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BELL_TOLLING

                                             August   31, 2012
                                             December  5, 2013

Julian Bell, in his review of Dutton,
is largely interested in a gotcha            PEACOCKS_IN_FIGHT
concerning the rate of evolution,
and the timing of our aquisition of
language.

Roughly, he wants to argue that since
storytelling relies on the language
capability, if you want storytelling
to be critical to our evolution, the          Bell may be falling into a trap
time period for that to happen has to         that I fear people with humanist
be compressed too much, into the period       backgrounds are prone to: in
after we've acquired language.                introductions to evolution, much
                                              emphasis is placed on how *slow*
Bell states his case:                         it is-- a gradual accumulation of
                                              tiny changes over a long period
  "But from them he draws a striking          of time.   While that's true
  statistic on which to erect his             in outline, there's no reason to
  arguments about art's evolution.            be dogmatic about this "speed
  Almost all we know of the arts comes        limit".  Genetic changes can
  from the five hundred-odd generations       accumulate quickly under unusual
  between the beginnings of civilization      circumstances (such as an
  and the present-- surely too little         artificial breeding program), and
  time for large-scale adaptations in         natural circumstances may apply
  behavior to occur. But human beings         more or less pressure for change
  have in fact been evolving through a        at different times.
  good 80,000 generations, since the
  dawn of the Pleistocene era 1.6
  million years ago."

  "That span is ample to permit many an
  adaptive feature to imprint itself on
  the brain-- notably a disposition
  toward certain sorts of landscape,
  Dutton starts by suggesting, and a
  disposition toward creating
  fictions. Fiction entails holding in
  suspense the actuality and the use
  value of objects, so that we start to
  appreciate their potential beauty."

  "... one might beg for some
  clarifications.  'Fiction,' a central
  component of Dutton's hypothesis-- the
  underpinning, seemingly, of our sense
  of beauty-- he repeatedly equates with
  'storytelling,' something that would
  seem to require grammatical language;
  but grammatical language, the majority
  of human evolutionists agree, is
  unlikely to have predated the
  emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens, our        Graphic art first,
  own subspecies, some 160,000 years            Then language,
  ago, which would reduce Dutton's              Then linguistic art.
  available time for all the adaptations        Why not?
  needed to sustain the arts to a mere
  8,000 generations, rather than
  80,000. But then his sketch of an
  explanatory 'theory' is shot through
  with strategic vaguenesses. [4] "


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