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Explaining Away Art

Attempts to explain art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of understanding.
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Writer and philosopher Roger Scruton says: “The attempt to explain art, music, literature, and the sense of beauty as adaptations is both trivial as science and empty as a form of understanding. It tells us nothing of importance about its subject matter, and does huge intellectual damage in persuading ignorant people that after all there is nothing about the humanities to understand, since they have all been explained — and explained away.” “The whole ‘adaptation’ approach to human phenomena is topsy-turvy. It involves a mechanical application, case by case, of the theory of natural selection, as supplemented by modern genetics.

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