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Jonathan Kramnick English Department Rutgers University

Against Literary Darwinism

Literary Darwinists integrate literary concepts with a modern evolutionary understanding of the evolved and adapted characteristics of human nature. They aim not just at being one more “school” or movement in literary theory. They aim at fundamentally transforming the framework for all literary study. They think that all knowledge about human behavior, including the products of the human imagination, can and should be subsumed within the evolutionary perspective.

Joseph Carroll, "What is Literary Darwinism?"

What is undeniable is that theories of human behavior must be consistent with the fact of evolution; so too must they be consistent with the fact that the human body is made of matter. However, it does not follow from this that either evolutionary biology or physics can tell us anything interesting about human behavior.

Elliott Sober, Philosophy of Biology

Darwinian literary criticism has a strange place in the current intellectual scene. Only

a short while ago, evolutionary perspectives on art and literature were scarce and exotic. In

the past few years, studies connecting literary texts to processes of natural and sexual

selection have come forth in handsome volumes from the major trade and university presses

and have received a fascinated response from magazines, newspapers, and even television.1

Arguably no movement in literary studies has attracted so much attention in quite some

time. "Literary Darwinism" would seem to be all the rage. Yet for all this attention outside

the academy, the movement has not provoked much of a response within, where if it has

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been noticed at all, it has often been treated with trepidation or contempt.2 This is a shame.

Were the claims of Literary Darwinism true, we might be at the threshold of what one of its

advocates calls a "new humanities," in which the natural sciences and literary studies speak

directly to each other.3 Even if its central arguments are misguided or unprovable, we might

learn something about the place of literary study among the disciplines from the manner in

which Literary Darwinism fails to make its case. At the very least, it would seem odd not to

engage work that has so captivated a public otherwise dismissive of what happens in

literature departments. For these reasons, the present essay attempts to take seriously the

central premises of the Darwinian program in literary studies. I will argue against Literary

Darwinism but only as I reconstruct the story about literature it attempts to tell.

My argument has three parts. I first discuss the attempt to fit literature to the model

of evolution by natural selection. I'll argue that Literary Darwinism has trouble specifying

what features of literary narratives are heritable traits (phenotypes) and so also has trouble

specifying how literature serves some sort of adaptive end.4 The Literary Darwinists readily

admit that the phenotypes they are interested in are not exactly anatomical. Their lot is

thrown in with the relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology and with the

proposition that many features of mental life trace back to the dawn of our species in a

manner analogous to our physiology. In the second section, I discuss whether the kind of

mind hypothesized by evolutionary psychology could find a special place for composing or

attending to literary texts. Many of the candidate features for evolved cognition, I'll argue,

would seem to be a poor fit to literature on almost any definition of the term. Because of

this poor fit, I'll then suggest, the Literary Darwinists often are sent back on a broadly

thematic and sentimental approach to individual texts. In the final section, I will attempt to

draw out the implications of Literary Darwinism's failure to make its case. I don't think the

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lesson should be that literary study ought to be kept apart from exciting developments in the

sciences of mind. I want to argue against the idea that literature is an adaptation and for a

messier account of how we did or did not come to like stories. This messier account is, I will

suggest at the end, closer to the kind of thing that science can help us say about the arts.

Criticism and Natural Selection

Literary Darwinism is the name for a school of criticism that attempts to ground the

interpretation of literary works in a theory of evolution by natural selection. According to

self-described Literary Darwinists like Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton, Jonathan

Gottschall, and Michelle Sugiyama, we write and read stories because in the past it enhanced

our fitness to do so. Literature on this view is an adaptation. We like to read and write novels

(say) because our very distant ancestors liked to tell stories, and their telling stories provided

some sort of advantage for survival and reproduction. This claim "for an adaptive function

that is specific to art or literature proper" is perhaps what separates the Literary Darwinists

from other critics interested in bringing ideas of evolution to literary study.5 "Adaptationist

literary scholars," writes Joseph Carroll in his manifesto collection Literary Darwinism (2004),

"are convinced that through adaptationist thinking they can more adequately understand

what literature is, what its functions are, and how it works—what it represents, what causes

people to produce it and consume it, and why it takes the form that it does."6 "The art of

storytelling," echoes Brian Boyd in his recent On the Origin of Stories (2009), "is a specifically

human adaptation, biologically part of our species. It offers tangible advantages for human

survival and reproduction."7 "Far from derived from sets of cultural conventions," opens

Denis Dutton in his crossover bestseller The Art Instinct (2008), "the enjoyment of fiction

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shows clear evidence of Darwinian adaptation."8 On its own admission, Literary Darwinism

stands or falls on the idea that literature is an adaptation.

But what exactly is an adaptation, and how would we go about arguing that literature

should be considered as one? Why would we want to? Much of the more polemical side to

the Literary Darwinist program lies in reminding readers of the prudential virtues of

literature for this or that facet of human living. Several generations of historicist or

theoretical criticism have apparently forgotten that literature is good for you. The claim for

adaptation, however, is considerably more demanding than this. According to mainstream

evolutionary biology, an adaptation is not merely something that is good for an organism;

rather, it is something that is preserved in the genes of an organism and passed on because it

is or was once good for an organism. In this respect, adaptations are historical concepts: they

are traits whose existence may be explained by their selection for fitness to a past

environment. As the philosopher of biology Elliott Sober puts it, "Characteristic c is an

adaptation for doing task t in a population if and only if members of the population now

have c because, ancestrally, there was a selection for having c and c conferred a fitness

advantage because it performed task t."9 My blood clots because in some ancestral

environment blood clotting was selected for its fitness to a world with sharp edges.

Therefore blood clotting should be considered an adaptation. Should blood clotting in some

distant future turn out to be a bad thing, however, it would still be an adaptation among

those who possessed the trait. Likewise should some special new kind of blood turn out to

be a better match to the environment it would not be an adaptation unless and until it was

passed on to subsequent generations and spread in the population. In other words, the

argument is not so simple as to say that any bundle of traits perfectly matches its

environment at any time. Since adaptations are relics of past generations of selection, a trait

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may lose its fitness if the environment changes.10 Likewise a new trait may be advantageous

without being an adaptation, if for example it is a product of relatively recent mutations. Nor

finally is the argument so inclusive as to say that every feature of anatomy or physiology (let

alone psychology) is adaptive. Some are byproducts or side effects, others transformed or

acquired with time.11

According to the sort of biology the Literary Darwinists would recruit for the study

of literature, in other words, adaptation explains much but not everything and should be

used with some caution. In his classic study of the topic, G. C. Williams cautions at the

outset, for example, that "adaptation is a special and onerous concept that ought only to be

used when it is really necessary."12 At a minimum, adaptations result from asymmetrical

distributions of alleles (pairs of genes) in the population. Some members of a species have

some alleles (whether for blood clotting or liking stories) and others do not. Over long

swaths of time, those alleles that promote survival and reproduction remain while those that

do not fade away. To claim that literature is an adaptation therefore is to say that it is

represented in the genome, selected for in an ancestral environment, and passed on through

reproduction.13 So we can begin untangling the difficult agenda set for the Literary

Darwinists by asking what it would mean for something like a capacity or competence for

literature to have evolved under selection pressure. Unlike livers or joints, literary texts are

not features of anatomy or physiology. They are very specific kinds of behaviors. So at an

elementary level the proposition means that nature selected a certain habit of mind: a

"compulsion to invent or enjoy stories we know to be untrue" or, in slightly baggier terms,

"a uniquely human, species-typical disposition for producing and consuming imaginative

verbal constructs."14 We have in expressions like these a pretty clear sense of the trait the

Literary Darwinists are after: an internal, mental characteristic that causes humans to create

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or attend to works of literature. And we have a clear sense, too, of the premises (tacit and

explicit alike) lying behind their work. Literary Darwinism assumes that dispositions to

behave in a certain way may be selected for and inherited. They further assume that relatively

complicated dispositions—"liking stories" or "good at telling stories"—may be carried in

genes and fixed in brains. They conclude that such dispositions are present in us now

because they offered a fitness advantage in the past. The first two parts of the program are

typically articles of faith and rarely argued at any length. The last part about fitness is where

the action tends to be. We know that liking literature is "biologically part of our species"

because we can conjecture that it helped us survive and reproduce, not because we can

locate the trait on the genome or in the wetware of neurons. 15

With the emphasis on mental characteristics, Literary Darwinism commits itself to a

strong form of psychological nativism. Habits and faculties of mind are not learned from

culture or picked up by experience; rather, they are every bit as much of our genetic

inheritance as the hair on our body and the saliva in our mouths.16 Several further features of

the argument follow from this premise. Given how long it takes for adaptive genotypes to

spread among large populations, the window during which a taste for literature might have

become a "species-typical disposition" is very wide, somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000

years ago, near the end of the fabled Pleistocene era.17 We are asked in other words to

believe that some sort of mutation led to "a compulsion to invent and appreciate stories"

and that this behavior spread among humans as literature lovers survived to reproduce and

pass on their genes. In the words of Denis Dutton: "A thoroughgoing Darwinism makes a

specific demand: nothing can be proposed as an adaptive function of fiction unless it

explains how the human appetite for fictional narratives acted to increase, however

marginally, the chances of our Pleistocene forebears surviving and procreating."18 The shift in

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tense in this sentence is no accident. Nothing can explain the present status of fiction as an

adaptation unless it refers to the past action of increasing fitness. So the scope for Literary

Darwinism is at once expansive and limited. All humans have an innate disposition (or

appetite or competence) for literary narrative. Anything one could say about this trait must

be applicable to the minds of stone-age hunter-gatherers. As Michelle Sugiyama puts it,

