Is Art an Instinct or Did We Just Make It Up?

One thing I didn't expect when I started studying beauty is that the question "what is art?" turns out to be nearly unanswerable.

Not in a vague philosophical way. In a more concrete, "every definition people put forward quickly stops holding up" way.

A urinal in a museum. A banana duct-taped to a gallery wall. A literal can of the artist's feces, sold at auction for $360,000. A bed — just someone's actual, unmade bed — shortlisted for a major art prize and later sold for $3.7 million.

If you can't define art, can you study it scientifically? And if art is this universal human behavior that shows up in every culture we've ever found, does that mean something about it is already wired into the way our bodies and brains work?

Art is not the same thing as aesthetics

Before going further: art and aesthetics overlap, but they're not the same thing.

Aesthetics is the perceptual experience — the spectrum from beauty to ugliness, the feeling of "oh wow" or "oh yuck." You can have an aesthetic response to a sunset, a face, a well-designed coffee mug. None of those are art.

At minimum, art seems to be something humans make and present in a way that invites contemplation, interpretation, or argument, not just practical use. But even that starts to wobble fast, because the most interesting contemporary works are often built to break whatever framework you just settled on.

Every definition of art breaks

The book The Aesthetic Brain by Anjan Chatterjee walks through how every proposed definition of art runs into counterexamples:

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) — a urinal signed under a fake name — blew up the idea that art has to be skillfully made. Andy Warhol's Brillo Boxes broke the "art must be unique" definition. Andres Serrano's Piss Christ broke the "art must be reverential" assumption. Piero Manzoni's Artist's Shit broke... well, most assumptions.

More recent examples push even further:

• The Comedian — Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a gallery wall. Sold for $120,000-$150,000. Another artist ate the banana as "performance art."
• My Bed — Tracy Emin reassembled her actual unmade bedroom in a gallery. Sold for $3.7 million.
• Shall We Go Dancing — an installation of champagne bottles and a disco ball. Museum cleaners accidentally cleaned it up, thinking it was party debris.
• The glasses prank — someone set down eyeglasses on a museum floor as a joke. Visitors gathered around and took photographs, treating them as art.

The anti-essentialist view

Philosopher Morris Weitz argued that art simply cannot be defined with necessary and sufficient conditions. Two reasons:

1. Art is inherently revolutionary — any definitional box will be smashed by some artist. That's what artists do.
2. Family resemblance — borrowing from Wittgenstein, art objects share overlapping features but no single feature is absolutely required. Like members of a family — they look similar without sharing every trait.

One student proposed a different framework: art requires an agreement between the creator and the viewer. The artist proposes something as art; the viewer agrees to interpret it as art. If both sides of that agreement exist, it's art.

But then you realize: this means art is just "anything anybody thinks is art." Which is why it's so hard to study.

If we can't define it, why does every culture have it?

Here's the tension. Art resists definition, but it's universal. Every human culture ever documented produces art — visual, musical, narrative, performative. Children spontaneously draw, sing, dance, and tell stories without being taught. Archaeological evidence pushes artistic behavior back hundreds of thousands of years.

This is exactly what makes art different from something like writing or agriculture: if it were purely a cultural invention, you'd expect at least some cultures to lack it. But across the human record, that never seems to happen.

This universality is what leads some researchers to propose that art isn't a cultural artifact at all. It's an instinct.

Evolution 101: the toolkit you need

Before diving into the debate, a few evolutionary concepts:

Natural selection: the peppered moth story. Light moths survived on lichen-covered trees. When industrial pollution darkened the trees, dark moths survived better. When pollution eased, light moths came back. Traits that solve environmental problems get passed on.

Sexual selection: the peacock's tail. It hurts survival (heavy, conspicuous to predators) but helps reproduction because peahens prefer it. Traits that attract mates can be selected for even when they're costly.

Spandrels: by-products with no function. Bones are made of calcium because calcium is structurally strong. Calcium happens to be white. The whiteness serves no purpose — it just came along for the ride. Architecturally, the triangular spaces between arches (spandrels) had no structural purpose but eventually got decorated.

Exaptations: features that evolved for one purpose, then got repurposed. Feathers originally evolved for insulation. Later, they turned out to be useful for flight. The original function wasn't flying — that was a happy accident that got refined.

The key question for art: is it an adaptation (directly useful for survival or reproduction), a spandrel (a by-product of something else), or an exaptation (repurposed from another function)?

The instinct camp: Dutton, Miller, and Dissanayake

Denis Dutton: art as evolved instinct

Philosopher Denis Dutton argued in The Art Instinct (2009) that aesthetic taste is not socially constructed but an evolutionary trait shaped by both natural and sexual selection.

