Evolution, Literature, and Film:
A Reader
edited by
Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll,
and Jonathan Gottschall
Contents
Introduction
Sources of the Essays in This Collection
Part 1:
Evolution and Human Nature
1.1. Historical Overview
1. David Buss. Evolutionary Psychology: The New
Science of the Mind (2008)
1.2. The
Theory of Evolution
Adaptation
by Means of Natural Selection
2. Charles Darwin. On the Origin of Species: Recapitulation and Conclusion. (1859)
The
Gene as the Unit of Replication
3. Richard Dawkins. The
1.3.
Evolution and Humankind
4. Charles Darwin. The Descent of Man: General Summary and Conclusion. (1871)
5. Edward O. Wilson. Man: From Sociobiology to
Sociology. (1975)
6. Donald E. Brown. The Universal People.
(1991)
7. Edward O. Wilson. Sociobiology at Century’s
End. (2000)
8. Steven Pinker. Evolution and Explanation (2005)
9. David Sloan Wilson. Evolution and Social
Constructivism. (2005)
Part 2: The
Riddle of Art
10. Steven Pinker. Art
and Adaptation (1997)
11. Edward O. Wilson.
The Arts and Their Interpretation. (1998)
12. Ellen Dissanayake.
Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began. (2000)
13. Geoffrey Miller. Arts of Seduction. (2000)
14. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides.
Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of
Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts. (2001)
15. Denis Dutton. The Uses of Fiction. (2009)
Part 3:
Literature, Film, and Evolution: Theory
16. Brian Boyd.
Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture Critiques Cultural Critique. (2006)
17. Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall,
18. Edward
Slingerland. Two Worlds: The Ghost and the Machine. (2008)
19. Marcus Nordlund.
Consilient Literary Interpretation. (2002)
20. Robin Headlam
Wells. Humanism and Human Nature in the Renaissance (2005)
21. Joseph Anderson. The Reality of Illusion. (1996)
22.
23. David Bordwell.
What Snakes, Eagles, and Rhesus Macaques Can Teach Us. (2008)
Part 4:
Interpretations
24. Jonathan Gottschall. Homeric Women: Re-imagining the Fitness
Landscape. (2008)
25. Michelle Scalise Sugiyama. New Science, Old Myth: An Evolutionary
Critique of the Oedipal Paradigm. (2001)
26. Daniel Nettle. The Wheel of Fire and the Mating Game: Explaining
the Origins of Tragedy and Comedy. (2005)
27. Marcus Nordlund. Jealousy in Othello.
(2007)
28. Nancy Easterlin. Wordsworth, Psychoanalysis and the
‘Discipline of Love.’ (2000)
29. William Flesch. Vindication and Vindictiveness: Oliver Twist. (2007)
30. Joseph Carroll. The Cuckoo’s
History: Human Nature in
31. Brett Cooke. Human Nature, Utopia and Dystopia: Zamyatin’s We. (2002)
32. Judith P. Saunders. Paternal Confidence in Zora Neale Hurston’s
‘The Gilded Six Bits.’
33. Joseph Anderson. Character in Citizen
Kane. (1996)
34. David Bordwell.
Convention, Construction, and Cinematic Vision. (1996/2008)
35. Brian Boyd.
Art and Evolution: The Avant-Garde as Test Case: Spiegelman in The Narrative Corpse. (2008)
Part 5:
Literature as Laboratory
36. Jonathan Gottschall.
Literature, Science, and a New Humanities. (2008)
37. Catherine Salmon
and Donald Symons. Slash Fiction and Human Mating Psychology. (2004)
38. Michelle Scalise Sugiyama. Cultural Variation is Part of Human
Nature: Literary Universals, Context-Sensitivity and ‘Shakespeare in the Bush.’
(2003)
39. Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall, John Johnson, and Daniel
Kruger. Paleolithic Politics in British Novels of the Nineteenth Century.
Works Cited
Index
Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll and Jonathan
Gottschall
Introduction
Literary and Film Studies Now: Death or Rebirth?
Adding to a long litany of similar laments, William Deresiewicz
recently declared that “The real story of academic literary criticism today is
that the profession is, however slowly, dying.” We need not sit passively by,
watching as the patient succumbs. Instead, we should take seriously an
observation by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah: “In the humanities . . .
we are always engaged in illuminating the present by drawing on the past; it is
the only way to make a future worth hoping for” (Experiments 1-2). By drawing on the deep past of our evolutionary history, studies in literature and film
can ensure their survival and enrich their future.
For at least a decade, many scholars in
literature have felt their discipline in crisis. They have been demoralized by
falling enrollments and funding, by eroding prestige within and beyond
academia, and by a sense of intellectual repetition and exhaustion (see
Gottschall, section 36 below). Poststructuralism swept through departments of
literature and film in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but its once fresh questions
have hardened into habit or dogma. Women’s studies, queer theory, ethnic
literatures, cultural studies, post-colonialism, and ecocriticism opened up new
subject areas, but these areas have been thoroughly explored through
now-familiar research modes. Science studies, under the aegis of Foucauldian
discourse theory, have offered another new field but suffer from the same
malaise that afflicts poststructuralism in general. The Sokal hoax, in 1996,
was only the most spectacular exposé of mortal weaknesses at the heart of this
school (Sokal, “Transgressing”; Sokal and Bricmont, Fashionable).
