The surprising evolutionary link between bowerbirds and human art

The Past — March 25, 2025

In his book, “Birds, Sex and Beauty,” Matt Ridley explores why learning isn’t always nature versus nurture.


Sexual selection may explain the origins of art in both bowerbirds and humans, challenging the conventional wisdom that human creativity is purely cultural. The Acheulean handaxe, used by Homo erectus for more than 1.5 million years with little variation, suggests that some cultural behaviors may have a stronger genetic basis than previously thought. The Baldwin effect demonstrates how learned behaviors can become partially inherited over time, suggesting that culture can sometimes drive genetic changes in human evolution.

Sexual selection may explain the start of art. As [Charles] Darwin put it in The Descent of Man: “The playing passages of bower-birds are tastefully ornamented with gaily-coloured objects; and this shews that they must receive some kind of pleasure from the sight of such things.” The satin and great bowerbirds courting females with bottle tops and chili peppers are of course driven mostly by instinct, says the conventional wisdom, while human beings have culture.

Hmm. I think both ends of that claim are partly wrong: People are driven more by instinct than we admit, and bowerbirds have more culture than we assume. Bowerbirds are unusually large-brained birds. The Cambridge zoologist John Madden surveyed the behaviors of bowerbirds and concluded that “despite a paucity of data in comparison with primate studies, it could be argued that bowerbirds may be considered to fulfill the same criteria on which we base our use of the term culture when applied to our close relatives, the great apes.” For example, a spotted bowerbird that found itself swept off course by a storm, ending up in satin bowerbird country, learned to collect blue items instead of its usual white, green, and red.

As for whether people have instincts, plenty of experiments show that people have innate tendencies and that the way these work is often through making people more likely to learn some things than others, so culture and instinct are not opposites, but work together. Nature operates via nurture, not versus it. As the anthropologist Joe Henrich has documented, this means, for instance, that when people make mistakes they tend to be in an adaptive direction such as mistaking safe animals for dangerous ones rather than vice versa. Learning is a means of evolving.

More:
https://bigthink.com/the-past/the-surprising-evolutionary-link-between-bowerbirds-and-human-art/