The Aesthetic Niche

Stephen Davies has written a marvellously rich and detailed book. I cannot hope to cover all of the detailed argument in this short response. However, I do want to pick up on a couple of important themes and respond to them with some, I hope, helpful comments. Davies presents convincing arguments against the views of art as an adaptation or as a technology. I share Davies’ concerns about some of the arguments regarding the evolution of art, particularly those of some evolutionary psychologists. However, I present, in brief, an alternative to the adaptational and technology accounts that Davies rejects—which I call the aesthetic niche. I focus on the niche construction model and in particular what it tells us about behavioural and developmental plasticity in modern humans. I deploy these findings to an, admittedly brief, account of the aesthetic niche and, finally, I briefly speculate that neural circuitry adapted to non-aesthetic functions may be redeployed during development in the aesthetic niche.