Many scholars working under the aegis of
“New Historicism” or “cultural studies” now claim that they are “post-theory”
because they focus not on theories but on “empirical” historical data,
especially data gleaned from archives. In reality, the archivalists have not
left poststructuralist theory behind but have only internalized it. The
categories they use derive chiefly from Foucauldian traditions: versions of
Marxism and Freudianism filtered through deconstructive epistemology and cast
in a programmatically oppositional mode. Simply eschewing explicit theoretical
commitment does not invest findings with empirical validity nor insulate them
from theoretical critique. It has certainly done little to reverse the
declining status of the humanities within the larger world of knowledge.
While the established forms of study in
literature and cinema have been drifting into disarray, the evolutionary
analysis of human nature has been maturing. It has increasingly placed due
emphasis on cooperation, culture, intelligence, and imagination. For over three
decades, many observers inside and outside academia have been fascinated to see
how evolutionary studies can illuminate human lives, feelings, thoughts, and
behavior. Over the past fifteen years or so, evolutionary study in literature
and film has emerged as a distinct movement. In the past few years it has
gained rapidly in visibility and impact, with many articles and books, and with
much attention from the popular and scholarly press, from Nature to the New York Times.
Evolutionary thinking has had revolutionary
effects across the human sciences, but it has most dramatically transformed
psychology. Those who think that psychological research limits itself to rats
running mazes or pigeons pecking levers should think again. Since it began to
ask the evolutionary question why—for
what benefits—do our minds work as they do, psychology has begun to grapple
with much at the heart of literature and film: our core emotions like love,
fear, sorrow, happiness; our social and moral emotions like generosity, trust,
fairness and indignation; our core relations, parent and child, partner and
partner, friends, allies, enemies; Theory of Mind, our capacity to understand
other minds; and metarepresentation, our capacity to understand representations
as representations. Cognitive,
developmental and evolutionary psychology now track empathy in humans and other
animals, and our attunement to the emotions of others. Memory researchers study
the relationship between our remembered pasts and imagined futures, or between
our memory for character traits and our memory for the past. Evolutionary,
developmental and cognitive psychology together show why these and other
capacities arise, where they emerge from, when they develop in individuals, and
how they operate. How could literature and film not seize on all this with excitement?
Although many theorists in literary and
film studies have reacted with alarm to claims that biology might help shape
culture, acknowledging the reality of human evolution presents no serious
dangers and offers immense opportunities. An evolutionary perspective allows us
to see ourselves both in the widest angle and with the most precise focus, as
individuals solving particular problems within specific contexts, physical and
social, using the cognitive equipment—including a predilection for
culture—acquired through natural selection. Evolutionary anthropology, biology,
economics, and psychology now offer an integrated explanatory framework and a
host of new insights we can apply to literature and film.
Evolutionary theorists
of the arts aim not just at offering one more “school” or “approach” to fit
within the grab-bag of current theories. We seek to alter the paradigm within
which studies in art and culture are now conducted. We have rallied to Edward
O. Wilson’s cry for “consilience” among all the branches of learning. We
envision an integrated body of knowledge extending from theories of subatomic
particles to theories of the arts. Within this consilient world view,
evolutionary biology is the pivotal discipline uniting the hard sciences with
the human sciences and the arts. Evolutionists seek to investigate how
evolution has shaped human bodies, minds and behavior, how culture has emerged
out of nature, and how culture has equipped us to modify our behavior.
Virtually all evolutionary theorists of the
arts formulate biocultural ideas. That is, we believe that works of art are
shaped by our evolved human nature, by culture, and by individual experience.
We therefore distinguish ourselves from “cultural constructivists” who
effectively attribute exclusive shaping power to culture. We give close
attention to “human universals” or cross-cultural regularities that derive from
regularities in human nature, but we also recognize the uniquely intense human
capacity for culture. We welcome thick descriptions of local context but argue
that a true understanding of culture must be rooted in the biological
characteristics from which all human cultures grow. Adopting an evolutionary
perspective enables us to build theories of literature and film not from near
the end of the story but from the start, from the ground up. By building in
this way, we can ask altogether new questions and return to older questions
with sharper eyes and surer hands.
By insisting on the separateness of
humanistic subjects and modes of inquiry, many in the humanities have deprived
themselves of the resources discovered in other fields of inquiry. They have
also rendered their own research irrelevant to the interests that now most
actively engage the minds of the larger educated world. It need not be this
way.
What Dangers Does
Evolutionary Theory Pose?