"storytelling is the product of a mind adapted to hunter-gatherer conditions."19

For the uninitiated, the frequent recourse to a kind of ersatz anthropology of

Pleistocene-era hominids might be a little unusual. Literary criticism as a rule is not rife with

talk about cavemen. This emphasis on prehistory is a dimension to Literary Darwinism taken

without modification from a particular kind of late twentieth-century evolutionary

psychology. The disciplinary background here is worth a moment's pause, since the major

texts and points of contention may not be familiar to those in departments the Darwinists

would like to reach. We might begin simply by considering the oft-repeated aphorism, "Our

modern skulls house a stone age mind."20 The aphorism expressed in synoptic form the

basic premise of the school associated with the work of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby,

David Buss, Steven Pinker and others.21 The point is not exactly that we act like our distant

ancestors. Rather, it is that our minds are products of long and slow processes of selection,

most of which occurred in the long ago past. Here is the canonical view as summarized by

Cosmides and Tooby:

The key to understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that

its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a

modern American—they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems

of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a

brain far better at solving some problems than others. For example, it is

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easier for us to deal with small, hunter-gatherer-band sized groups of

people than with crowds of thousands; it is easier for us to learn to fear

snakes than electric sockets, even though electric sockets pose a larger

threat than snakes do in most American communities. In many cases, our

brains are better at solving the kinds of problems our ancestors faced on

the African savannahs than they are at solving the more familiar tasks we

face in a college classroom or a modern city. In saying that our modern

skulls house a stone age mind, we do not mean to imply that our minds

are unsophisticated. Quite the contrary: they are very sophisticated

computers, whose circuits are elegantly designed to solve the kinds of

problems our ancestors routinely faced.22

To be a Literary Darwinist is thus to take as a first principle that present-day habits of mind

may be explained by selection pressures from an antique environment. The fear of snakes

like the taste for sweet and fatty food or the disinclination to sleep with one's siblings is still

with us because it responded to a dilemma in the Pleistocene: snake bites, starving, inbred

deformities, and so on. "Behavior in the present," Cosmides and Tooby continue, "is

generated by information-processing mechanisms that exist because they solved adaptive

problems in the past—in the ancestral environments in which the human line evolved."23

There is a kind of melancholy belatedness to our basic mental equipment. Since the relevant

number of generations to produce adaptations occurred while we lived as small bands eking

out subsistence in Western Africa, our habits of mind are pitched to a world we no longer

live in. So it is best not to look to the present-day world for the clue to how our minds work.

"Evolutionary psychology is relentlessly past-oriented."24

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This relentless orientation and the form of nativism it brought in train remain

controversial for reasons that need not detain us much here.25 The important point for our

current purposes is that the adaptation thesis speaks to dimensions of literary competence

that may plausibly be said to be very old, present in the notional prehistory of the human

species, prior to writing, literacy, or any work with which we are familiar. The point bears

some emphasis since it stands athwart virtually every working principle of professional

literary study. The invention of writing and reading are comparatively late developments on

the timeline of the species, mere flicks in the eye of natural selection. Any claim made on

behalf of the adaptive function of literature therefore must be appropriate for prehistory and

oral texts.26 At the level of the phenotype, "sitting around a Pleistocene campfire listening to

the storyteller's tale" needs to be identical to reading Middlemarch.27 So much is readily

granted by Carroll, who cedes in passing that when he "speak[s] of the of the adaptive

functions of literature," he "mean[s] to signify the adaptive function of oral antecedents of

written stories, poems, and plays."28 The limitation doesn't bother him, since "writing is an

extension of oral communication" and the "same arguments that apply to these oral forms

will be understood as extending also to their counterparts in written language."29 If Literary

Darwinism is to succeed, therefore, orality and writing need to collapse to the same

phenomenon, and the relevant features of literary texts need to "extend" unchanged across

85,000 or so years. Both might come as a surprise. For all its interest in cognitive science,

Literary Darwinism acts as if there is no pertinent difference between the processing of

sound and image—the aural and visual pathways through the brain. And despite its alleged

fondness for literature, Literary Darwinism keeps at a distance the forms in which literary

texts appear. The only way to push forward from the ur-stories of cavemen to the fully

developed techniques of a literate culture, after all, is either to abandon written forms or to

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boil them to their skeleton: "some sequence of human actions in a concretely specified

setting."30 Since the entire span of literary history, from Gilgamesh to Coetzee, registers not a

dot on evolutionary time, finally, this skeleton is an unchanging feature of every text we

know.

The difficulty in making recourse to literary form and literary history runs persistent

interference in the attempt to ground meaning in adaptation. According to the sort of view

the Literary Darwinists would endorse, the clue to adaptive traits lies in their design and

function. As Cosmides and Tooby put it, an adaptation is "a complex arrangement of

specialized functions that does something good for the organism."31 In most cases, so the

story goes, intricacy of design and specialization of function are closely matched. (Eyeballs

are highly organized structures for seeing; immune systems are highly organized structures

for warding off pathogens.) Carroll seems to have something like in this in mind when he

claims that "artistic and literary productions are … highly organized in ways that seem

designed to fulfill a primary and irreducible psychological need" or, when looking to the

future of his field, he writes that "one central line of development for evolutionary literary

study will be to link specific cognitive structures with specific literary structures and

figurative modes, embedding both within the larger structure of evolved human

dispositions."32 The appeal to form is on the face of it quite seductive. Few in literary study

would dispute the complex arrangement of the artifacts we study. Design of this variety is

more or less the underlying rationale of the discipline. In statements like these, Carroll seems

to piggyback onto received notions of form ("literary structures and figurative modes" that

are "highly organized") biological notions of design for adaptive function, as if formal

analysis of the sort that grounds literary study of all varieties was already equipped to do the

sort of work that Literary Darwinism has in mind. And yet this argument faces a stiff

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challenge. "Literary structures and figurative modes" (again) are only commensurate with

features designed by natural selection if they may conceivably be located within stories told

in the Pleistocene. The kind of "structures" and "modes" that fit a vision of prehistory, for

this reason, turn out to be bare sequences of atavistic motivation. The result is not just a

reduction of form to plot but also an equation of plot with "the basic ground plan of human

motives and human feelings" as Literary Darwinism understands them: desire to reproduce,

look after one's kin, get along, fly into fits of jealous rage, and so on.33

The mention of form is in this respect something of a bait and switch. One expects

formal analysis to provide the lynchpin between the biological and the literary and yet one

gets instead a series of plot summaries: mate selection in Austen, jealousy in Shakespeare and

so on.34 If evolutionary psychology is "relentlessly past-oriented," Literary Darwinism is

relentlessly thematic. At the extreme, the theme is a kind of micro-version of the story of

natural selection itself. The Darwinian saga somehow becomes the very story of most

fictions. Thus Denis Dutton:

The basic themes and situations of fiction are a product of fundamental,

evolved interests human beings have in love, death, adventure, family, justice,

and overcoming adversity. 'Reproduction and Survival' is the evolutionary

slogan, which in fiction is translated straight into the eternal themes of love

and death in tragedy, and love and marriage for comedy … Story plots are

not, therefore, unconscious archetypes but structures that inevitably follow,

as Aristotle realized and Darwinian aesthetics explain, from an instinctual

desire to tell stories about the basic features of the human predicament.35

This paean to universal humanity and the great themes of love and death seems quite apart

from the promised attention to design. Where design might twist or arrange or put in

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relation themes of one sort or another, literature on Dutton's view provides a kind naked

access to them. The last sentence is in this respect quite telling. The disposition to tell stories

is an adaptation because it helped us survive and was passed on with reproduction. The

stories we tell are (oddly) about this process of survival and passing on of things like stories.

We need not have any idea how any design specific to literary form mediated this trait.

Design turns to plot and plot to theme.36

So design in the biological sense may turn out to be incommensurate with form in

the literary sense. The role of criticism is therefore somewhat unclear. If the interests are so

fundamental, what job is there for literary scholarship other than to describe to readers what

they already experience, what nature has selected they feel in their core instincts? If literary

form is supposed to have a special function, what adaptive role could there be for bare

themes, for subject matter as such? Carroll senses something like this in his caution to

Darwinian critics that it is "naïve" just to "examine this or that text in order to demonstrate

that the characters in the text behave in precisely the way that evolutionary psychologists

would predict they would behave."37 "Behavior that is depicted in literary texts," he

continues, "does not necessarily exemplify universal or species typical behaviors"; rather,

"species typical behaviors form an indispensable frame of reference for the communication

of meaning in literary representations."38 Carroll would render more sophisticated the

argument that literature is a repository for human nature. Between the behaviors represented

in individual texts and the frame of species-typical wants and actions lies, on his view, the

"distinctive characteristics of an author's identity."39 Thus we would miss something were we

to focus exclusively, say, on "the primary need to acquire resources and to mate successfully"

in Pride and Prejudice without pausing to show how "Austen's own style" is "supple, sharp,

quick, and crystal clear."40 Whatever one makes of Carroll's subsequent reading of Austen's

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"irony," the notion of form he uses moves towards different ends from what had been

promised. Pausing over Austen's style here amounts to a wave in the direction of her

intelligence and power, as if the Darwinist felt somewhat guilty about not having much to

say about the literature he likes so much.41 It does nothing to clarify how literature is an

adaptation. And that is perhaps no surprise. If literary and biological form are

incommensurate phenomena, with separate tempos on the timeline of the species, then it is

exceedingly difficult to glean any adaptive function from the forms literature has taken.

Literary texts may be highly organized in ways critics are trained to care about and yet this

may have little to do with their role in evolution, at least so far as evolution reduces to

adaptation.

