection at
the individual level tends to create competitiveness and selfish
behavior among group members—in status, mating, and the securing of
resources. In opposition, selection between groups tends to create
selfless behavior, expressed in greater generosity and altruism, which
in turn promote stronger cohesion and strength of the group as a whole.
An inevitable result of the mutually offsetting forces of multilevel
selection is permanent ambiguity in the individual human mind, leading
to countless scenarios among people in the way they bond, love,
affiliate, betray, share, sacrifice, steal, deceive, redeem, punish,
appeal, and adjudicate. The struggle endemic to each person’s brain,
mirrored in the vast superstructure of cultural evolution, is the
fountainhead of the humanities. A Shakespeare in the world of ants,
untroubled by any such war between honor and treachery, and chained by
the rigid commands of instinct to a tiny repertory of feeling, would be
able to write only one drama of triumph and one of tragedy. Ordinary
people, on the other hand, can invent an endless variety of such
stories, and compose an infinite symphony of ambience and mood.
What exactly, then, are the humanities? An earnest effort to define
them is to be found in the U.S. congressional statute of 1965, which
established the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National
Endowment for the Arts:
The term “humanities” includes, but is not limited to,
the study of the following: language, both modern and classical;
linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy;
archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and
theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have
humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and
application of the humanities to the human environment with particular
attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history
and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of
national life.
Such may be the scope of the
humanities, but it makes no allusion to the understanding of the
cognitive processes that bind them all together, nor their relation to
hereditary human nature, nor their origin in prehistory. Surely we will
never see a full maturing of the humanities until these dimensions are
added.
Since the fading of the original Enlightenment during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, stubborn impasse has
existed in the consilience of the humanities and natural sciences. One
way to break it is to collate the creative process and writing styles of
literature and scientific research. This might not prove so difficult
as it first seems. Innovators in both of two domains are basically
dreamers and storytellers. In the early stages of creation of both art
and science, everything in the mind is a story. There is an imagined
denouement, and perhaps a start, and a selection of bits and pieces that
might fit in between. In works of literature and science alike, any
part can be changed, causing a ripple among the other parts, some of
which are discarded and new ones added. The surviving fragments are
variously joined and separated, and moved about as the story forms. One
scenario emerges, then another. The scenarios, whether literary or
scientific in nature, compete. Words and sentences (or equations or
experiments) are tried. Early on an end to all the imagining is
conceived. It seems a wondrous denouement (or scientific breakthrough).
But is it the best, is it true? To bring the end safely home is the goal
of the creative mind. Whatever that might be, wherever located, however
expressed, it begins as a phantom that might up until the last moment
fade and be replaced. Inexpressible thoughts flit along the edges. As
the best fragments solidify, they are put in place and moved about, and
the story grows and reaches its inspired end. Flannery O’Connor asked,
correctly, for all of us, literary authors and scientists, “How can I
know what I mean until I see what I say?” The novelist says, “Does that
work?,” and the scientist says, “Could that possibly be true?”
The successful scientist thinks like a poet but works like a
bookkeeper. He writes for peer review in hopes that “statured”
scientists, those with achievements and reputations of their own, will
accept his discoveries. Science grows in a manner not well appreciated
by nonscientists: it is guided as much by peer approval as by the truth
of its technical claims. Reputation is the silver and gold of scientific
careers. Scientists could say, as did James Cagney upon receiving an
Academy Award for lifetime achievement, “In this business you’re only as
good as the other fellow thinks you are.”
But in the long term, a scientific reputation will endure or fall
upon credit for authentic discoveries. The conclusions will be tested
repeatedly, and they must hold true. Data must not be questionable, or
theories crumble. Mistakes uncovered by others can cause a reputation to
wither. The punishment for fraud is nothing less than death—to the
reputation, and to the possibility of further career advancement. The
equivalent capital crime in literature is plagiarism. But not fraud! In
fiction, as in the other creative arts, a free play of imagination is
expected. And to the extent it proves aesthetically pleasing, or
otherwise evocative, it is celebrated.
The essential difference between literary and scientific style is the
use of metaphor. In scientific reports, metaphor is
permissible—provided it is chaste, perhaps with just a touch of irony
and self-deprecation. For example, the following would be permitted in
the introduction or discussion of a technical report: “This result if
confirmed will, we believe, open the door to a range of further fruitful
investigations.” Not permitted is: “We envision this result, which we
found extraordinarily hard to obtain, to be a potential watershed from
which many streams of new research will surely flow.”
What counts in science is the importance of the discovery. What
matters in literature is the originality and power of the metaphor.
Scientific reports add a tested fragment to our knowledge of the
material world. Lyrical expression in literature, on the other hand, is a
device to communicate emotional feeling directly from the mind of the
writer to the mind of the reader. There is no such goal in scientific
reporting, where the purpose of the author is to persuade the reader by
evidence and reasoning of the validity and importance of the discovery.
In fiction the stronger the desire to share emotion, the more lyrical
the language must be. At the extreme, the statement may be obviously
false, because author and reader want it that way. To the poet the sun
rises in the east and sets in the west, tracking our diel cycles of
activity, symbolizing birth, the high noon of life, death, and
rebirth—even though the sun makes no such movement. It is just the way
our distant ancestors visualized the celestial sphere and the starry
sky. They linked its mysteries, which were many, to those in their own
lives, and wrote them down in sacred script and poetry across the ages.