The social sciences and humanities have
long resisted evolutionary biology, assuming that an evolutionary perspective
can only minimize culture, glorify ruthless self-seeking, and deny human
uniqueness, diversity, and purpose. In fact evolution now lets us understand
the full measure of human uniqueness and
human continuity with other life, the power of cooperation, culture, diversity,
and the emergence of purpose. Let us quickly allay misgivings about supposed
dangers in applying evolution to human minds and behavior.
1. Ignoring human differences:
An evolutionary view of human nature does not ignore or deny the enormous
cultural differences between peoples, but makes it possible to explain cultural difference in a way
that insisting humans are completely “culturally constructed” cannot.
(Constructed out of what, in any case?)
2: Biological or genetic
determinism: All modern evolutionists recognize that phenotypes (the observable properties of organisms) are not
determined solely by genotypes (the
genetic recipes in DNA). Behavior is always co-determined
by the interaction of genes and the environment. Environments shape, constrain,
and elicit the behaviors of organisms. Failing to account for complex
interactions between genes and environments is, in fact, profoundly unbiological.
3. Nature versus culture?
Biology is not an alternative to society or culture. Sociality occurs
only within living species, and culture only within the social and therefore the biological realm. Moreover,
culture is far from being uniquely human. Culture—the non-genetic transmission
of behavior, including local customs and even fashions—has been discovered over
the last few decades in many social species, in birds as well as mammals.
4. The natural as right: To
argue that biology provides a base for human life does not mean it must impose
a model for human morality. A particular origin need not predetermine a
particular end. Biology in any case offers
a vast array of different models, and culture is itself a part of
biology with the power to generate a cascade of new possibilities.
5. Genetic selfishness: Genes
are “selfish” in the sense that they prosper according to what benefits them in
successive reproductive rounds, but most genes benefit from the health of the
whole organism, or even from the success of a whole group of individuals.
Richard Dawkins points out that he could just as aptly have called his famous
first book not The Selfish Gene but The Cooperative Gene (a title adopted
for a more recent book by the biologist Mark Ridley) (Dawkins, Ancestor’s 158). Evolutionary psychology
and evolutionary economics concern themselves with the complex mix of
cooperation and competition in social life. Indeed, they have placed far more emphasis on generosity, trust, and
fairness than non-evolutionary psychology
or economics ever had.
6. The supposedly fixed and
unchangeable character of human nature: Evolution is change, and species have evolved multiple ways to respond more
sensitively to rapid change, including sexual reproduction, nervous systems,
flexible intelligence, social learning, and culture. Biologist David Sloan
Wilson observes that because of the unique importance of culture in humans, “We
have not escaped evolution, as so commonly assumed. We experience evolution in
hyperdrive” (“Foreword” 16).
7. Nature and power: Some
fear that “Nature, red in tooth and claw” would valorize power and class. In
fact evolutionary anthropology and biology increasingly stress that a major
difference between humans and other mammals is that humans have found ways to
control the urge for dominance. They collaborate to resist being dominated and
thus unleash the power of human cooperation (Boehm, Hierarchy). A key concern of evolutionary psychology has been to
explain not the redness of our teeth and nails, but why we are, as
primatologist Frans de Waal puts it, so “good natured.”
8. Nature versus human
singularity: Evolution can explain both our substantial continuity with and
our substantial differences from other forms of life. Life has passed through a
number of major transitions, each involving new forms of cooperation at one
level that enable radically new and more complex possibilities at a higher
level. Many biologists now see the cooperation that makes human culture
possible as the latest major transition in evolution, as dramatic as the
transitions from single-celled to multicellular organisms, or from individual
organisms to societies (
What Would We Lose by
Adopting an Evolutionary Perspective on Literature and Film?
Traditional humanists
approach literature and film from the perspective of cultivated common sense.
The scope of their research extends from scholarship on intellectual and
artistic traditions to subtle analyses of tone, theme, style, and form in
particular works. At its best, this kind of study embodies in its own
perspective the qualities we look for in literary prose and cinematic art:
elegance, power, humor, wit, wisdom, passion. The great scholars and critics
have assimilated and articulated rich cultural traditions. In constructing and
expressing their worldviews, they draw on works of imagination and thus
exemplify the value and importance that can attach to the study of artistic
culture.
Are any of these values and goals
incompatible with an evolutionary perspective on literature and film? We see no
reason they should be. Modern science now enters ever more directly into the
investigation of what most concerns students of literature and film: human
motives and behavior, perception, emotions, cognition, personality and social
dynamics. Integrating the new human sciences with humanist literary cultivation
presents an immense challenge but also an immense opportunity.
A rapprochement with science need not
diminish the creative contribution of the individual literary scholar. The idea
that science must mean sterile impersonality is merely a prejudice. In reality,
as the physiologist Robert Root-Bernstein explains, the forms of imagination
"manifested in styles of scientific creativity” are “just as unique as
those of any artist” (“Sciences” 53). Einstein famously affirmed that
“Imagination is more important than knowledge”. If creativity is essential to
the best work in both the humanities and the sciences, surely it is essential
also to work that integrates these domains.