Form is supposed to provide evidence of adaptation because it shows the special

purpose of highly organized phenomena. How else would such a strange artifact as a cochlea

come about were it not for hearing? Because Literary Darwinism has trouble locating the

forms it cares about in a story about evolutionary design, it has tremendous difficulty

specifying the function literature is supposed to perform. Why would natural selection have a

thing for literature? Michelle Sugiyama puts the problem like this: "Life as a hunter-gatherer

is difficult, arduous, and dangerous. Given these conditions why would our Upper

Pleistocene ancestors bother to take the time to tell stories? For we can be pretty sure that

they did."42 We can be pretty sure they did, Sugiyama reasons, because storytelling is a

uniform feature of every existing society, and anything that ubiquitous in human culture

must be a Darwinian adaptation. Her question asks to what particular selection pressure

storytelling was a response. This is the familiar tack of both biological and psychological

theories of evolution. Natural selection puts together artifacts for some purpose or other:

cochlea to hear and sustain balance, a taste for sweets and fats to promote the intake of

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calories.43 In either case, structure and function are mutually supporting. As evolutionary

biologists like David A. Baum and Michael J. Donoghue put it, adaptations are "characters

that evolved via natural selection for some specified biological role."44 The same is supposed

to be the case for traits of mind. "An adaptive problem and its cognitive solution," write

Cosmides and Tooby, "need to fit together like a lock and a key."45 The task for evolutionary

biology in this respect is comparatively simple. We know at the cellular level why blood clots.

We know what the genes for blood clotting are and how they create a body that doesn't

bleed to death at a common scrape. We can make a pretty good case that blood design

responded to a problem of hard edges and soft skin. According to the first wave of

evolutionary psychology, one could make an equally plausible account of the function of

liking sweets and fats or avoiding snakes or not copulating with close relatives or detecting

cheaters and so on. "Natural selection shapes domain-specific mechanisms so that their

structure meshes with the evolutionarily stable features of their particular problem

domains."46 In these classical examples, the inference works backward from a phenotypic

trait to its origins. Whatever one thinks about this sort of argument, it would seem that

storytelling and attending present a very different situation. We know of course very little or

nothing about how they are implemented in the brain or represented in the genome.47 So

much could be said for all traits of the mind. But in this case we also know nothing about

the stories stone-age humans may have told each other.48 We have no sense if any features of

a particularly literary design responded to any pressures from a specifically Pleistocene

environment.

This puts us in a different situation from where we might stand with respect to

other ostensibly inherited behaviors. The detection of cheaters or the caring for young or the

fearing of snakes have, in outline, a form we may say "fits together" with an adaptive

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problem: the need for trust in small societies, survival in a forbidding environment. In each

case, a specified form mediates a specified function. To detect a cheater is to represent and

scrutinize someone else's state of mind; to care for young is to provide food and shelter; to

fear snakes is to move in a certain way when presented with a slithery reptile. In each case,

the "key" and "lock" have rudimentarily discernable characteristics. In contrast, storytelling is

drastically underspecified as both a behavior and a disposition and so fits any problem one

might imagine for the distant past. The result is a certain scattering of function depending on

which Literary Darwinist you read. What is the function of listening to or creating stories?

Take your pick:

The ability of human beings to extend themselves by representing in their

minds possible but nonexistent states of affairs—situations-that-were-

true-in-the-past-or-are-not-true-in-the-present or are-possibly-true-in-

the-next-valley-or-might-be-true-in-the coming-winter.49

Most succinctly expressed by the Boy Scout motto: be prepared. As any

Survivor fan knows, finding food and water, building a shelter, preventing

and treating injury and illness, and maintaining group cohesiveness is

difficult and demanding work. … Narrative enables people to acquire

information, rehearse strategies, or refine skills that are instrumental in

surmounting real-life difficulties and dangers. 50

The ability to share and shape the attention of others by appeals to

common cognitive preferences … to behaviors that focus not on the

immediate needs of the here and now, but on directing attention and

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engaging emotion for its own sake, even toward distant realities and new

possibilities.51

An emotionally and subjectively intelligible model of reality [within

which] human beings organize their complex behaviors.52

A fitness signal for … attracting and seducing members of the opposite sex.53

Organizing motivational systems disconnected from the immediate

promptings of instinct.54

The Literary Darwinists are united in their sense that literature helped to make us the species

we are, but consensus stops there. After the insight is floated, the accounts of function

scatter because none have recourse to a property that could be said to be intrinsic to literary

narrative. The limit would seem to be one in principle. Without an appeal to the form of

stories told in the long-ago past, one doesn't know where to look. And so each candidate for

function slides from literary narrative to something else. Natural selection did not need

literature to represent "possible but non-existent states of affairs" for example. It only

needed the mind's ability to form sentences in the conditional tense. Conditional sentences

and modal constructions are, one imagines, quite wonderful things for human survival. How

the mind forms these sorts of sentences or represents events that might or could happen is an

independently interesting problem. How natural selection chose minds with this facility is a

matter of intense debate.55 My point is simply that stories are not necessary for modality.

Syntax would do the work just fine. The same is the case with the other candidates for

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function: acquiring information from the environment, sharing attention, forming mental

images of non-existent entities, experiencing emotions, sending out fitness signals to

potential mates. We would be hard pressed to make the case that any one of these functions

couldn't be achieved by simpler means: memory, reasoning, perception, recursive syntax, the

modal tense, and so on.56 Literary narrative would seem to be a further fact, distinct from these

other facts with which it is sometimes accompanied.57 The conclusion I'll draw from this

later on in this essay is that it's a great deal easier to make a case for adaptive and other

functions of mind feeding into a disposition to create and consume works of literature than

it is for such a disposition itself to be an adaptation.58 The stakes of making such an

argument will turn out to be considerably lower, however, and will include the possibility

that literature need not be discussed in evolutionary terms at all. Faced with such a

possibility, we'll see, the Darwinists often retreat to the idea that literature provides enduring

themes or values, now validated by the latest science. No wonder the press loves them.

Literature and the Innate Mind

My point so far has been that Literary Darwinism is in debt for a plausible account

of selection, an explanation both of how storytelling in the Pleistocene had features in

common with actually existing literary practices or artifacts and how these features might

have responded to an adaptation problem of one sort or another. In these respects, my

argument has proceeded along evidentiary lines, inquiring into whether Literary Darwinism

could provide a convincing account of the selection history of its ostensible trait: literary

competence, "liking literature" or what have you. I will now turn the argument in a different

direction and ask if this trait is the kind of thing that could be selected for and innately

specified in the first place. As we have seen, Literary Darwinism presupposes a strong form

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of psychological nativism. All minds enter the world with a common structure and set of

tools. This structure and set of tools are part of the genetic endowment and develop

independently of environment or learning. The particular culture in which an individual

matures merely fills in content or turns some switches in one direction or the other. Each

feature of the innate mind, moreover, is present in us now because it solved an adaptive

problem in the past. So for example we don't learn to cooperate or speak a language or

recognize faces; we grow an innate ability to do so. We do so because, in the past,

cooperating or recognizing faces or speaking a language provided a fitness advantage for

those lucky to have the trait. Liking literature on this account is simply one or the many

things that we do by nature.59

But what sort of thing is it, exactly? The argument that liking literature is an innate

feature of mind should have some clear sense of what the properties of this feature are, not

just what it does and why its there, but what it is. As we have seen, the preferred terms hover

around "disposition," "compulsion," "appetite," or "inclination." One is disposed to create

or listen to stories, or has an appetite or inclination for the same. On its own, this sort of

argument needn't imply adaptation under selection pressure. A disposition toward fictional

narratives might have emerged (or not) out of other features of the mind, with separate

pathways on evolutionary history.60 Comparatively recent events in the history of human

societies might have recruited more stable aspects of cognition. But softer claims like these

would leave too much to chance and too much to culture. On the strong adaptationist

account, the disposition to create or listen to fictions is a kind of permanent tendency in all

humans at all times and itself responded to problems in a past environment. We would

expect therefore for the disposition not merely to be a placeholder—a moment in mind

before listening to or composing stories—but to be a particular way of responding to or

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creating information. We would expect it to have intrinsic characteristics. For reasons that

will become clear, the Literary Darwinists do not spend too much time elaborating on the

nature of these characteristics. The working hypothesis for most comes (again) from a

certain kind of evolutionary psychology: the view that attributes functional specialization to

independent features of the evolved mind.61 The disposition to like literature, on this view, is

one of many "modules" put in place by natural selection in response to a specific pressure

from the environment. This account of the mind lies behind statements like the following,

by Michelle Sugiyama: "our minds and bodies are not general-purpose organs but, rather, a

set of specialized organs, each of which has evolved to surmount a specific obstacle to

survival or reproduction (an adaptive problem or selection pressure) that recurrently beset

our ancestors throughout evolution."62 Or this by Denis Dutton: "My approach has tended

to model the human mind on the analogy of a multipurpose tool—a Swiss Army knife fitted

by evolution with an assortment of mental blades and implements for solving specific

problems in prehistory."63 Or this by Joseph Carroll: "The human mind has functional

cognitive mechanisms for precisely the same reason that the human organism has complex

functional structures in other organ systems—because it evolved through an adaptive

process by means of natural selection."64 Just as evolution developed hearts to pump blood

and kidneys to filter impurities, so it also built modules to process vision or parse sentences

or detect cheaters or like literature. The question for us now is whether attending to or

creating stories is the kind of thing that could be a functionally distinct target for selection.

