The Historical Position of Literary Darwinism

“Literature” depends on literacy, a very recent acquisition in human evolutionary history, so recent that it cannot plausibly be considered an adaptation. But people in all non-literate cultures use language, tell stories, and play with words in creative and evocative ways. Written language is just a cultural technology extending those universal human aptitudes. Literature and its oral antecedents are thus part of the basic profile of “human nature.” Over the past fifteen years or so, literary scholars in a small but now rapidly growing group have argued that producing an adequate theory of literature requires an evolutionary conception of human nature. By assimilating evolutionary social science, these “literary Darwinists” aim at forming a new paradigm for literary study. Not surprisingly, that grand ambition has often met with a skeptical response. “There have been previous efforts to establish a scientifically based criticism—Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism. All these efforts have failed. Why would your effort be any different?” Not a bad question, but we have a good answer. This effort is different because the historical moment is ripe. We now have, for the first time, an empirically grounded psychology that is sufficiently robust to account for the products of the human imagination.

Sciences do not typically spring full blown from the mind of a single originator. Often, some creative thinker will assimilate the efforts of predecessors, synthesize them, correct them, and add some crucial conceptual component that makes all the pieces fit in a functional way. When that happens, a paradigm forms. The current effort to integrate literary study with the evolutionary social sciences can be located within a nested series of three previous paradigm formations, each serving as a necessary precondition for the one that followed: Charles Lyell’s paradigm in geology in the early nineteenth century; Charles Darwin’s in evolutionary biology later in the century; and the still-emerging paradigm in evolutionary social science.

In the decades immediately preceding Lyell’s publication of Principles of Geology (1830-33), geologists had become so disgusted with grand and fanciful speculation that they had renounced general theories and devoted themselves instead to producing an accurate map of geological strata. Lyell assimilated these efforts and introduced “uniformitarianism,” the idea that geological features result from the accumulated effects, often minute, of the geological forces visibly at work all around us. This idea fundamentally shaped Darwin’s geological vision and informed his theory of natural selection. Darwin’s speculations about human nature in The Descent of Man were prescient, but the times were not yet ripe. Evolutionary social science did not become a cumulative research program until the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Until the past few years, three theoretical deficiencies hampered efforts to form a paradigm in evolutionary social science. Early sociobiologists insisted that “selection” takes place only at the level of the gene and the individual organism. David Sloan Wilson has spear-headed the now largely successful effort to resuscitate the idea of “group selection” and use it as the basis for a more adequate understanding of human sociality. In the 1990s, “Evolutionary psychologists” distinguished themselves from sociobiologists by emphasizing “proximate mechanisms” that mediate reproductive success, but in constructing their model of “the adapted mind,” they left out the idea of a flexible general intelligence. Books such as Kim Sterelny’s Thought in a Hostile World (2003) and David Geary’s The Origin of Mind (2005) demonstrate how that deficiency can be corrected. The third major deficiency was an inadequate appreciation of “gene-culture co-evolution”—the idea that culture operates in reciprocally causal ways with the genetically mediated features of human nature. That barrier, too, is now giving way. Theorists such as Ellen Dissanayake, E. O. Wilson, Brian Boyd, Tooby and Cosmides, Denis Dutton and I have made increasingly effective arguments that literature and the other arts are functionally significant features of human evolution.

I think these three gradual corrections have finally produced a conceptual framework with the explanatory power of a true paradigm. Over the next few years, research in evolutionary literary study will provide a test for this claim. The decisive evidence will be whether we generate a cumulative body of explanatory principles that are in themselves simple and general but that nonetheless encompass the particularities and complexities of literature and the other arts.

Joseph Carroll