Patterned play

Dear Editor,

Reviewing my On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction in ABR, Lisa Gorton writes, ‘Boyd shows a troubling lack of interest in the female of the human species’ (October 2009). Yet I happily follow the evolutionary theoretician of art Ellen Dissanayake in taking the origins of art, ontogenetically, back to ‘mothers and others’, to what developmental psychologists call protoconversation, the patterned play with sound, and movement that begins between infants and mothers or others. (See, by the way, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s wonderful new book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.)