Again, the question is not the rather obvious one of whether isolated systems like sight or

language might feed into a disposition to create or compose literary works; it is the

considerably trickier one of whether there could be something like a discrete, innate, and

adaptive system for creating and attending to works of literature.

20

To answer this question would require that we take a closer look at the properties

and features alleged to belong to such systems. The idea that faculties of mind could be

discrete and innate dates back to Chomsky's conception of the language faculty as a "mental

organ" with identical features across the human species.65 The subsequent fallout is well

known. Chomsky introduced universal grammar as a genetically programmed feature of the

human mind. Jerry Fodor revised the idea to include cognitive processes or procedures, like

sensory perception and certain kinds of computations.66 The notion that mental states and

properties arise from multiple and differentiated faculties in turn proved handy for the

succeeding generation of evolutionary psychologists because it provided a model for how

parts of the mind might have individually responded to selection pressures.67 Thus Steven

Pinker in response to Fodor: "The organs of computation that make up the human mind are

not tailored to solve arbitrary computational problems but only those that increased the

reproductive fitness of our ancestors living as foragers in pre-state societies."68 The corpus of

modules accordingly expanded to include hundreds of loci selected for their special function:

from processing language or recognizing faces to performing basic moral judgment.69

The argument that literature is an adaptation thus runs in tandem with the view that

the mind is not a single thing but rather is divided into faculties that were selected in

response to discrete problems in the long-ago past. Once again, we need not be detained so

much by the debates this view has engendered as by the strains it puts on Literary

Darwinism. 70 Liking literature on this account must be considerably more than a mere

disposition or an appetite or a tendency. It must be a faculty/module with its own

procedures and database. Consider the following pronouncement at the beginning of

Dutton's long argument for the adaptive function of the arts:

21

The arts, like language, emerge spontaneously and universally in similar

forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that

had clear survival value in prehistory. The obvious surface differences

between art forms cross-culturally no more argues against their instinctual

origins than the differences between Portuguese and Swahili show that

language does not rely on a universal ensemble of instinctive capacities.71

Dutton craftily weaves innateness together with selection, two elements of the argument that

might otherwise be kept apart, indeed that Chomsky and Fodor had expended considerable

energy in keeping apart. 72 And this is no surprise. Dutton's goal is not just to show the arts

to be innate; it is to show them to be adaptive, and while one might have innateness without

adaptivity (think of the funny bone or handedness), one cannot have adaptivity without

innateness. So the argument draws an analogy between art and universal grammar. Just as

every human has a linguistic competence in the capacity to learn a language and produce

grammatical expressions, so every human has an aesthetic competence in the capacity to

appreciate or create works of art. Despite the apparent dissimilarity among tastes from place

to place or across time, all humans share this innate aesthetic endowment. Once we accede

to this, Dutton thinks, it is only a matter of time before we realize that such an innate

competence must also be an adaptation. And yet the argument comes with the significant

burden of having to connect one or another literary practice to an underlying set of innate

rules, on the analogy of a particular language to a universal grammar. Dutton puts off this

difficult task, but we might ask: what is the "universal ensemble" of intellectual and

imaginative capacities that engender the artifacts we come to know as literature?

The analogy between linguistic and literary competence makes a familiar move. The

apparent fact of cultural dissimilarity relies on a universal and innate similarity. Since we may

22

easily grant that a faculty for language is innate, we ought to do the same for literature, which

also has a general structure despite appearances to the contrary. So how long can one sustain

the analogy between literary and linguistic competence? Several features would seem to be

important in making language the prototype for an innate mental faculty.

1) Universality. All humans have a language just as all humans have legs and livers.

2) Commonality. Beneath the surface diversity of human languages there are base

regularities and shared rules.

3) Ontogenesis: Language has a regular pace of development across time and place; it is

"grown" according to a predictable schedule of acquisition, error, and the like.

4) Poverty of the stimulus: Language develops faster than the available data would explain,

which suggests an innate, internally held body of knowledge.

5) Speed and encapsulation: Linguistic processing is separate from and faster than other,

more "domain general," kinds of mental activity. It works on a restricted database

(words, phonemes) and cannot be accessed or manipulated.

I asked earlier what features a disposition to enjoy or create works of literature would need

to have for it to be an innate part of our cognitive repertoire. I'm not suggesting that the

above would provide a checklist so much as a vague likeness. If enjoying literature is the

kind of thing that can be innately specified and inherited across the duration of human

history, one would expect it to have intrinsic features like those of language, perhaps the only

cognitive faculty on whose innate existence there is a reliable consensus. When Dutton and

others equate literary with linguistic competence, after all, they do so for a reason. A great

deal hangs on the analogy working as an argument.

Let's consider the parts of the analogy one at a time and see if they actually make a

working thesis:

23

Universality: The Literary Darwinists make frequent claim to the ubiquity of literary

taste and production. All cultures at all times in all places (so it is said) produce and consume

literature. This is an empirical thesis and is on occasion supplemented with some evidence.73

But what might it mean were it to be true? Were we to discover or just stipulate that

something like literary taste and production is present in all cultures at all times, our

explanation would again be limited (drastically so) to what could be said about oral

production. Writing and reading are eleventh-hour developments on the timeline of

evolution. For this reason, they are also something one learns. Global illiteracy confirms this

every day. Therefore, the claim for universality obliges its adherents (again) to downplay or

eliminate the difference between written and spoken texts. Even this lower-level universality,

however, wouldn't seal the deal on an innate or adaptive faculty for literature. After all,

universality as such does not prove innateness, or else Chomsky could have just stopped

with everyone speaking a language. There are clearly some universals (or near universals),

like clothing and cooking, which are less likely to be innate than to be perennial responses to

recurrent problems.74 So even if everyone reads or listens to stories, that might just be

because stories have become part of our inherited culture, something everyone learns. To

prove innateness, one would need to connect the universal practice to a system of underlying

rules and constraints.75

Commonality. One way to exclude a non-nativist explanation for the ubiquity of

literature, therefore, is to show that enjoying and creating literary works (however they may

be defined) is in fact constrained by a set of rules that play a role analogous to a grammar.

One might make recourse in this regard to the tradition of formal analysis that looks for

these kinds of rules. Vladimir Propp's morphology of the folktale, for example, draws an

analogy between parts of stories and parts of an organism as a way of enumerating the

24

relevant components of all fairytales.76 Tales break down to "functions" arranged in a

"sequence."77 The best-case scenario for the literary nativist might proceed along these lines

and extend the analogy so functions resemble parts of speech and sequences resemble

syntax. Like universal grammar, functions and sequences are "stable, constant elements in

folktales, independent of who performs them."78 And like natural languages, folktales are at

once "multiform, picturesque, and colorful, and to no less a degree, remarkably uniform and

coherent."79 But the analogy would confront some difficulties. Propp himself declined to

explain the uniformity of fairytales according to the uniformity of the human mind. There

were just too many other kinds of tales with separate kinds of rules.80 The closer one gets to

form, on his view, the closer one also gets to diversity and historical circumstance. Literary

Darwinism wants to say that the closer one gets to form, the closer one gets to the universals

selected for during the Pleistocene. Therefore it continues to translate form into theme.

When Dutton turns to works of fiction, for example, he makes a great deal of the "seven

different types of plot" essayed not by a formalist like Propp but by a pop-Jungian like

Christopher Booker.81 These "blueprints for story plots" constitute the mind's innate

contribution to works of fiction. They precede any literary artifact we encounter. The nature

of this contribution, however, is unclear. The mind would not seem to supply rules that

would structure, constrain, or engender this or that story; rather it would supply "the deep

themes that fascinate us in fictions."82 Academic literary criticism of course recoils from this

sort of thing, and for good reason. We are left with no accounting for how "the universal

themes of love, death, adventure, family, conflict, justice, and overcoming adversity" (should

they exist) make their way into any given artifact we care to explain.83 Instead the argument

seems to move in the other direction, with genial sounding themes glancing off of individual

texts and making their way to all minds.

25

Ontogenesis: One source of evidence for the linguistic nativist is the regular schedule

of language learning among healthy children. Were language taught, so the story goes,

children might pick it up at various speeds. And yet despite the best or worst efforts of

parents, children tend to "grow" their language at more or less the same rate. The inference

follows that language learning is served by some sort of innate mechanism. Friends of

psychological nativism have extended the inference from ontogenesis to other domains,

from "theory of mind" (the recognition of mental states in other people) to morality.84

Under certain experimental parameters, children can be shown to develop a theory of mental

states on a regular schedule without explicit instruction.85 Likewise, on some sets of

evidence, children demonstrate norms of fairness and cooperation at predictable intervals.86

Can the same be said for something like literary competence? Brian Boyd thinks so. On his

account, an interest in art, including the art of storytelling, "develops reliably in all humans

without special training."87 Moreover, "the fact that it emerges early in individual

development—that young infants respond with special pleasure to lullabies and

spontaneously play with colors, shapes, rhythms, sounds, words, and stories—particularly

supports evolutionary against nonevolutionary explanations."88 Since the interest appears so

early, Boyd argues, it must be innate, and since it is innate it must be adaptive. The inference

from early to innate to adaptive, however, raises some further questions. If the arts are

innate and develop without training, we would expect them to come online according to

separate schedules and to have separate rules, as in the case, for example, of vision and

language. What, then, apart from an indifferent response to stories and sounds in the very

young would demonstrate how literary competence matures? One potentially promising

body of research has focused on the advent of pretence, imagination, and "pretend play" in

very young children. According to some, children regularly show a capacity for "acting as if"

26

something is the case between eighteen and twenty-four months, so that for example if a cup

is full of pretend water, the floor beneath it will become pretend wet in the event the cup is

tipped.89 In other words, the ability to bracket our ordinary sense of the external world and

establish an internally consistent, counterfactual version of things may develop on a regular

schedule across humans. So there's a reasonable chance that pretending and imagining are

innate. There's also a reasonable chance that pretence and imagination feed into the way that

older children understand fictional worlds.90 Yet the moral of this finding is not easy to

draw. Pretence and imagination are likely to be features of literary competence. But they are

clearly not identical to such competence. Reading or attending to fictions require other

faculties or skills to be in working order alongside pretence, each of which might come

online independently of the other, from language to memory to the emotions and beyond.

