 We turn now to our second question: Is art-making an adaptation or a non-adaptive consequence of developments which may themselves have adaptive advantages? Or something else entirely? Strong and contrary views have been expressed on this question; some have argued that the development of depiction, story-telling and music have been crucial for social bonding (Dissanayake 1992, 2000, 2017) or mate-choice (Miller 2000; Dutton 2009; for criticism see, e.g., C. Wilson 2016), others say that the creation of aesthetic artefacts offers no adaptive advantage but that they gained their hold on us because they provide rewards to sensory and other mechanisms in the mind that arose for quite other purposes (Pinker 1997). From a somewhat different perspective it is suggested that we do best by seeing human aesthetic activity as simply the continuation of ubiquitous practices of signalling and manipulation in the world of plants and animals. An interesting feature of this idea is that it replaces the traditional distinction between the aesthetics of artefacts and the aesthetics of nature with a distinction between, on the one hand artefacts and natural entities such as animal calls and flower colouring, and on the other natural objects such as rocks, sunsets and the night sky which “do not coevolve with sensory evaluations of them” (Prum 2013: 821; see also De Tiège, Verpooten, &amp; Braeckman 2021). It is not clear whether we currently know enough to decide between the available alternatives (S. Davies 2012: ch. 12; for the case of fiction, Currie 2020; §7.4). But would deciding whether art-making is adaptive advance the cause of aesthetic inquiry? That is doubtful. The question whether art is an adaptation concerns whether the reason we have art now is that it contributed to the fitness of our species. That could be true without it also being true that art now enriches our lives in any of the ways commonly claimed—giving pleasure, educating our emotions, instructing us about morality. And it is possible that art does now have all those advantages while having been an evolutionary irrelevance. It is also true that even if art was not originally adaptive, it might have become adaptive (an “exaptation”) at some stage and might be adaptive now. Different answers may apply to different art forms. It is said that the novel is a particularly appropriate means by which to exercise our capacities for empathy and mind reading (Nussbaum 1990, 1995; Mar and Oatley 2008); perhaps these advantages did not appear until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. While questions about art posed in evolutionary terms are certainly of scientific interest, what matters to the aesthetician is more likely to be the values that art currently and historically exemplifies and the ways those values are currently and historically responded to by us.