Nok sculpture (Nigeria), ca 400 BC

Science still calls for qualities that are unnatural. Information sponges that they are, children soak up what they need in order to understand the basics of their world or their language. They need not be taught how to speak or pretend play. But they do need slow formal instruction to read, write, or calculate, and they need even more training, and the help of externalized information (books, diagrams, models), to master the knowledge on which science builds. If they undergo the intensive training required to become scientists, they will still need imagination to find new ways of testing or re-explaining received knowledge. Even for those with training, looking for potential refutations of cherished ideas is both emotionally difficult and imaginatively draining, especially since we have an inbuilt confo9rmtion bias. And whereas art appeals to human preferences, science has to account for a world not built to suit human tastes or talents.

Unnatural selection though it is, science allows for the accumulation of advantageous variations and the rapid “evolution” of complex intellectual and technological design. Art works very differently. Many of its unnatural variations may not be intrinsically deeply valuable, even if they aim to appeal to human preferences. But some art is deeply valuable, and speaks profoundly to many, over long stretches of time or life, and across many cultures. Because art is primarily a process of variation -- although artists and audiences also select -- there is not the same ratcheted accumulation or better design that we meet in science. Hence art of thousands of years ago, like Homer’s or the Nok sculptures’, can be superior in a=many ways, as examples of creativity, to most works generated now, simply because Homer of the Nok craftsmen could appear to preferences that they understood deeply and that have not changed readily since their day. - 412