“SINCE THE DAYS of cave painting, art has only degenerated,” Miró said. Miró believed that by the Stone Age art had already evolved as a fully formed human instinct, since when it has not progressed. Different styles have emerged over the millennia, of course, and new tricks such as perspective learnt, but human beings paint instinctively because the deep structure of art is innate (as innate, indeed, as the deep structure of language that Noam Chomsky described).

Darwin linked art to nakedness. On his travels in the tropics Darwin met many Stone Age tribes, and he noted that they all painted, tattooed, pierced, clothed and decorated themselves. Closer to home, the Picts of Scotland were so named because their bodies were pictures. Because of the ubiquity of body art, Darwin proposed that we lost our hair to paint our bodies, and that only later had we transferred that skill to decorating cave walls.

Alfred Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, did not concur. He agreed with Darwin that human nakedness has no survival value — a bare skin is vulnerable to cold and sun — but precisely because our nakedness is absurd, he argued that it proved the existence of God. Darwin was disappointed, writing in a catty footnote in Descent of Man that: “Mr Wallace believes ‘that some intelligent power has guided or determined the development of man’ and he considers the hairless condition of the skin as coming under this head.”

The scientific evidence supports Darwin. Most mammals possess only one species of louse, but we have three (scalp, pubic and body lice). Biologists have long reasoned that they evolved from a common ancestor when we lost our body hair and evolved three unique patches of hair. And the recent DNA dating work of Mark Stoneking and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig shows that our three lice separated from each other about 70,000 years ago, which dates our body nakedness to then.

And the earliest known art, the stone ochre carvings and sea-shell necklaces from the Blombos Cave in South Africa, recently discovered by Christopher Henshilwood of the State University of New York, are also dated to 70,000 years ago, thus supporting Darwin’s hypothesis that art and nakedness co-evolved.

Art is not unique to human beings. From the peacock’s tail to the flowers in the fields, flora and fauna have for aeons used art to attract animals, generally for sex. The male bower birds of Australia even decorate their bowers with bunches of flowers to attract females, and Congo, a chimpanzee who lived in London Zoo in the 1950s, painted more than 200 works; Miró collected his paintings, one of which sold for £14,400 earlier this year. But about 70,000 years ago the artistic instinct seems suddenly to have exploded in humans, and we lost our bodily hair to paint and decorate ourselves in uniquely creative ways. Why? For sex of course; but for a specially human type of sex — intelligent sex.

We find intelligence sexy because it translates into wealth and power. Repeated surveys have shown that the more intelligent a person is, the better is that person’s health, wealth and social standing. And because intelligence is linked to wit and creativity, the person who decorates their body in the most creative, charming or amusing way is signalling their intelligence and thus their attractiveness.

This month Miriam Law Smith, of St Andrews University, showed that girls awash with oestrogen are sexy. The higher the levels of a girl’s oestrogen, the larger are her eyes, the fuller her lips and the smaller her nose. Men like that sort of thing, and because oestrogen also promotes fertility it is called an “honest” biological signal: it attracts men to women who are genuinely fertile. But Miriam Law Smith also found that women with low oestrogen who used make-up shrewdly could fool men into finding them as attractive as their more fertile sisters. Art and IQ, in short, are mightier than the hormone.

Art, artifice, artisan . . . it was the Romantic Movement that rescued art from the mundane, because for millennia we humans treated artists as commonplace or even deceiving. But the Romantics were right; we all possess to differing degrees an artistic instinct, but it is also a killer instinct — a lady-killer instinct.





The author is Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University

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