His most compelling evidence: Acheulian hand axes. These tear-drop-shaped stone tools were made by Homo erectus starting about 1.4 million years ago. They've been found across Asia, Europe, and Africa. Many show no evidence of practical use — no wear on their edges, some too large for butchering.

Dutton's argument: hand axes were the first works of art. They were displays of capacity — demonstrations of intelligence, motor control, planning ability, and access to resources. The better your hand axe, the more attractive you looked as a mate.

This is extraordinary because Homo erectus didn't have language. These objects may have communicated mate value for over a million years before humans could talk.

Dutton proposed that the art instinct evolved through two mechanisms:

1. Creative capacities for survival — storytelling and imaginative "what if" scenarios helped early humans plan for dangers without risking their lives. You didn't have to actually eat the poisonous berry — someone could tell you about it. Storytelling may have been one of the earliest forms of art precisely because it served a direct survival function.
2. Creative virtuosity for mating — the best creators attracted more mates (Geoffrey Miller's costly signal argument)

Geoffrey Miller: art as costly signal

Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller took the sexual selection angle further. Artistic efforts, he argued, are essentially courtship displays — the human equivalent of the peacock's tail.

The key concept is costly signaling. For a signal to be honest, it has to be expensive. A peacock that's starving and has bad genes can't grow a magnificent tail — the tail is an honest advertisement of health and genetic quality because it's costly to produce.

Art works the same way. Creating a beautiful sculpture, composing music, or mastering an instrument takes enormous time and cognitive resources. Someone who's struggling to survive isn't going to spend hours carving hand axes or practicing the violin. The very fact that you can waste time on art signals that you have resources to spare.

This connects to conspicuous consumption — purchasing things specifically for display. The car you drive (visible to everyone) versus the underwear you wear (visible to nobody). The sports car, the wedding ring, the designer bag — these are costly signals that advertise resources. Miller argues art originated from the same impulse.

The savanna hypothesis

Dutton also pointed to landscape preferences as evidence of evolved aesthetics. People across cultures — even children who have never visited Africa — prefer landscapes that resemble the East African savanna: open grasslands, scattered trees (especially ones that fork near the ground — climbable in emergencies), water visible in the distance, paths that invite exploration.

Studies with Austrian children showed they preferred savanna-like landscapes — sparse trees, low mountains — even having never visited one. After puberty, preferences shifted to include denser forests and higher mountains, modified by lived experience. But the baseline preference for savanna-type environments appears to be programmed in.

Ellen Dissanayake: making special

Ellen Dissanayake took a different angle. Her concept of "making special" (artification) frames art not as an object but as a behavior — the innate human tendency to give things significance beyond their original state.

Her most striking argument: the roots of art lie in mother-infant bonding. When human ancestors became bipedal, the narrowed pelvis meant babies had to be born earlier, more immature and dependent. Mothers developed ritualized behaviors — exaggerated facial expressions, repetitive sounds, rhythmic touching — to strengthen the bond. These behaviors use the same patterns as art: simplification, repetition, elaboration, exaggeration.

"Mothers make infants special" — and that impulse to make things special is the seed of all artistic behavior.

A caveat about "universality"

One important caution about claims of universality: a landmark paper called "The Weirdest People in the World" demonstrated that most psychology research has been conducted on Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) populations. Phenomena we assume are universal sometimes aren't when tested across cultures.

Even basic visual perception differs. The Müller-Lyer illusion — where lines with inward-pointing arrows look shorter than lines with outward-pointing arrows — is robust in Western populations but nearly absent among San foragers. One explanation: people in built environments with right angles everywhere use corner geometry as a depth cue, which distorts size perception. People who grew up without boxy buildings don't have this distortion.

If something as basic as line-length perception varies across cultures, we should be cautious about claiming aesthetic universals without cross-cultural evidence.

The by-product camp: Pinker and Gould

Steven Pinker: art as cheesecake

Steven Pinker offered the most famous counter-argument. Music, he said, is "auditory cheesecake" — an artificial stimulus that tickles pleasure centers evolved for other purposes.

Just as cheesecake exploits our evolved preference for scarce fats and sugars, art exploits our evolved capacities for language, emotional processing, visual analysis, and motor control. We didn't evolve for art any more than we evolved for cheesecake. Art is a delightful by-product.

Stephen Jay Gould: not enough time

Gould and Lewontin argued from a different angle: human culture is only about 10,000 years old. That's not enough time for substantial brain changes through selective pressure. Art must be a by-product of large brains that evolved to solve entirely different problems.

