Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

by Brian Greene

Evolution has surely coaxed us toward a raft of behaviors aimed at increasing our biological fitness, from finding food, securing mates, and ensuring safety to establishing alliances, fending off adversaries, and instructing progeny. Heritable behaviors that, on average, resulted in greater reproductive success spread widely and became the go-to mechanisms for surmounting particular adaptive challenges. In shaping some of these behaviors, one carrot evolution wielded was pleasure: if you find particular survival-promoting behaviors pleasurable, you will be more likely to undertake them. And by virtue of their survival-promoting qualities, these behaviors will increase the likelihood that you’ll stick around long enough to reproduce, endowing future generations with similar behavioral tendencies. Evolution thus generates a collection of self-reinforcing feedback loops that renders pleasurable those behaviors that enhance fitness. In Pinker’s view, the arts cut the feedback loops, sever adaptive benefits, and directly stimulate our pleasure centers, yielding gratifying experiences that from an evolutionary perspective are unearned. We like how the arts can make us feel, but neither creating nor experiencing them makes us more fit or appealing. From the standpoint of survival, the arts are junk food.