For the past several
decades, studies in literature and film have taken a “theoretical” turn.
Without abandoning the ideals of cultivating minds through art,
poststructuralist scholars and critics have often rejected the perspective of
cultivated common sense. In its place they have looked for theories that open
up deeper explanations of the forces shaping human experience and products of
the human imagination. Semiotics and deconstructive linguistic philosophy
stressed the central role language plays in human consciousness. Freudian
psychoanalysis opened up psychosexual symbolism emerging from the most intimate
family relationships and the phases of childhood development. Gender theory
foregrounded the power conflicts built into human sexual relations. Marxist
social theory has inquired into the way works of imagination articulate
socioeconomic conditions.
Is an evolutionary
perspective unable to deal effectively with issues that arise out of linguistic
philosophy, depth psychology, gender theory, and socio-economic theory? No.
Evolutionary human science embraces cognitive neuroscience and cognitive
linguistics. Evolutionary psychology concentrates heavily on the
often-conflicted relations in the core reproductive relations of families—mothers,
fathers, and children—and offers new and penetrating insights into gendered
social roles. Evolutionary social theory identifies affiliation and dominance
as elemental forces in human social interaction. The way those forces ramify
into the complexities of specific social economies provides a rich field of
exploration for scholars and scientists.
Culture is part of human nature, and all of
the forces we have been describing—linguistic, psychological, and
social—manifest themselves in imaginative culture. An adequate understanding of
human nature and the products of the human imagination will require the
combined and collective work of biologists, psychologists, social theorists,
and scholars in the humanities. We need lose nothing of the best that has been
thought and said. We need only add to it.
Frequently Asked
Questions
Over the years, those who approach art from
evolutionary perspectives have met recurrent criticisms, questions, and
complaints. Here are some of the most common, along with our responses.
1. Isn’t an evolutionary approach to literature reductive? “Reductive”
is a pejorative term signifying that some approach oversimplifies the complex
and rigidifies the flexible. “Reductiveness” is a fault, but “reduction” is
essential to causal explanation, which necessarily involves reduction to more
fundamental principles. Successful reduction connects basic causal principles
with the particular features of some specific object. For instance, an
explanation of heredity that reduces it to genes and DNA can unify our
understanding of diverse phenomena and at the same time bring to light
undreamed-of diversity and intricacy. Similarly, evolutionary explanations in
the arts can identify elemental causal forces and at the same time open out
into a powerfully expansive understanding of particular works or artistic
features.
2. There have been many failed
attempts to examine literature and film from professedly scientific
foundations. Why is this different? Structuralism, Marxist economics, and
Freudian psychoanalysis all claimed a
scientific basis for studying literature and film. None of these claims
survived prolonged empirical scrutiny. The theory of evolution by means of
natural selection, in contrast, has been firmly established as the most fertile
and robust theory in the life sciences. Evolutionary psychological and social
science has emerged as a cumulative, continuously productive research program
only within the past forty years. That program now provides the necessary
context for evolutionary studies in the arts.
3. How would an evolutionary
approach to literature and film avoid the dogmatism and guruism that have
characterized much recent literary theory? The theory of evolution by means
of natural selection is not a cult or dogma but a scientific research program
that took decades to establish on a firm empirical footing. It has to face the
continual challenge of consistency with established and emerging evidence from
multiple disciplines. Evidence, not assertion or the authority of particular
advocates, provides its criterion for validity.
4. Frank Lentricchia claims that
if he knows a literary critic's theory he knows in advance how the critic will
interpret particular works (64). How
do you keep evolutionary approaches from sterile apriorism, if you assume from
the outset that all people are ultimately motivated by survival and
reproduction? Survival and reproduction are “ultimate” principles that have
shaped the characteristics of human nature over evolutionary time. In the case
of any individual artist, those characteristics operate through “proximate”
mechanisms that are often only tenuously connected to survival and
reproduction. Individuals vary widely in their genetic makeup and in the
experiences—personal and cultural—that shape their motives. Humans fabricate
imaginative worlds that can detach them from survival and reproduction—driving
them, for instance, into celibacy or into sacrificing their lives for an
abstract cause. Each artistic work challenges us to draw connections from the
elemental components of human nature to the particular features of a unique
imagined world.
5. Aren't the claims in section
two (The Riddle of Art) just-so stories? Isn't this whole approach underpinned
by mere storytelling? Evolutionary hypotheses about the adaptive or
non-adaptive role of the arts are not final products to be accepted or rejected
according to their narrative or rhetorical force. They must be evaluated on the
basis of their explanatory and predictive power. The process of testing alternative
predictions should—and already has begun to—yield unexpected new information
about art and its causes and effects, just as with evolutionary accounts of
other familiar but biologically puzzling activities like sleep, dreaming, and
play.
6. Isn't it a "category
error" to study questions about art in the terms of the sciences? It
would certainly be a category error to confuse art itself with science. Art and
science have different origins, purposes, effects, and criteria for success.
