PERSON
Ellen Dissanayake
The American independent scholar who spent four decades grounding aesthetic behavior in evolutionary biology—arguing that “making special” is not cultural luxury but a survival behavior wired into the human species, and whose framework identifies exactly what is threatened when AI makes the merely adequate effortless to obtain.
Ellen Dissanayake is the scholar who looked at the Chauvet cave paintings, the Scandinavian courting spoon, and the three-year-old covering a birthday card with excessive glitter, and recognized in all three the same biologically grounded behavior: the deliberate elaboration of the ordinary into the extraordinary through the investment of more effort than any functional purpose requires. She called this behavior
making special, and she spent her career assembling the cross-cultural and evolutionary evidence that it is not an artifact of Western fine-art culture or elite leisure but a universal, ancient, and costly behavior that natural selection maintained in the human lineage because it serves survival functions: strengthening social bonds, marking important transitions, and signaling care through the
reliable mechanism of costly investment. Her reorientation of the entire question of art—from a category of objects with certain formal properties to a category of behaviors involving deliberate, effortful elaboration—arrives