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Comment by awt | Hacker News Reader

This is insightful. Along the line of discussing what art is really about (not money), I would say that it is about sex. Art will not go away if it's no longer possible to become a millionaire doing it. Some evolutionary psychologists propose that art is a never ending game of creative one-upmanship. Women find creative men sexy, men find creative women sexy (the reasons for this are complex and have to do with the mechanics of sexual selection -- I won't go into it here). How do you show people that you're creative? Entertain them. Make them laugh. Make them think. Make a movie, make a song, write a book. Recommend a movie, recommend a good book. You might not get a million bucks out of it, but you might get a husband or a wife. The real game is helping people show their creativity.

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I don't think it's about sex, the answer is a lot less Freudian and a lot more obvious: it's about the joy of being able to make an imprint on another human being's mind & soul. It's as old as humanity itself is.

Who said anything about Freud? In any case, you need to ask yourself why it feels good to make an imprint on another human being's mind and soul. There is a reason. It's not random or unexplainable.

If your original proposal were strictly true, then artists would never perform for the same gender (unless that was who they wanted to attract).

It may be aimed at establishing oneself within the hierarchy - which happens all over the animal kingdom.

I agree. I would add that if I want to impress a girl, I might buy tickets to a concert by a great artist. If she's impressed, I get a fraction of attractiveness credit with the girl just by having the ability to recognize good stuff. This doesn't preclude me from personally enjoying the show as well.

Why not? It gives social status, popularity... all good for attracting a mate, especially for men.

This brings up an interesting topic: can a rational person do anything that's not for the purposes of ego, or to be more polemic, sex? Hypothetically, if one were to be completely ego-free and also rational, they would have to reconcile that their work and their productions here on earth, are infinitesimal and perhaps negligible on the scale of galaxies. Surely, all human motivations break down at that level, and for a person to continue to be productive, they must admit to the level of "i'll produce something here on earth, that will a.) give me attention (and hence a chance at a more lovely significant other), b.) money (so that I may live comfortably and have a better chance in the future to achieve 'a'." To even claim altruism is to use the adjective to positively light one's ego, no? True altruism would have to function under "rather than doing nothing, i shall do something good, but 'I' do not exist", and under the course of 80 years, any person would succumb to a more aesthetically pleasurable life.

Somethings are beautiful. Some people want to see those things. Someone the things don't exist yet, and so the people create them.

To even claim altruism is to use the adjective to positively light one's ego, no?

No.

This reductionism has no explanatory power. You might as well say "all egoism boils down to the benefit of the other because personal benefit benefits humanity/the universe at large. Therefore all reduces to altruism." You can pick any explanation and say "in the heart this boils down to X". If you have no special reason for choosing X (which is evident if you can explain just as much with Not-X), all such explanations are equally worthless.

There are many options other than believing that a human life divided by infinite space approaches zero.

The worst fallacy of modern times: that everything comes back to the ego.

I have no idea what you mean by a "more aesthetically pleasurable life," except that apparently it's a bad thing, but if we all truly accepted our insignificance (in the face of the cosmos, God, love, whatever) and that we often do "altruistic" things out of self-interest rather than love and compassion, the world would be an amazing place.

There are many reasons why it feels good, many of which have nothing to do with sex. For example, creating things asserts one's existence and, by feeling alive, one is able to avoid thinking about your own mortality, if even for a moment. Having another person acknowledge your creativity or your work has all kinds of positive effects not having to do with sex. People trying to shoehorn motives into sex (or tangential things that lead to sex as a way to point to sex as the root motivator) are wrong.

I think there's a bit of confusion about what we're talking about when we say "sex." I'm not talking about the conscious desire to have sex. When I talk about sex, I'm talking about sexual selection which is the competition between members of the same species for sexual partners over many generations.

I'm not talking about the conscious motives of individual artists. Their conscious motives for creating art may be to "assert [their] existence," as you say.

I would argue that all of our physical and mental traits have arisen from the process of natural and sexual selection. If you accept that, you can also accept that over the generations, we have evolved the ability to be artistic, in many different ways. An individual who has inherited the ability to create good art, and does so, may not (and probably is not) creating art with the conscious goal of using it to attract sexual partners. However, if individuals of the opposite sex do find this ability (or side effects of this ability) attractive, they will be more likely to mate with the artistic individual, perpetuating the artistic genes. This is how I see art coming about because of sexual selection.

In my country we've got a saying: you're a nobody until you've raised a child, built a house and planted a tree.

There's an universal truth that won't go away soon: we are dying, second by second. We feel good when we "create" something meaningful as it prolongs our existence and it gives us happiness as suddenly we aren't breathing the air for nothing.

Creativity is about pleasure.

Of course, for some that reduces to the motives the parent comment is highlighting. For others, it is self gratification. And yet for others, it is to touch the divine.

By that line of thinking ( warning: i would punch an evolutionary psychologist anytime ), Porn should be considered the highest and most effective form of art (or simply, like monkeys we could jiggle our junk instead).

It seems like this line of reasoning perhaps conflates sexual arousal with attractiveness?

To illustrate, if you're looking to marry (and have kids), and you had a choice between a physically attractive but dull porno actress, and an attractive and intelligent writer (you know because she's fun to talk to and wrote a very popular book), you'd go with the porno actress?

Most porn I've seen isn't very creative, and being in a porno is not something I have on my checklist for attractive mates. I think that's true for most people. I would wager to say that the most effective form of art is the most creative, not the most sexually stimulating.

I will refrain from commenting on theories that resolve all moral decisions through reasoning about natural selection (as i said i am biased, and this is already off topic). Just this:

One study of the biographies of 1004 eminent people found homosexual and bisexual people overrepresented (11 percent of the sample), especially among poets (24 percent), fiction writers (21 percent), and artists and musicians (15 percent) (Ludwig, 1995)[1]

Surely if artistic creativity was evolutionarily so advantageous it wouldn't hide itself in the least-reproducing subpopulations

[1] http://www.davidmyers.org/davidmyers/assets/Sex-Orient-9e.pd...

Are bisexual people "non-reproducing" now?

People with non-mainstream careers are less likely to conceal their sexuality, and also the converse.

I'm not talking about natural selection, I'm talking about sexual selection, which is a completely different animal. Sexual selection leads to really bizarre adaptations, like male peacock tails and mating dances that seem maladaptive in the context of natural selection. Natural selection is about finding enough food to live long enough to mate. Sexual selection is about competing within the same species for mates.

Because slightly more highly creative people are homosexual doesn't necessarily mean creativity isn't attractive. It could just be that homosexuals have more time to devote creative tasks due lack of childcare responsibilities.

I would say that people often aren't consciously aware of why they are exhibiting creativity. On top of that, I would guess that homosexuals value finding mates just as highly as heterosexuals, which would be at least one reason why they would exhibit creativity, consciously or unconsciously.

Sexual selection also requires reproduction. Whatever way one sees it, the data doesn't support the view that nature selects for creativity.

Homosexuals also have eyes. Does this mean that nature doesn't select for eyes?

Let me put I bluntly if all homosexuals had third eye, it would never be selected for.

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