It will be a long time before a similar venerability in literature is
acquired by the real solar system, in which Earth is a spinning planet
encircling a minor star.
On behalf of this other truth, that special truth sought in literature, E. L. Doctorow asks,
Who would give up the Iliad for the “real”
historical record? Of course the writer has a responsibility, whether as
solemn interpreter or satirist, to make a composition that serves a
revealed truth. But we demand that of all creative artists, of whatever
medium. Besides which a reader of fiction who finds, in a novel, a
familiar public figure saying and doing things not reported elsewhere
knows he is reading fiction. He knows the novelist hopes to lie his way
to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage. The novel is
an aesthetic rendering that would portray a public figure
interpretively no less than the portrait on an easel. The novel is not
read as a newspaper is read; it is read as it is written, in the spirit
of freedom.
Picasso expressed the same idea summarily: “Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth.”
The
creative arts became possible as an evolutionary advance when humans
developed the capacity for abstract thought. The human mind could then
form a template of a shape, or a kind of object, or an action, and pass a
concrete representation of the conception to another mind. Thus was
first born true, productive language, constructed from arbitrary words
and symbols. Language was followed by visual art, music, dance, and the
ceremonies and rituals of religion.
The exact date at which the process leading to authentic creative
arts is unknown. As early as 1.7 million years ago, ancestors of modern
humans, most likely
Homo erectus, were shaping crude
teardrop-shaped stone tools. Held in the hand, they were probably used
to chop up vegetables and meat. Whether they were also held in the mind
as a mental abstraction, rather than merely created by imitation among
group members, is unknown.
By 500,000 years ago, in the time of the much brainier
Homo heidelbergensis, a species intermediate in age and anatomy between
Homo erectus and
Homo sapiens,
the hand axes had become more sophisticated, and they were joined by
carefully crafted stone blades and projectile points. Within another
100,000 years, people were using wooden spears, which must have taken
several days and multiple steps to construct. In this period, the Middle
Stone Age, the human ancestors began to evolve a technology based on a
true, abstraction-based culture.
Next came pierced snail shells thought to be used as necklaces, along
with still more sophisticated tools, including well-designed bone
points. Most intriguing are engraved pieces of ocher. One design, 77,000
years old, consists of three scratched lines that connect a row of nine
X-shaped marks. The meaning, if any, is unknown, but the abstract
nature of the pattern seems clear.
Burials began at least 95,000 years ago, as evidenced by thirty
individuals excavated at Qafzeh Cave in Israel. One of the dead, a
nine-year-old child, was positioned with its legs bent and a deer antler
in its arms. That arrangement alone suggests not just an abstract
awareness of death but also some form of existential anxiety. Among
today’s hunter-gatherers, death is an event managed by ceremony and art.
The beginnings of the creative arts as they are practiced today may
stay forever hidden. Yet they were sufficiently established by genetic
and cultural evolution for the “creative explosion” that began
approximately 35,000 years ago in Europe. From this time on until the
Late Paleolithic period over 20,000 years later, cave art flourished.
Thousands of figures, mostly of large game animals, have been found in
more than two hundred caves distributed through southwestern France and
northeastern Spain, on both sides of the Pyrenees. Along with cliffside
drawings in other parts of the world, they present a stunning snapshot
of life just before the dawn of civilization.
The Louvre of the Paleolithic galleries is at the Grotte Chauvet in
the Ardèche region of southern France. The masterpiece among its
productions, created by a single artist with red ocher, charcoal, and
engraving, is a herd of four horses (a native wild species in Europe at
that time) running together. Each of the animals is represented by only
its head, but each is individual in character. The herd is tight and
oriented obliquely, as though seen from slightly above and to the left.
The edges of the muzzles were chiseled into bas relief to bring them
into greater prominence. Exact analyses of the figures have found that
multiple artists first painted a pair of rhinoceros males in
head-to-head combat, then two aurochs (wild cattle) facing away. The two
groups were placed to leave a space in the middle. Into the space the
single artist stepped to create his little herd of horses.
The rhinos and cattle have been dated to 32,000–30,000 years before
the present, and the assumption has been that the horses are that old as
well. But the elegance and technology evident in the horses have led
some experts to reckon their provenance as dating to the Magdalenian
period, which extended from 17,000 to 12,000 years ago. That would align
the origin with the great works on the cave walls of Lascaux in France
and Altamira in Spain.
Apart from the exact date of the Chauvet herd’s antiquity, the
important function of the cave art remains uncertain. There is no reason
to suppose the caves served as proto-churches, in which bands gathered
to pray to the gods. The floors are covered with the remains of hearths,
bones of animals, and other evidences of long-term domestic occupation.
The first
Homo sapiens entered central and eastern Europe
around 45,000 years ago. Caves in that period obviously served as
shelters that allowed people to endure harsh winters on the Mammoth
Steppe, the great expanse of grassland that extended below the
continental ice sheet across the whole of Eurasia and into the New
World.