Likewise, imagination and pretence might well feed into other dispositions, like a tendency

for religious belief, as Pascal Boyer and Paul Bloom have argued.91 In other words, the

regular pattern in which pretend play develops in young children provides evidence that

literary competence is built from features of mind selected (if at all) for other purposes.92 I

will return to this below.

Poverty of the Stimulus: The early cognitive revolution reintroduced nativism to talk

about the mind by arguing that the stimulus from the environment was insufficient to

produce the sort of response that behaviorists claimed amounted to learning a language.93

The influential conclusion from this observation was that the mind must have an innate

repertoire of grammatical rules that exceed the evidence available from experience. Children

extract examples from the environment but then expand or compute on them at a rate of

learning that cannot be explained without recourse to internal processes and innate

knowledge. Once again, I have no interest in adjudicating this equally significant and

27

controversial thesis about language. I would only point to its ineliminable connection to

nativist theories about other mental faculties, like moral judgment. "If children are born with

a set of moral principles," writes Marc Hauser, "then this foundation helps solve the

acquisition problem. The poverty of the experience is no longer a problem for a child. From

a few examples handed down through the local culture, she can derive the proper

principles."94 Whatever one might think about this argument, one would have to grant that it

has at least a kind of formal coherence. The parts of the analogy fit together, and for this

reason the validity is an empirical question. It would be exceedingly difficult to find a way to

write a similar series of sentences about what Carroll calls "art or literature proper." 95

Hauser and Chomsky have recourse to ideas of innate content, whether the rules of

grammar or of conduct. As we've seen from the example of narrative morphologies, even

the best-case presentation of shared literary parameters might tell us very little about an

innately held faculty for literature. In this respect, literature is a poor fit to a poverty of the

stimulus type argument on logical or a priori grounds. Literary competence might not be the

kind of thing that could develop in advance of stimulus.96 Elements of literary competence

might be, but to say this (again) would be to run a very different kind of argument.

Speed and encapsulation. One particularly thorny point in the debate over modularity

was the claim by some that innate mental systems must work fast on a restricted database

and thus be inaccessible to conscious manipulation.97 Consider this: From the soup of

ambient noise, the language faculty extracts units of sound and immediately parses them into

sentences. One doesn't have to work at all to hear speech as language. One just does. The

lesson is supposed to apply equally to other modules as well. Jerry Fodor puts it like this:

"You can't help hearing an utterance of a sentence (of a language you know) as an utterance

of a sentence, and you can't help seeing a visual array as objects distributed in three

28

dimensional space. Similarly, mutatis mutandis, for the other perceptual modes: you can't, for

instance, help feeling what you run your fingers over as the surface of an object."98 Fodor's

point is that the speed in which linguistic and other information is extracted from the

environment corresponds to the inaccessibility of the raw data, either from one module to

another or from one module to regular, "domain general" intelligence. Try as one might, one

cannot make a sentence sound like noise. The same is the case for vision. Presented with an

optical illusion, like the Müller-Lyer drawing (two parallel arrows with ends pointing in

opposite directions) or the appearance of the sun at the horizon, my visual experience will

remain the same no matter what my thinking is. I cannot make myself see the lines as

identical in length or the sun as ordinary sized. Therefore it is reasonable to infer, so the

story goes, that modules produce output into central systems while receiving no equivalent

input from them. Boyd draws a relatively loose analogy to literary processing along these

lines. Just as we automatically hear noise as language or see objects in three dimensions or

interpret actions in terms of mental states, he argues, so too we respond quickly by design to

narrative fictions. "In the same way," he writes, "we are unable not to imagine and respond to

the characters and events of a well-told story." "We may know that the story consists of

mere words, words with no pretense to report real events," he continues, and yet "we cannot

stop conjuring up and responding to the story's invented people and predicaments, and

even, if occasion prompts, weeping tears at characters' fates."99 I have as little access to the

process in which I respond to fiction, on this view, as I do to the process in which I put

together bits of sound as speech. Narrative raw materials are sealed off in roughly the same

way as linguistic raw materials, hence the automatic and fast response I have to stories I

know to be false. Since we respond automatically and speedily to literary artifacts, Boyd

concludes, we may reasonably infer that literary competence is of a piece with other features

29

of the adapted mind. Once again, however, the analogy seems difficult to sustain. Is literary

response automatic and encapsulated in the manner of language or vision? One can always

argue oneself out of grieving for Cordelia, and one might have to work hard to get or like a

given text. Whereas the component bits of language or vision are inaccessible to other parts

of the mind, the component bits of a text or oral performance are not, except insofar as they

are made from linguistic or visual forms. So for example we might lose the details of

conversational syntax or be unable to break down a visual image, but we can pretty well

track the component bits of the texts themselves, the "agents and actions, character and plot,

intentions and outcomes" as Boyd calls them.100 Often these bits solicit consideration that

would to be impossible were the system shut off from introspective access. (Queequeg

orders two bowls of chowder and Ishmael one; now why is that? Why does "she that me

learneth to love and to suffer" will that "my lust's negligence be reined by reason"?) Reading

or listening to stories or poems or plays may recruit or even fatigue the peripheral systems of

language and vision and memory, but would seem to be in some important sense distinct

from them. The point is not that literature is some ethereal thing above the whirs and gears

of the cognitive machinery. Were we to agree that the mind has modules, rather, we would

most likely have to say they are brought to reading or attending to stories, in the sense that it

is hard to read without having language or sight or hard to listen without audition, and so on.

This quick overview of literature and psychological nativism has tended throughout

toward a similar end. Literary Darwinism presupposes the functional specialization of the

mind and argues for a special process devoted to art and literature.101 The case for such a

process seems quite thin on the ground. When we consider the plausibility of a "literature

faculty" or "literary competence" alongside the properties assumed to belong to other innate

faculties of the mind, we seem moved in one of two directions: either a disposition to create

30

and attend to literature just isn't the sort of thing that can be innately specified, or other bits

of the mind feed into and have some sort of regular relation with creating and attending to

literary texts. It may be then that the interdisciplinary project between literary studies and the

sciences of mind is just to sketch out these relations. This would look quite different from

the project of Literary Darwinism.

Consilience?

The previous section attempted to take seriously the claim that humans are born

with an innate faculty for literary competence. My point was to show how in some cases the

argument was forced to make recourse to innate competence designed for other purposes

while in others the comparison revealed incommensurate kinds of terms. The point of this

essay has not been entirely negative however. I think there are interesting lessons to be

learned from each side of the coin. So I'll say a bit now in conclusion about what possibilities

might be opened by the "evolved for other purposes" argument and the

"incommensurability" argument.

The Literary Darwinists sometimes write as if they own a "naturalist" aesthetics while

the rest of us wander aimlessly with our cultural blinkers in place.102 I think this is unfair and

misleading, not least because it restricts science to the particular version of evolutionary

psychology of which they are fond while reducing contemporary literary study to a caricature

of "social construction" and "theory."103 You don't have to be a fan of the adaptive story

about literature to be excited about recent, interdisciplinary ventures in literature and science.

One route these have taken is to explore the cognitive dimension of this or that problem in

literary study.104 Another has been to connect the long history of cognitive science to the rise

and fall of literary forms.105 Neither approach requires the adaptationist argument. An

31

adaptation is a necessary feature of our current biology, the "inevitable consequence," in

G.C. Williams's words, "of the natural selection of alternative alleles in an environment

described in relevant genetic, somatic, and ecological (including social and demographic)

detail."106 Were the disposition to create or consume literature innate in this way it would be

just as invariant across the species and across time as the Literary Darwinists suggest. But if

the disposition is not innate in this way, it might simply emerge from other features of the

mind in a way considerably more sensitive to environment and history. So much would seem

to underwrite at least some of the more interesting work across science and literary studies in

recent years.107

I argued earlier that Literary Darwinism tends to sound strange or sketchy in its

evocation of the distant past and tends to sound sentimental or thematic in its treatment of

literary artifacts. I would now say in wrapping up that both result from the strain to vault up

the scale of explanation from the biological to the literary and back. The word for this sort

of maneuver is "consilience," a bit of Victorian-era jargon made popular recently by E.O.

Wilson, the controversial socio-biologist whose influence looms large over Literary

Darwinism.108 Thus Joseph Carroll:

[The Literary Darwinists] want to establish a new alignment among the

disciplines and ultimately to subsume all other possible approaches to

literary study. They rally to Edward O. Wilson's cry for "consilience"

among all the branches of learning. Like Wilson, they envision an

integrated body of knowledge extending in an unbroken chain of material

causation from the lowest level of subatomic particles to the highest

levels of cultural imagination. And like Wilson, they regard evolutionary

biology as the pivotal discipline uniting the hard sciences with the social

32

sciences and the humanities. They believe that humans have evolved in

an adaptive relation to their environment. They argue that for humans, as

for all other species, evolution has shaped the anatomical, physiological,

and neurological characteristics of the species, and they think that human

behavior, feeling, and thought are fundamentally constrained and

informed by those characteristics.109

One might well flinch at the comfort Carroll expresses about the state of consensus in the

natural and social sciences. Indeed it is to the detriment of Literary Darwinism that it sells

one contested version of cognitive science as the "model of human nature … on which most

practitioners in the field would agree."110 Even so, my concern is less with the triumphalism

in which evolutionary psychology is presented as the truth about the human mind than with

the confusion between a set of facts about the world and a method for studying these facts.