But we can study art as we can human
psychology. While we would be wrong to confuse an actual human being with a
psychological theory, we can reasonably study both human beings and their
cultural products using concepts from the human sciences.
7. Doesn’t analyzing literature
and film require us to invoke concepts and methods different from those in
biology and the human sciences? Like any other subject area, literature has
“emergent” concepts peculiar and appropriate to its own subject. Literary and
film scholars necessarily employ categories such as narrative structure, genre,
point of view, verse, mise en scène,
camera angles, cuts, tone, style, and thematic structure. All such categories
engage attention, imagination, cognition and emotion in ways that can be most
deeply explored in terms of an evolved and culturally developed human nature.
8. If the paradigm of literary
and film study were to shift toward evolution, would everyone have to start
reading from the "gene's eye view"? Modern evolutionary analysis
requires explanation at multiple levels: at the level of the gene, the
organism, the group (pairs, families, alliances), the population, and the
species. Recent cultural and literary studies have stressed group-level (class,
community, nation) effects, and they have underplayed other levels. The most
complete forms of explanation in the arts would connect high-level phenomena
like artistic meaning and effect with causal forces at multiple levels.
9. If scholars in the humanities
adopt evolutionary perspectives, will there be any room left for imaginative
performance—for the kind of work that reveals the depth and richness of the
critic’s own mind? The sciences have developed methods like experiment and
quantitative analysis to overcome the
biases of individuals, cultures and species. Artists, by contrast, have
developed methods to appeal to the
biases of individuals, cultures, and our species. Critics of literature and
film aim at uncovering and explaining facts, but they also respond emotionally
and aesthetically to the imaginative qualities in art. Good critics read widely
and intensively and write with the boldness and flair that comes from long and
deep immersion in great writing. Good criticism needs responsive individual
experience, but it also needs the objectivity and impartiality that
characterize the scientific ethos.
10. How do evolutionary
approaches to literature and film relate to cognitive approaches? Cognition
occurs only within evolution. First-generation cognitive psychology derived
from early artificial intelligence, from the kinds of information processing
involved in computer programming. Second and third-generation cognitive
psychology has incorporated a greater recognition of evolved minds: especially
of the pre-linguistic bases of cognition, the emotions, and the connections
between senses, thoughts, and feelings. Evolutionary and cognitive approaches
are only different facets of a common process of inquiry.
Plan
of the Volume
1.
Evolution
and Human Nature
Historical
Overview
Part
One opens with David Buss’s overview
of the historical development of evolutionary biology and evolutionary
psychology. In the two sub-sections that follow, we have selected
excerpts for
their classic status, their representative character, and their power
to
illuminate central themes in evolution and human nature. The
evolutionary ideas
delineated here provide the historical and theoretical background for
the
inquiries into imaginative culture in sections two through five.
The
General Theory of Evolution
The most significant scientific theories
bring the largest range of phenomena within the smallest compass of causal
explanation. Judged by this criterion of significance,
In the selections we include here from On the Origin of Species,
Darwin himself knew
nothing about the specific mechanism of inheritance through which
characteristics descend from parents to offspring. When he published On the Origin of Species (1859),
genetics as a science did not exist, and it did not begin to achieve scientific
maturity until the early twentieth century. DNA, the molecule recording genetic
information, was not understood until the middle of the twentieth century. In
“The
The
Evolution of Human
Nature
The evolutionary understanding of human
nature has often concentrated on the “species-typical” or “universal”
characteristics of human nature. Anthropologist Donald Brown’s synthetic
portrait of “the universal people” offers an engaging introduction to the
characteristics shared by humans in all known cultures. In a concise
theoretical and historical overview of modern psychology, cognitive
psychologist Steven Pinker reveals the explanatory power evolutionary theory
brings to the social sciences. And finally, biologist David Sloan Wilson argues
that culture reshapes human motives, minds and environments and that “cultural
constructivism” should, accordingly, be included within an evolutionary
understanding of human nature.
2.
The Riddle
of Art
Homo
sapiens is a strangely artistic ape. Most humans spend much of their time
outside work and sleep lost in landscapes of make-believe. Across the whole
breadth of human history, across the wide mosaic of world cultures, there has
never been a society where people have not
devoted much of their time to seeing, creating, and hearing fictions—from
folktales to film, from theatre to television. Nor has there ever been a
culture in which people have not devoted precious resources, in time, skill,
and material, to producing song, music and dance, pictures and carvings,
ornaments, decorations, and designs.
Other animals have adaptations for
cooperation in social groups with specialized functions and status hierarchies.
Other animals engage in play, produce technology, and share information. Humans
alone produce imaginative artifacts designed to provide aesthetic pleasures,
evoke subjective sensations, express emotions, depict nature or human
experience, or delineate through symbols the salient features of their
experience. Dispositions for producing and consuming art constitute uniquely
human, species-typical characteristics, and the arts offer rich insights into
the human mind. No understanding of human nature that leaves out the arts could
possibly give an adequate account of its subject.
