ABSTRACT
At a stroke, natural selection deprived religious naturalism of its greatest single support beam. Darwin discovered a purely physical process that could generate biological organisms that function as though they had been consciously designed. Indeed, they were “designed,” but in a new sense: design by blindly causal rather than knowingly intentional processes. Today, biblical creationists still insist on the necessity of divine intention to account for at least some features of the natural world, for instance, the intricate purposiveness of a weaverbird’s nest or the human
eye. Anyone with a clear grasp of evolution is unlikely to find the creationist position interesting. But when it comes to applying evolution to the human mind and to cultural and artistic life-prime examples all of rational, intentional human planning and action-the issues of design and purpose reemerge all over again, though in ways not always appreciated even by sophisticated defenders of Darwinism. It is one thing to connect the structure and function of the immune system or inner ear to evolutionary principles. It is quite another to suppose that evolution might be linked to the paintings of Albrecht Dürer or the poetry of Gerard de Nerval. Darwin believed there were important connections between evolution and human artistic practices. Here I want to examine an important question: are the arts in their various forms adaptations in their own right, or are they better understood as modern by-products of adaptations?