It is of course trivially true that literature depends on evolution. Without bodies there would

be no books. Yet it is overwhelmingly possible that very little in any given reading of any

given text need make recourse to this truth. The dream of consilience, according to Jonathan

Gottschall, is "shrinking the space of possible explanation."111 But in putting things this way,

Gottschall mistakes the state of the world with the arrangement of its disciplines. Why

should explanation shrink to evolutionary psychology and not physics? Why should

explanation not multiply and expand along the grain of the world's many particles?

One might be tempted to say in this instance that consilience masks an overly hasty

form of reduction. But I don't think this quite captures the problem. In the effort to shrink

the space of explanation, Literary Darwinism doesn't so much reduce literature to biology as

move away from both, into ever more genial themes of human nature. There are reasons for

this. As we have seen, thematic concerns of a very bald sort often stand in here for an

33

engagement with literary form and history. (The road to consilience for Gottschall lies in the

"universality of Romantic Love.")112 They also mark out the role for "art and literature

proper" in the big story of evolution. Literary Darwinism has a difficult time finding a place

for literary forms in the story of adaptation under selection pressure. At the same time, it is

committed to the proposition that literature must have helped us to become the species we

are. The result of this curious imbalance is that literature simply is about who we are, in a

relatively straightforward and uplifting sense. Literary texts provide "lively and powerful

images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly

capable and complete human beings who wrote them."113 There is something tender hearted

in this bid for the function of literature to create "healthy human possibility."114 It exchanges

a hardheaded naturalism for mushier notions of moral improvement and strikes an ethical

note reminiscent of Leavis. But surely this is a most remarkable turn of events. Casting about

for a function specific to literature, the friends of adaptation seem to settle for it making us

better, more decent, or more complete human beings.115 Yet value-laden ideas like complete

humanity have no meaning in the terms of evolutionary or any other science and tell us very

little about any cultural artifact. And this is precisely my point. With the turn to a kind of

pabulum, Darwinian criticism seems not very scientific or consilient at all.

The sciences of mind have been shown to provide suggestive points of linking

between literary studies and more empirically driven disciplines. One lesson from Literary

Darwinism might be that we should be more open-ended and modest about what this work

has accomplished and where it might go. Once the story of why a given adaptation was

selected is finished, the historical work is over. My hunch is that the work only gets started

when we identify connections between certain features of mind and certain kinds of texts or

forms. In other words, once we rule out the kind of strong nativism that would see literary

34

competence as adaptive and innate, the beginnings of a research project come into view. The

question for this project is not what function did literature have in the ancestral past but

what is done with minds at certain times and in certain places. There is no telling what such

work might reveal.

35

1 Academic year 2008-2009 was something of a watershed moment for Literary Darwinism,

marked by the twin publication of Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human

Evolution (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008) and Brian Boyd's On the Origin of Stories: Evolution,

Cognition, and Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Along with being reviewed

in most major dailies, Dutton made a noteworthy appearance on January 28th, 2009 on the

Colbert Report (http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/217078/january-

28-2009/denis-dutton). This breakthrough into the major media was preceded by articles in

the New York Times Magazine (November 6th, 2005), The Globe and Mail (August 11, 2007), The

Boston Globe (May 11th 2008), The New York Times (May 27th 2008 and February 16th 2008), The

Guardian (January 14th, 2009) and elsewhere. For the background argument, see manifesto-

anthology, Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson eds. The Literary Animal: Evolution

and the Nature of Narrative (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005); the special issue

of Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001); the special double issue of Style 42. 2-3, (2008); Joseph

Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature (New York: Routledge,

2004); and Jonathan Gottschall, Literature, Science, and the New Humanities (New York:

Palgrave, 2008).

2 The major figures of Literary Darwinism—Boyd, Carroll, Dutton, Gottschall, Sugiyama—

all make much of this marginalization. (In a recent essay, Carroll refers to the group as a

"robust guerilla band" ["Evolutionary Paradigm," 104].) They would seem to have a point, at

least anecdotally: apparently the MLA repeatedly turned down proposals for panels on the

topic and the Literary Animal went through several presses before finding a home at

36

Northwestern. It is hard to know what to make of these inescapably gossipy and complaint-

driven stories. Nevertheless, Dutton's Philosophy and Literature has become something like the

house journal of the movement in part due to the perceived sense that no other academic

journal would consider their work seriously.

3 See Gottschall, Literature, Science, and the New Humanities, especially 89-176.

4 Literary Darwinism identifies literature with narrative and narrative with storytelling so as

to come up with a plausible account of Pleistocene origins. My account here will accept this

identification for the sake of argument. Even so, one could might contest the first premise

that literature is exhausted by narrative hastily narrows the category.

5 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, xxi. Among these other critics, I would include those who seek

to draw insights from evolutionary psychology without arguing that literature is an

adaptation, like William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other

Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), Blakey Vermeule,

Why We Care About Literary Characters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), and

Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State

University Press, 2005). I would also include those who use evolution as an analogy for

literary history, including especially the work of Franco Moretti; see Signs Taken For Wonders

(London: Verso, 1983), 262-78 and Alberto Piazza's afterword to Graph, Maps, and Trees:

Abstract Models for Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 95-113.

6 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, vii.

7 Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 1.

8 Dutton, The Art Instinct, 5.

37

9 Elliot Sober, The Philosophy of Biology (Boulder: Westview, 2000), 85.

10 In classic evolutionary psychology this point is made all the time. Some allegedly adaptive

behaviors for cavemen are disastrous for moderns. The environment has changed faster than

our genome. So for example we like to eat fatty and sweet food because tens of thousands of

years ago, our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed to store calories. So a taste for these sorts of

things was selected for. What was good for us back then makes us obese now. This notion

has lead to some real controversy. See for example the discussion of rape in Brian Leiter and

Michael Weisberg, "Why Evolutionary Biology is (so far) Irrelevant for Legal Regulation,"

Law and Philosophy 29 (2010), 31-74.

11 Few among even the most die-hard nativists would deny that some features of mind are

acquired and don't simply grow. In the effort to introduce nativism to a discipline they feel is

hopelessly mired in blank-slate empiricism, the Literary Darwinists quite underplay this. For

some of the debates and issues see Eliot Sober, The Nature of Selection (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1983).

12 George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1966), 4.

13 Jerry Fodor has made much of the importance of "selected for" in theories of natural

selection. Selected for as opposed to mere selection, on his view, presumes intensionality and

therefore gets into all sorts of trouble. Polar bears are both white and match their

environment: whiteness and matching the environment were thus both selected; but which

was "selected for"? See for example the controversial essay "Against Darwinism" in Mind and

Language 23 (2008), 1-24 and the briefer "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings," London Review of

Books, October 17 (2007).

38

14 Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 69. Joseph Carroll (quoting from his forthcoming book with

Gottshcall, John Johnson and Daniel Kruger, Graphing Jane Austen), "Evolutionary Paradigm

for Literary Study," Style (2008), 134.

15 Boyd takes some time On the Origin of Stories (e.g. 190) but the evidence is largely behavioral

with the neuro angle largely inferred.

16 The great wave of popular evolutionary psychology writing during the 1990s—culminating

in Stephen Pinker's How the Mind Works (New York: Viking, 1997) and The Blank Slate: The

Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002)—represented a massively

expanded and controversial form of the sort of nativism that had marked the first cognitive

revolution of the 50s and 60s. Twenty-first century Literary Darwinism can be seen, in this

respect, as a kind of final plank in the attempt to extend adaptive nativism to the mind.

17 Reference to the Pleistocene era abounds in the literature of evolutionary psychology,

where the period of human speciation around 150,000 marks the beginning of the

"environment of evolutionary adaptedness." See e.g. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides

paradigm building "The Psychological Foundations of Culture," in Barkow, Cosmides, and

Tooby eds. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1992), 19-136. With specific reference to literature, Michelle Scalise

Sugiyama writes, "we can safely say that oral narrative is part of our hunter-gathering past,

likely to have emerged between 30,000 and 100,000 years ago." Sugiyama, "Narrative Theory

and Function: Why Evolution Matters." Philosophy and Literature 25 (2001), 234.

18 Dutton, The Art Instinct, 109-110, emphasis added.

39

19 Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, "Reverse-Engineering Narrative: Evidence of Special Design,"

The Literary Animal, 177.

20 The aphorism about stone-age minds appears several times in Cosmides and Tooby's

writing and is quoted often by others (often in critique). It is "principle 5" on their online

Evolutionary Psychology Primer. See http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html

(1997).

21 For Cosmides and Tooby, see the manifesto anthology, The Adapted Mind; for David Buss,

see Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of Mind (London: Allyn and Bacon, 1998) and The

Evolution of Desire: Strategies for Human Mating (New York: Basic Books, 1995); for Pinker, see

How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997) and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of

Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002).

22 Cosmides and Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology Primer.

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html (1997).

23 Cosmides and Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology Primer.

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html (1997).

24 Cosmides and Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology Primer.

http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html (1997).

