This savanna in Tanzania is typical of the kind of landscape that helped shape early human evolution.

In the 1790s, artist Humphry Repton painted an idealized image of an English country garden, below, with a savannafied vista promising a safe human haven amid an otherwise foreboding forest landscape.

Not long ago in Africa, I camped in what seemed like one of the perfect places on Earth, at the edge of a stand of trees overlooking a floodplain. The stars were spangled across the sky in smoky clusters of light, and I lay in my tent listening to the distant rumble of lions and the doleful keening of jackals. In the morning, my companions and I squatted around an open fire and watched the night fade gradually into dawn on the open plain. It might have been 100,000 years ago, when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers. It might have been millions of years ago, when we were apes.

It felt like home, and the biologist I was visiting suggested that perhaps our evolution in a landscape like this had shaped much more than the way our hips articulate or our hands grasp. Maybe evolution  influences what we like, he said. Maybe we like glassy, sparkling surfaces because they suggest close proximity to water. Maybe we take comfort in a certain branchy tree shape because our Pleistocene forebears roosted in such trees at night for safety from predators. Perhaps things we regard as purely cultural and artistic—like the graceful way a ballerina’s ankle unbends when she is on point, in a way few men can manage—are actually products of anthropoid evolution. A woman’s ankle can rotate through a much greater arc, one biologist has suggested, because our early female ancestors had to stretch from one branch to another while foraging in the trees and bushes, whereas heavier-bodied males tended to stick to flat land.


The idea that there might be a natural history of aesthetics turned out, when I got home and began to read, to be more than idle campfire talk. Richard Coss, now a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis, largely invented the idea of evolutionary aesthetics in a paper he wrote 30 years ago as a young graduate in industrial design. Coss made the startling suggestion that we respond to art, and to our visual world, not just as aesthetes (or even Philistines) but as animals. Among other examples, he cited an abstract painting by Paul Klee, The Snake Goddess and Her Enemy. Coss noted that butterflies and other creatures often use false eyespots to produce alarm in predators. He suggested that Klee was eliciting an innate biological response in his viewers through similar “releasing mechanisms”—the S-shape of the snake and the use of a mask with two prominent eyes.

The idea of looking at art from the perspective of animal behavior also occurred to Gordon Orians at the University of Washington. Orians was studying how blackbirds choose where to live when he noticed that humans also select their habitat according to specific criteria, like the presence of water, large trees, open space, and distant views—criteria evoking the savanna where humans evolved. Moreover, when Orians asked test subjects to rate landscape paintings, they tended to prefer the ones that met those criteria. A John Constable landscape like Dedham Vale appeals to us, Orians argued, at least partly because it gives the viewer clues to finding resources and avoiding danger. Looking at it is an unconscious exercise in habitat selection: Could I live here? Is it safe to explore? Should I turn and run?

In Woman and Bird in the Moonlight, 1949, Joan Miró uses staring “eyes” to heighten the viewer’s sense of alarm.

The ideas pioneered by Coss and Orians have gained increasing currency. But to many people, the animal behavior perspective on art still seems like an affront to our idea of what it means to be human. We tend to think that few things are more individual than art, and it’s difficult to accept that our idiosyncratic tastes might have a common biological basis. Orians argued, for instance, that the celebrated landscape of the English country house was an unconscious attempt to recreate the environment of the African savanna. I tried this idea out recently on a British aristocrat, who replied, in a horrified tone, “No. The idea was to bring out the natural character of the English countryside.” But the means her family had employed over the centuries to achieve a “natural” effect at their house included cutting down forests to create open vistas, introducing water holes, and otherwise turning the grounds into a savanna.

The evolutionary perspective has also been slow to take hold because research on the biology of aesthetics tends to be fuzzier than scientists (and some art historians) might like. Orians, Coss, and others quantify preferences that are expressed both verbally and by such physiological measures as pupil size and blood pressure. Then they compare these preferences across cultures (and sometimes across species) to discern whether they are a product of nature or nurture. Skepticism is the typical reaction: A curator at one prominent museum argued that art is far more likely to be influenced by cultural developments, such as the invention of photography or the rise of Impressionism, than by evolution.

