Aesthetic Preferences: An Evolutionary Approach

Contradiction That Never Was: Epigenesis versus Modularity in Evolutionary Aesthetics

“…At the same time, I remain reserved toward the rhetoric that this would or should be a turn away from evolutionary psychology, as coevolutionary aesthetics often positions itself. For example, Portera and Bartalesi position themselves against evolutionary psychology in evolutionary aesthetics by opposing a strong innateness of aesthetic cognition and appealing to the uselessness of the nature/nurture dichotomy: «We will argue that the EP and EA way of understanding the relationship between nature and culture -nature being innate and universal and culture being acquired, local, and contingent -is not the best way to try to explain the development of aesthetic preferences» (Portera, Bartalesi [2016]: 380).…”

“…Although I agree with that there is a good reason to move on from and enrichen strictly nativist views in evolutionary aesthetics 11 , I find that Portera and Bartalesi paint an unnecessarily divaricate caricature of the mainstream evolutionary aesthetics scholars by stating they value adaptations higher than anything else affecting an aesthetic judgement: evolutionary psychologists -whose perspective currently prevails within the field of evolutionary aesthetics -conceive sexual and environmental preferences as innate, universal and species-specific, a sort of «universal basement» compared to which cultural differences are no more than superficial accidents. (Portera, Bartalesi [2016]: 384) I take up a counterexample from a major branch of evolutionary aesthetics focusing on storytelling. According to literary Darwinist Joseph Carroll, claiming that evolutionary psychology ignores anything else but adaptations is an unhappy misunderstanding, which requires constructing an erroneous view that learnt behavior and evolutionarily adaptive behavior could be separated from each other (Carroll [2012]: 408).…”