25 One might merely note that evolutionary psychology proposed a contentious series of

arguments about, for example, the fixed nature of human gender roles, intelligence, and

predispositions—from a preference for a certain waist to hip ratio to a bias for biological

over step children to an inclination for sexual violence. The Literary Darwinists tend to write

as if evolutionary psychology is the only game in town, and the entirety of the social sciences

have cottoned to the program with only the humanities remaining to be swayed; see for

40

example Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, 17-41. For a helpful survey of

the arguments evolutionary psychology has engendered since Cosmides and Tooby, see

David Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005) and Kim Sterelny, Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of

Human Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). The Literary Darwinists also don't take up the

rather strenuous objections made to evolutionary psychology made by some in evolutionary

biology. See for example Elisabeth A. Lloyd and Marcus W. Feldman, "Evolutionary

Psychology: A View from Evolutionary Biology," Psychological Inquiry 13 (2002).

26 Thus the following moment from Dutton's interview with Steven Colbert:

Colbert: "How many cavemen were reading Emma?"

Dutton: "They weren't reading anything. What they were doing was telling very complex

stories to each other."

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/217078/january-28-2009/denis-

dutton. The conversation is from 1:40 to 1:52 mark.

27 Dutton, The Art Instinct, 132.

28 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 103.

29 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 103. Dutton concedes the same point. "Modern technologies

for creating and enjoying fictions are a long way from sitting around a Pleistocene campfire

listing to the storyteller's tale. However, these technological developments don't mean as

much as we might imagine" (132).

30 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 163.

31 Cosmides and Tooby, "The Psychological Foundations of Culture," in The Adapted Mind,

56.

41

32 Carroll, "Human Nature and Literary Meaning," in The Literary Animal, 103, and

"Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study," Style (2008), 108.

33 Carroll, Evolutionary Paradigm, 115. Along with the emphasis on adaptation, the Literary

Darwinists are united in their fondness for "human nature" as a constant across the species,

surely an oddity among twenty-first century literary scholars. This again is taken from the

kind of evolutionary psychology they like. Common human nature was the rallying cry for

Cosmides and Tooby, Buss, Pinker and the like. But the connections to literary study are

pretty thin. When evolutionary psychology talks about human nature it tends to mean a

common, innate structure to the mind. When Literary Darwinism talks about human nature,

it tends to mean a common overt psychology. The first is (largely) closed to introspection;

the second is open to introspection. On this difference, a great deal of significance hangs. It's

why for example Dutton, Carroll, Boyd, et. al sound at moments more like Harold Bloom

than Steven Pinker. Carroll's earlier book on Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia:

University of Missouri Press, 1995) makes this quite clear. The chapter for example on

"Elements of Literary Figuration" continually slides from narrative form to shared human

nature. See e.g. 131, passim.

34 See Carroll's essay on Austen discussed below and Daniel Nettle's essay on Hamlet in the

Literary Animal, 56-75.

35 Dutton, Art Instinct, 132.

36 Thus Brian Boyd can write for over a hundred pages about Homer's Odyssey without, it

would seem, knowing any Greek. Once the attention turns to the themes of love, death,

quest and the like it matters not at all whether the text is read in the original or in translation.

37 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 187.

42

38 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 187.

39 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 206.

40 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 207.

41 "It has less the quality of a brush held by a lady's gentle touch than of a finely tempered

blade held wielded by a hand that is strong, deft and aggressive." Literary Darwinism, 207.

42 Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, "Reverse-Engineering Narrative: Evidence of Special Design,"

The Literary Animal, 177.

43 The example of a taste for sweet and fatty foods crops up recurrently among the friends

of the adaptationist theory of literature; see e.g. Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 37 and Dutton,

The Art Instinct, 86-89. This argument has been given a full airing in Michael Power and Jay

Schulken The Evolution of Obesity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

Interestingly, the adaptive value of having a taste for sweet and fatty foods was Gould's

paradigm example of the just-so story as simple bullshitting in "the cocktail party mode." See

Steven Jay Gould, "Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism," The New York Review of Books

44.11 (1997), 51

44 David A Baum and Michael J. Donoghue, "A Likelihood Framework for the Phylogenetic

Analysis of Adaptation," in Steven Orzack and Elliot Sober eds. Adaptationism and Optimality

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24.

45 Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Origins of domain specificity: The evolution of

function organization, in L, Hirschfield and S. Gelman eds. Mapping the Mind: Domain

Specificity in Cognition and Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 97.

46 Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Origins of domain specificity," 96.

43

47 Work on the neuroscience of reading is in its (interesting) infancy. See for example

Stanislas Deheane on the neural location of word recognition and semantic decoding.

Location identifies a correlation between the phenomenal experience of reading and activity

in regions of the brain. It explains where that experience might be realized not how the brain

subserves literary experience. See for example "Evolution of human cortical circuits for

reading and arithmetic: The 'neuronal recycling' hypothesis," in Stanislas Deheane, Jean-René

Duhammel, Marc Hauser, and Giaccomo Rizzolatti eds. From Monkey Brain to Human Brain:

A Fyssen Foundation Symposium (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 133-138 along with the more

wide-ranging book length elaboration, Reading in the Brain: The Evolution and Science of a

Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009). See also Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid:

The Story and the Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Harper Collins, 2007). Both Deheane

and Wolf emphasize that reading is learned and historically recent (in evolutionary terms).

48 Many Literary Darwinists try to solve this problem by looking at the habits of present day

hunter-gatherer societies, a solution which seems tendentious and question-begging (hunter

gatherers then were like what the are like now), when not wholly dependent on the

secondary literature of another discipline. See for example the Sugiyama essays in The

Literary Animal and Philosophy and Literature and Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New

Humanities, 56-70. As Buller and others point out, there is no reason to assume, in

Gottschall's terms, that "World ethnography, especially of relatively 'uncontaminated'

hunter-gatherers, is a precious repository of information about the lives of our ancestors."

Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, 25.

49 Dutton, The Art Instinct, 113.

44

50 Sugiyama, The Literary Animal,187. This account of "information acquisition and storage"

is maintained also in Sugiyama (2001) 238.

51 Brian Boyd, "Literature and Evolution: A Biocultural Approach," Philosophy and Literature

29 (2005), 10.

52 Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism, xxii

53 Dutton, The Art Instinct, 140. Dutton rather remarkably argues that literature and the arts

can be both or either naturally or sexually selected. He considers this a more "complete"

evolutionary theory of the arts. The trouble is that no single work or group of works or

genre could ever be said to be more one rather than the other. The argument fails to

individuate kinds of selection upon types of (literary) traits.

54 Carroll, "Evolutionary Paradigm," 122.

55 See for example the lively debate between, on the one side, Noam Chomsky, Tecumseh

Fitch, and Marc Hauser and, on the other, Ray Jackendoff and Steven Pinker over the

evolution of the language faculty. For Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch language evolution can

be limited to recursion (or syntactic embedding), whereas for Jackendoff and Pinker the

"gene involved in language learning and speech" also included "morphology, phonology,

case, agreement," and so on. For Chomsky, Fitch and Hauser, see "The Faculty of Language:

What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?" Science. 298 (2002), 1569-79, and the

follow up, "The evolution of the language faculty: Clarifications and implications," Cognition

97 (2005) 179-210. For Jackendoff and Pinker, see "The faculty of language: what's special

about it?" Cognition 95 (2005), 201-236 and the follow up "The Nature of the Language

Faculty and its Implications for Evolution of Language" Cognition 97 (2005) 211-225. The

relevant point of the Fitch, Hauser, Chomsky thesis is that language might have “evolved to

45

solve other computational problems such as navigation, number quantification, or social

relationships” (Hauser et. al 2002: 1578) and not initially communication, i.e. that it was not

selected for fitness in the classic sense of adaptation. This debate like many others in the

evolution of mental faculties passed without notice in effort to absorb hard-line evolutionary

psychology into the humanities.

56 Or in the case of Carroll's argument that "art and literature proper" helped to attach

emotional meaning to higher-order intelligence, that religion doesn't do the work better and

more thoroughly and over a much longer swath of human history. Were Carroll to concede

this rather obvious point he would then have to say that religion is an adaptation, something

he would clearly rather not do. It is nevertheless remarkable that the rather extensive body of

work on the evolutionary grounds of religion escapes his notice, including especially the

quite relevant work of Pascal Boyer. (See note 91 below.)

57 The language of further fact is taken from arguments about consciousness in the

philosophy of mind. See David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

58 The "evolved for other purposes" argument could extend from the thoroughgoing

nativism of Stephen Pinker who famously argues that the arts (minus literature) are

"cheesecake for the mind" to the more modest claim that some of our mental dispositions

(the emotions, theory of mind) are most likely innate but that they interact with more

context specific features of the changing environment. For the cheesecake argument, see

Steven Pinker How the Mind Works, (New York: Norton, 1997) 525-565.

59 Thus Dutton: "The love of fiction—a fiction instinct—is as universal as hierarchies,

marriage, jokes, religion, sweet, fat, and incest taboo." Art Instinct, 109.

46

60 This would be the argument for excaption or spandrel, for the idea that literature co-opted

features evolved for other ends. A version of this sort of argument is made on behalf of

religion by Pascal Boyer (see note 91). One would think that an argument for religion would

have some implications for art, as intimately related as the two were in the pre-modern era.

This would run interference with the argument that art and literature were specifically

selected for and adaptive.

61 For a basic outline of the "massive modularity" thesis see Cosmides and Tooby, "The

Modular Nature of Human Intelligence" in A.G. Sheibel and J.W. Schopf eds. The Origin and

Evolution of Intelligence (Sudbury: Jones and Barlett, 1997), 71-101.

62 Sugiyama, Literary Animal, 285.

63 Dutton, The Art Instinct, 135

64 Joseph Carroll, "An Evolutionary Paradigm for Literary Study," Style 42. 2-3 (2008), 106.

In the same essay, Carroll mentions in passing that he has grown skeptical of modularity, yet

does little to suggest an alternative architecture that would support the idea that literature is

itself an adaptation. He makes a similar point in the chapter on E.O. Wilson in Literary

Darwinism, 82.