Art, in this view, is a spandrel — the decorative triangles between arches that had no structural purpose but got repurposed for beauty.

Who's right?

Chatterjee, the neuroscientist who wrote The Aesthetic Brain, lands somewhere interesting: "We do NOT have an art instinct." There's no dedicated aesthetic module, receptor, emotion, or cognition in the brain. Aesthetic experiences flexibly engage neural ensembles of sensory, emotional, and cognitive systems.

But — and this is important — that doesn't mean art is trivial. We don't have an instinct for reading or writing either, and nobody calls those trivial.

The Bengalese finch analogy

Chatterjee uses a fascinating analogy from ornithology. The white-rumped munia is a wild bird that produces a simple, stereotyped song — the same pattern every time, evolved for attracting mates and defending territory. Japanese breeders domesticated this bird (creating the Bengalese finch), selecting for plumage rather than song. Nobody cared about the song.

Something remarkable happened: freed from the survival pressure to produce the "correct" mating call, the Bengalese finch's song became more complex, more varied, more interesting. The wild munia cannot learn the domesticated finch's elaborate songs. But the Bengalese finch can learn the munia's simple one — it just doesn't need to.

The analogy to human art: evolution gave us the basic cognitive components — motor skills, emotional processing, pattern recognition, social cognition. When survival pressures relaxed (reliable food, shelter, social structures), these components became freer to combine in flexible, creative ways. Art isn't a separate instinct that evolved under pressure. It emerges when survival pressures ease and existing capacities start interacting more freely.

His conclusion: art is a chimera — "a messy collection of adaptations, spandrels, and exaptations, replete with modifications and plug-ins fashioned by historical episodes and cultural niches." Art germinates instinctually and matures serendipitously.

Having instincts for beauty does NOT mean having an instinct for art. Beauty is neither sensitive nor specific to art — conceptual art can be shocking without being beautiful, and beautiful sunsets are not art.

The baby dancing test

Here's a simple thought experiment that exposes where each theory lands. Watch a baby — barely old enough to stand — hear music and immediately start bouncing rhythmically. No training. No imitation. Just a tiny human moving to a beat.

• Dutton would say: innate pleasure from aesthetic experience, evolved as a biological imperative for group cohesion and mate signaling
• Miller would say: costly signal in training — demonstrating motor skills and energy expenditure that will eventually serve courtship
• Dissanayake would say: spontaneous art-as-behavior, innate appreciation for rhythm rooted in mother-infant bonding rituals
• Pinker would say: rhythm perception evolved for language and motor coordination; the baby is responding to the underlying capacities music exploits, not to "music" itself as an adaptation
• Chatterjee would say: basic rhythmic capacities are biological, but the song the baby dances to is a cultural artifact — biology provides the seed, culture provides the soil

A few things I'm taking away

• Art and aesthetics overlap but aren't the same — you can have aesthetic experiences without art, and art doesn't require traditional beauty
• Every proposed definition of art has been broken by some artist, which may be the point — art is inherently revolutionary and resists confinement
• The anti-essentialist view (no essential ingredients, just family resemblance) is the most honest framework, even though it makes scientific study harder
• Acheulian hand axes — beautifully crafted stone tools from 1.4 million years ago with no practical wear — may be the earliest art, functioning as fitness signals for mate selection
• The savanna hypothesis explains why people universally prefer landscapes with open views, scattered trees, and visible water — features of the environment where we evolved
• Dissanayake's "making special" argument traces art to mother-infant bonding — the same patterns of simplification, repetition, and exaggeration that mothers use with babies show up in art across cultures
• Pinker's "cheesecake" argument says art exploits capacities evolved for other things (language, emotion, motor control) rather than being an adaptation itself
• Chatterjee's synthesis is the most nuanced: art is a chimera — part adaptation, part spandrel, part exaptation, shaped by both biology and culture
• The fact that we can't define art doesn't mean we can't study it — it just means we need to be honest about the messiness of what we're studying

And the one that reframed everything for me: art germinates instinctually and matures serendipitously. The seed is biological. The flower is cultural. And trying to separate the two is like trying to separate the dancer from the dance.

Sources:

• Dutton, D. (2009). The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution. Bloomsbury.
• Chatterjee, A. (2014). The Aesthetic Brain: How We Evolved to Desire Beauty and Enjoy Art. Oxford University Press.
• Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. W. W. Norton.
• Dissanayake, E. (1995). Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why. University of Washington Press.
• Miller, G. (2000). The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. Doubleday.
• Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 205, 581-598.