The arts in all their glory are no more remote from the evolved features of the human mind and personality than an oak is remote from the soil and subterranean waters that nurture and sustain it. The evolution of Homo sapiens in the past million years is not just a history of how we came to have acute color vision, a taste for sweets, and an upright gait.  It is also a story of how we became a species obsessed with creating artistic experiences with which to amuse, shock, titillate, and enrapture ourselves, from children’s games to the quartets of Beethoven, from firelit caves to the continuous worldwide glow of television screens.

—Denis Dutton

The late philosophy professor, editor, writer (and occasional provocateur) Denis Dutton spent a great deal of his professional life closing the gap between art and science. Continue reading →