Art poses an evolutionary riddle. Why are
we storytelling apes? Why do we compulsively concoct and consume fictional
stories, stories we know to be untrue? Why do we spend (waste?) so much time
telling tales and shaping objects for aesthetic effects—time that could be
devoted to activities that produce obvious biological benefits: securing
resources, courting mates, or caring for offspring and other kin?
The selections here show some of the range
of positions on this contentious and complex issue. Steven Pinker argues that
aesthetic aptitudes arose as side effects of other adaptively significant
mental powers. Geoffrey Miller offers the most influential version of the idea
that the arts serve the purposes of sexual display. E. O. Wilson, Ellen
Dissanayake, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and Denis Dutton provide overlapping
versions of arguments that the arts fulfill definite adaptive functions. Brian
Boyd, in Part 4, also addresses the adaptiveness of art in tandem with a close
reading of a single avant-garde work. Carroll, Gottschall, Johnson, and Kruger,
in Part 5, offer empirical evidence for story’s adaptive function.
3.
Literature, Film and Evolution: Theory
Evolutionary and cognitive approaches to
the arts have been strongly at odds with recently prevailing assumptions in the
humanities. There have been two core disagreements: evolutionists claim (1)
that we humans share a great deal of our mental and motivational makeup, that
differences across cultures and ideologies are dwarfed by similarities; and (2)
that our minds have been shaped to provide us with mostly valid information
about our world, rather than to operate by arbitrary convention.
Clashes between
bioculturalism and cultural constructivism have sometimes been sharp. For
instance, surveying and lamenting the decline of literary studies, critic Louis
Menand appealed for renovation but explicitly rejected just one possible form
of renovation, the one we regard as most promising: the integration of the
humanities with evolutionary biology. "Consilience,” he claimed, “is a
bargain with the devil” (“Dangers” 14). Menand’s article prompted Brian Boyd’s
rejoinder, “Getting It All Wrong.” While making a sweeping comparison of the
key positions in postmodern and evolutionary cultural theory, Boyd delineates
the false conceptions that inform Menand’s resistance to consilience. Joseph
Carroll and colleagues provide an overview of the literary theory of the last
century and contrast it with the emerging evolutionary paradigm. Refuting
attempts to present Shakespeare and his contemporaries as deniers of shared
human nature, Robin Headlam Wells shows that they had an explicit belief in
human nature and a desire to illuminate it. Writing from outside literature (he
is a scholar of early Chinese thought), Edward Slingerland argues that a
biologically grounded cognitive science can reconcile the humanities and the
sciences. Marcus Nordlund incisively formulates a naturalistic basis for a
literary hermeneutics alert to the unpredictable complexities of specific
interpretive problems.
Reviewing the history of film theory,
Joseph Anderson suggests that the accessibility of film depends on its appeal
to evolved human modes of “ecological” perception—that is, our perception of
the environment that we negotiate as mobile creatures. Beginning with what his
American students can understand of an undubbed, un-subtitled Taiwanese martial
arts movie—a great deal, it turns out—David Bordwell proposes a naturalistic
approach to film response that explains both the considerable convergence and
partial divergence in our responses to art.
4.
Interpretations
Despite first the
“theoretical” and then the “archival” turn in much recent scholarship, readings
of individual works still dominate the activity of criticism. To vindicate its
paradigmatic claims, evolutionary study in literature and film must also
demonstrate that it can give compelling interpretive accounts of particular
works. Part Four showcases evolutionary readings that display both explanatory
power and sensitivity to particular meanings and effects.
If evolutionary approaches work for any
art—if evolution has indeed shaped all artists and audiences—they should work
for all. The readings here move chronologically from Homeric epic to
avant-garde comics. Although many readings focus on English literature, others
discuss ancient or modern European literature or cinema from Africa, the Middle
East and Asia, as well as
Some critics stress
what might seem like naturally evolutionary topics: anxieties about paternity
certainty in Judith Saunders’ essay on Zora Neale Hurston, for instance, or
Jonathan Gottschall’s discussion of mating strategies in Homer’s Iliad. While Saunders focuses on a
human universal, Gottschall attempts to explain the peculiar ecological and
reproductive pressures promoting conflict in the society Homer depicts. For
those with no prior acquaintance with evolutionary approaches to literature,
other contributions might be more surprising, like William Flesch on altruistic
punishment in Oliver Twist, Joseph
Carroll’s analysis of Wuthering Heights
in terms of human life history theory, or Brian Boyd’s discussion of dominance
and counter-dominance in Spiegelman’s contribution to The Narrative Corpse.
Many of the critics here address the
question of human nature and its relative persistence across time and
circumstance. Marcus Nordlund considers local legal and cultural conditions
that modify male sexual jealousy in early seventeenth-century
While evolutionary criticism has a deep
interest in human nature, it should not neglect local or individual differences
or the effects of artistry. Indeed, just as life itself is a problem-solving
process, an evolutionary and cognitive approach to the arts should focus on the
partly unique and partly shared problem-solution landscape within which
individual artists work. Essays that place particular emphasis on form and
individual artistry include Nordlund on Shakespeare, Easterlin on Wordsworth,
Bordwell on shot-reverse shot composition, Anderson on Orson Welles, and Boyd
on Spiegelman.