65 Dates back in the modern period. The idea itself goes back to Plato and, as Chomsky

himself pointed out, with immediate relevance to the seventeenth and eighteenth-century

rationalists. See his Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). For Cosmides

and Tooby's debt to Chomsky see The Adapted Mind, 93-8. Chomsky himself has been a

lifelong critic of adaptive accounts of mental processes in general and language in particular.

47

66 See Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), and the revisiting of

modularity (in response to its use by evolutionary psychology) in The Mind Doesn't Work That

Way (Cambridge: MIT, 2002).

67 For the purposes of this paper, I'm going to keep as relatively synonymous the terms

"module," "faculty," and "mental organ." In the more technical areas of linguistics and

cognitive psychology, the three are sometimes parsed with great care. Nothing in the present

argument will depend on this parsing, however. The important point for us is whether

"literary competence" can satisfy the basic requirements of a functionally differentiated

compartment of the mind. For the relevant distinctions, see John Collins, "Faculty Disputes"

Mind & Language vol. 19. no 5. (2004): 503-33.

68 Steven Pinker, "So, How Does the Mind Work?" Mind & Language, vol. 20, n. 1, 5.

69 See for example Frans De Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton:

Princeton University Pres, 2006) and Marc Hauser, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our

Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (New York: Harper Collins, 2006)

70 For the debates about modularity, see H. Clark Barrett and Robert Kurzban, "Modularity

in Cognition: Framing the Debate, "Psychological Review 113.3 (2006), 628-647; Buller, Adapting

Minds, 127-200. For the argument against massive modularity see Fodor, The Mind Doesn't

Work that Way, especially the appendix on detecting cheaters, 101-4. For a defense, see

Steven Pinker, "So, How Does the Mind Work?" Mind & Language, vol. 20, n. 1, 1-24 and

Dan Sperber, "The Modularity of Thought and the Epidemiology of Representations" in L.

A. Hirschfeld and S.A. Gelman eds. Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 39-67 and "In Defense of Massive

Modularity," in E Duproux ed. Language, Brain, and Cognitive Development: Essays in Honor of

48

Jacques Mehler (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 47-57. The question as the early 80s revival of

faculty psychology turned into the 90s interest in evolutionary psychology was whether

modules were for lower-level systems like perception or could include many different

systems defined in terms of function (like cheater detection in the classic case). Literary

Darwinism in this respect presupposes massive modularity without making much of a case

for it.

71 Dutton, The Art Instinct, 5

72 For Chomsky see note 55 and 66; for Fodor see notes 13, 67, and 70.

73 Sugiyama "Reverse Engineering" and Goltschall, New Humanities present some studies

about the global prevalence of literary culture. So do Tooby and Cosmides in "Does Beauty

Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the

Arts," SubStance, 94/95 (2001), 6-27. Often the claim is just asserted. Dan Everett's work on

the Piraha of northern Brazil has revealed at least one culture that has no art and no

narrative (fictional or otherwise). See "The Interpreter" in The New Yorker, April 16th, 2007.

74 See Jesse Prinz, "Is Morality Innate," in Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Moral Psychology.

(Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

75 For further discussion of the candidate features of innate cognition see the essays in Peter

Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich eds. The Innate Mind: Structure and Content

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

76 Gottschall's Literature, Science, and the New Humanities contains two chapters (91-126) on

folk and fairy tales without a single reference to Propp. This is too bad.

49

77 See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (1928), trans. Laurence Scott, (Blomington:

Indiana University Research Center, 1958), 71-9. Propp's study is of the fairytale, which he

understands as a subset of the folktale along with animal tales and jokes and anecdotes.

78 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 20.

79 Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 19.

80 See Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 96.

81 See Dutton, The Art Instinct, 127-132.

82 Dutton, The Art Instinct, 131.

83 Dutton, The Art Instinct, 5.

84 The research on theory of mind is vast and rapidly becoming a staple of cognitive theories

of art and literature (see e.g. Vermeule and Zunshine). The argument for innate development

on the analogy to language is set forth eloquently in Simon Baron-Cohen popular crossover,

Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). The

argument for innate moral competence is much more controversial (for obvious reasons).

For a kind of best-case scenario, see Hauser, Moral Minds and De Waal, Primates and

Philosophers. For the contrary argument, see Prinz. The Emotional Construction of Morals (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2007).

85 Thus non-autistic children pass the "false-belief" task around age four. They are able to

understand that other people have beliefs that may be false, as in the fabled "Sally-Ann"

hidden marble test. See Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness1-9.

86 See Hauser, Moral Minds, 60-70, passim.

87 Boyd, On the Origins of Stories, 73.

50

88 Boyd, On the Origins of Stories, 73.

89 See e.g. Alan Leslie's influential paper, "Pretence and Representation: Origins of 'Theory

of Mind," Psychological Review 94 (1987), 412-426.

90 See Deena Skolnick and Paul Bloom, "What does Batman think about SpungeBob:

Children's understanding of the fantasy/fantasy distinction," Cognition 101 (2006) B9-B18.

91 See Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York:

Basic Books, 2001) "Religious Thought and Behavior as a By-Product of Brain Function,"

Trends in Cognitive Science 7: 3 (2003), 199-123, and Paul Bloom, "Religion is Natural,"

Developmental Science 10: 1 (2007), 147-151. Boyer's conclusion is quite relevant to the present

argument and provides an indirect correction to the Literary Darwinists: namely, the higher-

order disposition toward religious belief is a by-product of, and cobbled together from,

mental faculties and systems evolved for other reasons. See especially the article in Trends.

92 The parenthetical is meant to hedge bets against adaptivity not against evolution. Again,

apart from theists, no one suggests that the mind hasn't evolved. The question is whether

mental faculties are adaptations and, if so, which ones. This is by no means a settled

question, nor is it really the place for literary scholars to be the one's doing the settling.

93 This is one of the points of Chomsky's famous review of Skinner's verbal behavior (1959),

though the phrase itself doesn't appear until his Rules and Representations (Columbia: Columbia

University Press 1980), 34 and passim.

94 Hauser, Moral Minds, 66.

95 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, xxi.

96 For an attempt to make it work, see Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 88-95.

51

97 Those who want to extend modularity across the mind and align modules with selection

pressures often jettison encapsulation so that modularity can apply to any adaptive function.

This was one of the main sticking points in the Fodor v. Pinker debate.

98 Fodor, The Modularity of Mind, 52-53.

99 Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 189-190.

100 Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 91.

101 And of course visual and the linguistic capacities must also have a vastly separate timeline

on the species, as Boyd at least acknowledges (On the Origin of Stories, 190)

102 "We cannot simply go back to literary texts," writes Brian Boyd, "without assimilating

what science has discovered about human nature, minds, and behavior over the last

century." Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 3. See also Gottschall, New Humanities especially 3-25.

103 The attacks on "theory" and "social construction" are surely among the more

disappointing aspects of Literary Darwinism and are aimed squarely it would seem at a straw

man. See Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, 335-347 and the quite intemperate, "Getting it All

Wrong," American Scholar 75:4 (2004) 18-20; Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 29-44; and

Gottschall, Literature, Science and a New Humanities, 1-42.

104 In addition to the texts by Zunshine, Flesch, and Vermeule listed earlier see G. Gabrielle

Starr, "Poetic Subjects and Grecian Urns: Close Reading and the Tools of Cognitive

Science," Modern Philology 105 (2007), 48-61 and the Fall 2009 issue of Poetics Today (long a

journal that has encouraged this sort of work).

105 See for example, Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the

Form of Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Suzanne Keene, Empathy and the

52

Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and

the Sciences of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

106 George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection, 259.

107 I hasten to add, this is work done by other people. The present essay simply attempts to

look over the shoulder at the Literary Darwinists and other folks interested in bringing

cognitive science in some relation to literary study. It is not a brief for the author's own

work, which is of a very different sort.

108 See E.O. Wilson, Consilience: On the Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1999). Wilson

introduces the manifesto anthology The Literary Animal. Boyd, Carroll, Gottschall, Sugiyama

and the rest make constant recourse to him. See e.g. Literary Darwinism, 69-84, and

Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, 19-21.

109 Carroll, "An Evolutionary Paradigm," 106. See also the chapter on consilience in Literary

Darwinism.

110 Carroll, "An Evotionary Paradigm," 103.

111 Gottschall, Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, 21.

112 Gottschall, Literature, Science, and the New Humanities, 156-170.

113 The quotation is from Joseph Carroll on David Copperfield. It is worth citing in full:

"What David gets from [the books in a neglected store near his room] are lively and

powerful images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the

astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them. It is through this kind of

contact with a sense of human possibility that he enabled to escape from the degrading

limitations of his own local environment. He is not escaping from reality; he is escaping

from an impoverished reality into the larger world of healthy human possibility. By nurturing

53

and cultivating his own individual identity through his literary imagination, he enables

himself to adapt successfully to this world. He directly enhances his own fitness as a human

being, and in doing so he demonstrates the kind of adaptive advantage that can be

performed by literature." Literary Darwinism, 68. This passage is exceedingly strange, shot

through with moral language—the fullness and healthiness of certain kinds of lives—that

would have sat fine with Leavis. At the same time, Carroll seems to believe that reading

provides a fitness, which of course it cannot do. It is literally impossible for what David

reads to prove the adaptive value of literature. Reading might (or might not) make David a

more ethical person and provide for him a fuller life, but it does nothing to effect his genes.

114 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 68.

115 Carroll, Literary Darwinism, 68.