But biologists believe that ancient history—the rise and fall of different body types, survival strategies, and instincts for habitat—has a way of shaping the DNA, where it becomes a sort of ghostly puppeteer. In humans, the strings tying us to our past may stretch back to more than 2 million years ago. These strings take the form of innate propensities, things we do unthinkingly and without having to learn from our parents.  As in the Klee and Constable paintings, artists often unconsciously express these same propensities.

One of the most basic inherited propensities in animals is a tendency to select a habitat where past generations have thrived. For instance, prairie deer mice live only in the grasslands of the Midwest. When scientists rear them in isolation and give them a choice between grassland and other habitats, untutored youngsters almost always choose grassland. It is in their genes, and natural selection keeps it there. For most animals, including humans, an instinct for suitable habitat—a place that offers adequate food, breeding opportunities, and shelter—is the difference between life and death. Individuals in past generations who chose badly left fewer offspring to perpetuate their foolish ways. On the other hand, individuals with an instinct for choosing good habitat tended to produce more offspring, thus spreading their instincts through the population. What has gotten programmed into our genes as a result, says Orians, is an emotional or psychological response to good habitat—and also to paintings and photos of good habitat.

The eye pattern on an owl butterfly’s wings, top left, frightens off predators, while a similar pattern in wood, below left, causes instinctive unease in humans. The spots of a leopard, top right, and scales of a python, below right, also tend to make the human heart beat faster.

The pattern on the women’s gottex bathing suit comes from a venomous asian pit viper

Most animals appear to be biologically prepared to recognize highly specific indicators of good habitat. When yellow warblers arrive in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, each spring, the trees are still leafless and there’s snow on the ground. But the warblers seem to recognize by the shape and color of the bare willow branches that this will soon become good habitat. Likewise, when scientists offer cage-reared chipping sparrows both deciduous and coniferous branches, they perch on the coniferous ones, which are a cue to their ancestral habitat.

Even if having an eye for the right habitat is hardwired into the genes, individual animals can often ignore or alter these innate propensities, within limits. Peregrine falcons have evolved to nest on cliff faces. But if a falcon finds its way to New York City, which has no suitable cliffs, it doesn’t suddenly act like a robin and nest in a tree in Central Park. Instead it nests high up on the next best thing to a cliff—a Fifth Avenue apartment building overlooking the park. Biologists believe people adapt in much the same way. The tenants in that building make more elaborate nests than the falcon. But evolutionary biology suggests they are also embellishing on innate propensities: Humans and falcons alike choose their roosts for the same reasons—that is, the proximity of good habitat and a safe prospect from which to view it.

It is relatively easy to demonstrate that humans have a genetically prepared negative response to nature. For example, we know rationally that handguns and frayed electrical wires pose a greater threat in the modern world than snakes or spiders. But our evolution has prepared us to fear natural threats more viscerally, and these fears stay with us even though it may be thousands of years since deadly snakes or spiders were part of our daily lives. Scientists have conducted Pavlovian conditioning experiments in which subjects are repeatedly exposed to threatening images. Fear of handguns and frayed wires vanishes relatively quickly. But fear of snakes and spiders, as measured by heart rate and other autonomic nervous system activity, persists long afterward. It’s in our genes.

Demonstrating that we have a biologically programmed positive response to nature is more difficult, because we don’t respond as dramatically to something that’s not a threat. But numerous studies since the 1970s suggest the subtle power of natural scenery to heal both body and mind. Texas A&M researcher Roger Ulrich, for instance, has shown that people who watch a calming nature video after a stressful experience have markedly lower muscle tension, pulse, and skin conductance activity after less than five minutes. This translates into significant medical benefits. Ulrich monitored patients after gallbladder surgery and found that those assigned to a room looking out on trees needed far fewer painkillers than patients in rooms that faced a brick wall. Heart surgery patients in rooms with nature scenes on the wall experienced less anxiety and smoother recoveries than patients with blank walls or abstract art. Likewise, cosmonauts confined for months in outer space quickly lose interest in video programs and other diversions. They prefer to stare out the window at the untouchable Earth.