5.
Literature
as Laboratory
Most
evolutionary literary scholars believe that mainstream literary studies could
do a much better job of generating reliable and cumulative knowledge. We all
concur in seeking better sources of knowledge in the biologically grounded
human sciences, but some of us have taken a further step: using empirical
methods to study subjects in the humanities.
In
taking this step we distance ourselves sharply from two salient features of
postmodernist literary theory. We reject both the radical skepticism
that denies the possibility of ever gaining reasonably objective knowledge, and
the practice, so regrettably common in literary study, of looking only or
mainly for evidence in support of our
hypotheses, especially those that we deem politically desirable.
Science has established many ways to avoid
being misled by selective evidence, confirmation bias, and a priori thinking. We believe many of these methods can be adapted
to questions about art. We cannot do without reading, thinking, and writing
well, but we want to extend the scholarly toolkit by adding scientific methods,
which can test, tease apart, and extend intuitions about literature.
Literature offers an unparalleled source
of thick descriptions of imagined human behavior and actual human preferences
over thousands of years—evidence that can be used to inspire, enrich or
challenge hypotheses about human nature. In this section we include examples of
humanities scholars and scientists flowing back and forth across the divide
between the two cultures of the arts and sciences. Their goal is not to promote a conquest of
humanistic culture by scientific culture. Rather, they are seeking to establish
a Third Culture on the fertile ground between the humanities and sciences. We include selections suggesting
that (1) stories are a valuable and much-neglected resource in the scientific
study of mind and behaviour, and (2) that humanities scholars can draw on the
methods, as well as the theories and findings, of the sciences.
Conclusion
The essays
in this volume offer a chance to reshape the landscape of scholarship. The
contributions from evolutionary biology, the human sciences, and the humanities
provide complementary and convergent perspectives on a single grand subject:
human nature in the works of the human imagination. Despite productive
disagreements, the authors represented here embody a set of shared attitudes
and beliefs. We all believe that evolutionary theory promises the deepest,
widest and most reliable knowledge about humankind and all its works. Still
more broadly, we believe in science; we believe that the world can be known in
a reasonably objective way, that knowledge in any field can accumulate, and
that knowledge in diverse fields can be causally connected. We are eager to extend
scientific knowledge into the fields of the humanities and to make use of the
tools available from both the humanities and the sciences. From the humanities,
we incorporate the skills of historical scholarship and close reading. We
respect the sensitivity critics display in responding to the artistry of
literature and film, and we are committed to preserving and celebrating the
rich heritage of the humanities. From evolutionary biology and the human
sciences, we incorporate a knowledge of human universals and of the cognitive
mechanisms underpinning art. We recognize that the building blocks of human
nature combine in different ways and under different conditions to form unique
structures in any given culture. We also recognize the rich genetic and experiential
differences between individuals. Whether or not we adopt empirical,
quantitative methods, we share a profound respect for the spirit of impersonal,
disinterested inquiry. We recognize that a passionate responsiveness to the
arts is natural to scholarship in the humanities, but we are also determined to
have access to the impersonal, objective scrutiny of science.
If the
impulses behind this anthology were to become active across the humanities,
that would constitute an epistemic revolution expanding the scope of both
science and the humanities. In the short term it would open the products of the
human imagination to the human sciences and the methods and results of the
human sciences to the humanities. In the long term, it would enable humanists to
join with scientists in contributing to the continuous development of more
reliable and durable knowledge. The revolutionary impulses implicit in this
volume are thus fundamentally creative and constructive. We have no illusions
that our formulations are fixed and final, but we have felt the excitement of
making new discoveries and look forward confidently to more. We have all been
inspired by the exhilarating sense that we are joining together in an
intellectual adventure of great scope. We invite you to join us.
**********************************************
Sources
of the Essays in this Collection:
Most of the journal articles and
excerpts from books included in ELF have
been abridged, and their various forms of citation have been standardized. In
condensing the articles, the editors have aimed at shaping coherent essays and
have not indicated omissions through ellipses. Sources for all the essays are
included in the bibliography. Essays that were originally published as journal articles
or as book chapters in edited collections can be located in the bibliography by
their titles in this volume.
Below, we list the source for essays
excerpted from monographs or otherwise titled in ways that are not identical
with titles in the bibliography. The sources listed below are sequenced in
parallel with the sequence of essays in this volume:
Dawkins’ “The
Edward O. Wilson’s “From Sociobiology to
Sociology” is from Sociobiology: The New
Synthesis, and his “Sociobiology at Century’s End” is from the 25thanniversary
edition of Sociobiology.
Donald Brown’s “The Universal People is
from Human Universals.
Steven Pinker’s “Evolution and Explanation”
is the Foreword to David Buss’s Handbook
of Evolutionary Psychology.
