Gottlieb, Anthony. "The Descent of Taste." NEW YORK TIMES January 29, 2009.

Dutton, Dennis. The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Dutton is a professor of the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, and the founder and editor of a popular Web site, Arts & Letters Daily. The ideas that are his starting point come from a form of evolutionary psychology that began to catch on in the 1990s. When you hear it claimed that some bit of human behavior is explained by the fact that we are genetically hard-wired to succeed and breed in a Stone Age environment, that — in its crudest, popularized form — is evolutionary psychology. Its terrain is full of pitfalls, and I suspect that Darwin would have been skeptical of it. We know so little about the environment of our Pleistocene ancestors, what they were like, and how they lived, that almost any hypothesis about which strategies might have helped them to reproduce, and thus let their characteristics ripple through the gene pool, is bound to be highly speculative. In addition, the story told by mainstream evolutionary psychology may both start too late and stop too early. When Darwin himself ventured into psychology, with his study of the expression of emotions, he cast his net far wider and looked at the distant common ancestors that humans share with other species. If he was right to do so, the origins of some human psychology may be older than the Stone Age. And evolution is now reckoned to be capable of working faster than was thought in the 1990s: it may well be that the wiring of our minds continues to develop. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/books/review/Gottlieb-t.html?_r=1&ref=review.