The beginnings of Aesthetic Intelligence
The When? has now a new answer: much earlier than expected, as Science magazine highlights today. But the interesting question is still open – and it is still the most interesting one: Why? Why Homo Sapiens (or maybe his competitor, Neanderthal) started to produce images? Around 48.000 years ago we started to develop our Aesthetic Intelligence and to use our representation skills to become what we are. Money is just one of the most recent and most trivial outcome of these representation performances – Homo Pictor is much older than Homo Oeconomicus, we shouldn’t forget it when we talk about financial crisis.
Aesthetic Intelligence 
Harvard Sociobiologist E.O. Wilson on the origins of art and evolution of culture: https://www.dropbox.com/s/bct104gvus581qr/on.the.origins.of.the.arts.pdf
Wilson’s latest book is Carlo Sini’s current reading – serendipity at work.
Here a brief article I use for one of our last education and learning project http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/01/biologist-e-o-wilson-on-why-humans-like-ants-need-a-tribe.html
Here a brief article I used for our last education and learning project http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/01/biologist-e-o-wilson-on-why-humans-like-ants-need-a-tribe.html
Another reading suggestion:
«E . O. Wilson, the great American naturalist, has a lot to say about the importance of bringing together the formal and the informal, even if he doesn’t quite describe it that way. In Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, he writes about how we can integrate the different sciences and might, eventually, even be able to integrate the sciences with the humanities».
From: Jon R. Katzenbach – Zia Khan, Leading outside the lines, 2010.