a friend of my mom's asked me the other day what to read on the relation of evolutionary biology to art. i didn't really have a good answer except perhaps "ben-ami scharfstein," but let me make a few remarks on this matter. i think that this sort of question is not actually scientific because it proceeds from an a priori assumption. take any given thing we do, in any way we conceive it, and it must have an explanation in terms of natural selection. putting it mildly, that is false. now this case is particularly acute. we are thinking of 'art' in terms of more-or-less-by-definition useless objects: art defined precisely as what is not practically useful, what you just stare rapt at; art really defined in its distinction from craft. this is a conception that dates from the 18th century, or at earliest the renaissance: obviously that's miniscule on an evolutionary scale. personally i would proceed precisely in terms of craft: skill in making things is obviously of the utmost practical value for the kind of organisms we are. thus the idea that skill in itself is admirable would be a sensible evolutionary-type development: more or less why we have these relatively elaborate central nervous systems. but it could be fantastically elaborated into an admiration of skill for its own sake, detached from practical applications. this, it seems to me, accounts for at least some of the value we place on art works that have no practical applications, or to extreme skill in sport or performance (say, sleight-of-hand magic or circus-type skills). if you conceive of art in terms of impracticality, it is an evolutionary puzzle. but if you conceive it as one of many sort of fantastical or arbitrary implications or side-effects of actual adaptations, it at least makes a certain sort of sense. on the other hand, such side-effects could end up being utterly counter-adaptive, as we fiddle while the world burns. then again, even if it were counter-adaptive or even universally fatal, it wouldn't follow that art isn't the meaning of life.