Finally this uncertainty drives Kandel, no less than Boyd and Pagel, back to the first principles of Darwinism, which are remorselessly utilitarian. And once again the connection of those principles to art is asserted rather than demonstrated. The “exercise in reading minds, which portrait painting provides, is perhaps not only pleasurable but also useful, sharpening our ability to infer what other people are thinking and feeling.” Or, again: “And that is why we generate, appreciate, and desire art: art improves our understanding of social and emotional cues, which are important for survival.” But could the amount of effort that goes into making a painting possibly be justified on these grounds, when each of us gets “exercise” in interpreting faces thousands of times a day? And don’t artworks regularly introduce us to faces we love because they are uninterpretable, or because they express things utterly beyond the domain of practical life? And what about landscapes and still lifes and abstract forms—what social cues do we learn from them? And does our experience tell us that people who spend much of their lives looking at art, or reading novels, or listening to string quartets—much less the people who make them—are better adjusted, more socially adept, and more likely to produce many children than those who do not?The problem with Darwinian aesthetics and neuroaesthetics is not that art is like religion, something divine that can only be violated by bringing it back to the realm of biology. Aesthetics is different, in that the facts it has to work with are terrestrial, this-worldly. They are the feelings and the thoughts we have in response to works of art, and the feelings and the thoughts that lead us to want to create them in the first place. So it would seem that there is no reason, in principle, why these cannot be illuminated by evolution. But this can only happen if we begin with a full and accurate account of what we are trying to explain.