As a mater of fact, the theory helps justify the existence of human minds because what is more significant than the mere passage of time, whether this is long or short, are the transitions in emphasis in human culture from activities which are directed to survival and reproduction to those which are not. Hunting and gathering, eating, sleeping, reproducing and caring for the young are activities without which neither individuals nor

Similar problems attend the evaluation of prehistoric cult objects. Are they simply magical tokens, designed to placate a god or to achieve other more basic purposes to do with fertility? Or are they, in addition, manifestations of a genuinely aesthetic sensibility? It is very tempting to think that there was a fine aesthetic sensibility at work in Moravia 27,000 years ago, if only because what we have in the torso is clearly worked, and worked in a way which emphasizes what for us is the very paradigm of the aesthetic. Would it not be too great a coincidence if some prehistoric Moravian cult required attention to just what are for us aesthetic characteristics in its cult objects for purely cultic reasons, as opposed to their being put there because in part at least the carver found them pleasing?

For icons, though certainly works of art, in that they are painted with an eye to aesthetic virtue, use the aesthetic purity of the image to witness to an image of man as destined for and capable of achieving a mode of life quite different from that of the nature of which biologists and anthropologists speak. I am not here assessing the truth or falsity of Orthodoxy, but simply pointing to the fact of its existence and to its iconography as showing how human beings are capable of being motivated by a striving beyond the instinctive. Nor, indeed, would it seem to have much to do with any 'tournament of the mind' aimed at success and admiration of a worldly sort if only because the whole motivation of icon painting was a sublimation of worldly instinct. That we could go from ape to caveman to icon painter: now that is a truly remarkable transition, however fast or slow, and even though the transition may be exploiting continuities already hinted at.

Aesthetic contrivances, writes E. O. Wilson, 'play upon the circuitry of the brain's limbic system in a way that ultimately promotes survival and reproduction'. Wilson's idea is that aesthetic interest has been embedded in us because of the usefulness of curiosity and the search for connections and similarities. For Darwin, aesthetics is more directly linked to reproduction, but he would not have demurred at Wilson's efforts to ground it in our genes.

species would survive. They also take up an awful lot of time, particularly if you do not know how to cook, plant seeds, domesticate animals, or organize your economy on the basis of specialization and the division of labor. If you are having to spend most of your day simply surviving and providing for your dependants, you are not going to find much time for developing the higher activities of art, science, morality, and religion, even if (as I believe is the case) there are in reflective, self-conscious beings drives in each of these directions, however simple or sophisticated their economies.

By around 10,000 BC mankind had learned to farm and in a few places was beginning to live in towns. The great period of prehistoric enslavement to need was coming to an end. Much time was saved fo

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