The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution, Neuroscience by Matthew Rampley, and: Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution by Michael Ruse (review)

Two new works—Matthew Rampley's The Seductions of Darwin: Art, Evolution, Neuroscience and Michael Ruse's Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution—ask an important question about Charles Darwin's legacy: is there a productive interplay between the methods and insights of evolutionary science and the humanities? Both answer in the negative, though for markedly different reasons.

In The Seductions of Darwin, Rampley provides a deeply thought-out, thorough, and trenchantly critical review of efforts to explain the function and history of art by Darwinian means. He divides such approaches into four broad categories: evolutionary accounts of aesthetics, natural selective or "mimetic" theories of cultural evolution, cognitive or "neuro" aesthetics, and general systems theory (85, 12). Along the way, Rampley canvasses a wide swath of scholars and thinkers, from usual suspects such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker, to literary evolutionists such as Franco Moretti and Brian Boyd. This breadth produces striking insights, including the likelihood that Dawkins's "memes" derive from earlier work by Abby Warburg on the inheritance of aesthetic "dynamograms" (51, 55). Throughout, Rampley firmly situates key concepts within a wide range of evolutionary and humanist fields (no mean feat in itself). He has provided a valuable and lasting index to the range of approaches to cultural evolution.

The Seductions of Darwin is also a relentlessly critical account of these efforts. If, like me, you come to Rampley's book already skeptical of current evolutionary accounts of culture, you will leave it further confirmed and better armed. Rampley raises three central criticisms. First, he rejects the "consilience" of the arts and sciences: a belief, often implicit in evolutionary or cognitive accounts of cultural practices, that a materialist approach might ultimately explain the construction, operation, and reception of things like landscape paintings or novels (4). Evolutionary accounts of art objects "simply create an additional descriptive layer," Rampley argues, one orthogonal to the questions of meaning and value important to art history (135). His second, related critique is that evolutionary frameworks, when derived from the longer evolutionary history of the human mind, lack the granularity to explain specific historical problems. If, over many thousands of years, our minds evolved certain capacities, this does little to explain the historical specificity of an artwork, or help to distinguish a preference for "Vermeer, Ad Reinhardt, Constable, or Greek phalanxes" (138). The third criticism involves a problem for evolutionary accounts in general, from Darwin's time to our own: the difficulty of showing that a plausible hypothesis about the value of some trait is the reason something evolved.

Rampley consistently raises the speculations of these "just-so" stories as a central problem for evolutionary accounts of art (34). Yet the challenge of substantiating plausible accounts seems to be a problem for historical explanation in general. Rampley draws a contrast between history's interest in the facts of historical process, and art history's focus on the value of the specific artifacts produced by that history. In practice, however, all fields of historical inquiry oscillate between the reconstruction of "nomological" patterns and the interpretation of "idiographic" evidence (2, 3). Moreover, this dynamic is central to evolution's "just-so" stories: historical reconstructions that posit the value of a given phenotype—interpreting the ways in which it might have helped the organism survive and multiply—and then attempt to prove that this value was, in fact, the selective "difference that made a difference" to its history (that last phrase is drawn from Gregory Bateson as qtd. in Rampley 109). Natural selection was notorious in Darwin's time, as in our own, for using an anthropomorphic agent of selection in order to imagine a collective agency that could judge the...