Steven Pinker’s Art and Adaptation is from How
the Mind Works.
Edward O.
Ellen Dissanayake’s “Art and Intimacy: How
the Arts Began” is from Art and Intimacy.
Geoffrey Miller’s “Arts of Seduction” is
from The Mating Mind.
Denis Dutton’s “The Uses of Fiction” is
from The Art Instinct.
“Imagining Human Nature” by Carroll,
Gottschall, Johnson, and Kruger is from Graphing
Jane Austen.
Robin Headlam Wells’s “Humanism and Human
Nature in the Renaissance” is from Shakespeare’s
Humanism.
Joseph Anderson’s “The Reality of Illusion”
is from The Reality of Illusion.
David Bordwell’s “What Snakes, Eagles, and
Rhesus Macaques Can Teach Us” is from Poetics
of Cinema;
the final segment, though, is a condensed version of the
“Foreword”
to Moving Image Theory, edited by
Anderson and Anderson.
Jonathan Gottschall’s “Homeric Women:
Re-imagining the Fitness Landscape” is from The
Rape of Troy.
Marcus Nordlund’s “Jealousy in Othello” is from Shakespeare and the Nature of Love.
William Flesch’s “Vindication and
Vindictiveness” is from Comeuppance.
Brett Cooke’s “Human Nature, Utopia and
Dystopia: Zamyatin’s We” is from Human Nature in Utopia.
Joseph Anderson’s “Character in Citizen Kane” is from The Reality of Illusion.
David Bordwell’s “Convention, Construction,
and Cinematic Vision” is from Poetics of
Cinema.
Jonathan Gottschall’s “Literature, Science, and a New Humanities” is from Literature, Science, and a New Humanities.
**********************************************************************
David Bordwell is Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film
Studies,
Brian Boyd is University Distinguished Professor of English,
David Buss is Professor of Psychology at the
Donald E. Brown is professor emeritus of anthropology at the
Joseph Carroll is Curators' Professor of English at the
Charles Darwin, independent scholar, biologist, discoverer of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, The Expression of Emotions in Animals and Man, and many other works.
Richard Dawkins retired in 2009 as the first Charles Simonyi
Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at
Ellen Dissanayake is an independent scholar, writer, and lecturer,
whose writings about the arts over 35 years synthesize many disciplines and
draw upon fifteen years of living and working in non-Western countries. Author
of three books and numerous scholarly and general articles, she is currently
Affiliate Professor in the
Denis Dutton is Professor of Philosophy at the
published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. He is also author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and
Human Evolution (2009).
Nancy Easterlin is Research Professor of English at the
William Flesch teaches English, film, and sometimes philosophy at Brandeis. In addition to Comeuppance (2007), he is the author of Generosity and the Limits of Authority: Shakespeare, Herbert, Milton, and The Facts on File Companion to Nineteenth Century British Poetry.
Jonathan Gottschall is an adjunct in the English Department
at
Robin Headlam Wells is Professor Emeritus of English
Literature at
John A. Johnson is Professor of Psychology, at
Daniel J. Kruger is an assistant research professor at the
University of Michigan, where he is affiliated with the Prevention Research Center
in the School of Public Health and the Life Course: Evolutionary and
Ontogenetic Dynamics program at the Institute for
Social Research. His evolutionary research interests include: altruism,
cooperation, competition, risk taking, mortality patterns, mating strategies,
and applications for social and ecological sustainability. Many of his research
projects are grounded in evolutionary life history theory.
Geoffrey Miller teaches evolutionary psychology and human
sexuality, and does research on mate choice, sexual selection, intelligence,
creativity, art, music, personality, psychopathology, consumer behavior, and
behavior genetics. His books include The
Mating Mind (2000), Mating
Intelligence (co-edited with Glen Geher 2008), and Spent: Sex, evolution, and consumer behavior (2009).
Following a B.A. from
Daniel Nettle is a Reader in the Centre for Behaviour and
Evolution,
Marcus Nordlund is an associate professor of English at the
Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone
Family Professor of Psychology at
Catherine Salmon is an associate professor of psychology at
the
Judith P. Saunders is Professor of English at
Michelle Scalise Sugiyama is Research Associate at the University of Oregon Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, and founder and Director of the Cognitive Cultural Studies Division at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, UC Santa Barbara. Her research focuses on cognitive adaptations for cultural transmission, with an emphasis on narrative and art behavior in foraging societies. She has written numerous articles on the origins of storytelling, the role that folklore plays in foraging societies, and the cognitive foundations of narrative.
Edward Slingerland is Associate Professor of Asian Studies
and Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the
Murray Smith is Professor of Film Studies at the
Don Symons received a B.A. in psychology and a Ph.D. in
biological anthropology from the
John Tooby and Leda Cosmides are best known for their work
in pioneering the new field of evolutionary psychology. They are professors
of anthropology and psychology at the
David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of
Biology and Anthropology at
Edward O. Wilson is University Research Professor, Emeritus,
at