Why I love Google alerts

I've just received a couple of emails from the art philosopher Dennis Denis Dutton. I'd love to pretend that they were a lofty exchange of high thought, but in fact they were simply kindly pointing out that I'd stupidly spelt his first name wrong in a review of his book  I'd just posted on the RSA Arts & Ecology website, but thanking me anyway for it.

I've just received a couple of emails from the art philosopher Dennis Denis Dutton. I'd love to pretend that they were a lofty exchange of high thought, but in fact they were simply kindly pointing out that I'd stupidly spelt his first name wrong in a review of his book  I'd just posted on the RSA Arts & Ecology website, but thanking me anyway for it.

That I received the first email within two hours of the reivew being posted shows that Google alerts is a remarkable thing and that, after a year or so writing and researching a book, authors know that the moment they're published most books disappear into a kind of strange unpeopled void and so any evidence that anyone at all has read them is gratefully received. It's also gratifiying to know that a review doesn't go unnoticed, for that matter.

Recessions make people wonder what the value of things is. Art for instance. As the fine art market takes a dive, Emma Ridgway opened the question below with her post on the art markets. Well, here's another way of looking at it for you. What if art has a purpose? An evolutionary purpose. This is the idea developed by contrarian Denis Dutton. Dutton proposes the idea that an understanding of art is hard-wired in us. It is crucial for our survival, and is fundamental to our society.

Firstly art has a function in evolutionary adapation. Art gave homo sapiens an advantage over other species in not only empowering us to be able to imagine the possibility of food and shelter elsewhere – but also lending us the means to inspire others with that vision. Dutton believes the whole tradition of landscape painting drips with this kind of Pleistocene longing for the better place.

Secondly it is the human equivalent of the peacock's feather. For Darwin, the ridiculously cumbersome plume was a conundrum which threatened to bring down then whole idea of evolutionary adaptation he'd proposed in The Origin of Species. Survival of the fittest? Why would a species make itself more cumbersome and flightless?

And then he realised those gaudy arse-feathers served a very different purpose. The peacock's strut is actually a blaring signal that the male is healthy and genetically functional. The female sexually selects the male by its display.

Art too is a type of display. If you doubt this, ask any 18-year-old male why he has formed a rock band. Nine times out of ten the answer will be procreative rather than musical. (Dutton's examples are a little more elegant than that one.)

Like most people smitten by evolutionary biology, Dutton takes this idea way too far, but it's interesting to think about art in terms of its utility in communicating otherness - something which Dutton demonstrates excellently. If art — as we strongly believe at the RSA Arts & Ecology Centre — has a part in communicating the thought that we can live differently from how we live today, Dutton's book supports the thesis that art has played a central role in doing this in the past.

Of course Dutton would probably balk at such a purpose himself. He's a been a climate change sceptic in the past, and enthusiastically reviewed Bjorn Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist in The Washington Post some years ago. But as I suggest in my review, despite the potentially revolutionary insights in his book, Dutton enjoys the role of curmudgeon too much. Like so many he finds in evolutionary biology an argument for looking backwards rather than forwards.

RSA Arts & Ecology: Review of Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct.