 It should be noted that even a very early dating of the emergence of aesthetic interests does not establish that they have a biological origin; the Acheulean period seems to have been marked by high levels of planning and organisation that suggest strong social relations (Hiscock 2014). In this sense aesthetic activity may be a culturally derived “technology”, as writing is, rather than an adaptation, as language may be (S. Davies 2012: ch. 10). Could we account, on that hypothesis, for the seeming ease with which young children take to forms of aesthetic activity such as drawing and singing? By contrast, learning to write is effortful and requires great investment in pedagogy. Recent work (Heyes 2021) seeks to reshape our assumptions about what is learned, arguing that such an early and reliably developing ability as interpersonal understanding is really a socially acquired “gadget” (Heyes &amp; Frith 2014). To add to a complex menu of options we also note that what begins as a gadget or technology might, under certain circumstances fall under complete or partial genetic control. This so-called “Baldwin effect”, once despised in evolutionary thinking, has attracted interest more recently (Weber &amp; Depew 2003). It proposes a mechanism by which acquired characteristics can become biologically heritable, without giving any ground to the Lamarkian idea that changes that accrue in an organism’s lifetime can be passed directly to the next generation. For example, if advantages flow from learning a skill, there may be selective pressure to ease the burden and uncertainty of learning by making the skill, or some of its components, innate (Papineau 2005). Given the multiply crossing paths between cultural and biological evolution there is little definite to be said about the origins of aesthetic interests other than that we see evidence for it in human populations more than half a million years ago.