Literary Darwinism?

Jonathon Gottschall, in a recent piece in New Scientist (reprinted here) offers what he calls "Literary Darwinism":

Understanding a story is ultimately about understanding the human mind. The primary job of the literary critic is to pry open the craniums of characters, authors and narrators, climb inside their heads and spelunk through the bewildering complexity within to figure out what makes them tick.

Yet, in doing this, literary scholars have ignored the recent scientific revolution that has transformed our understanding of why people behave the way they do. While evolutionary biologists have irreparably shattered the blank slate, most students of the humanities still insist that humans are born all but free of any innate qualities.

My fellow literary Darwinists and I hope to change their minds. By applying evolution-based thinking to fiction, we believe we can invigorate the study of literature, while at the same time mining an untapped source of information for the scientific study of human nature ... Darwinian thinking can help us better understand why characters act and think as they do, why plots and themes resonate within such very narrow bounds of variation, and the ultimate reasons for the human animal's strange, ardent love affair with stories.

So, what is this "Darwinian thinking" that Gottschall offers as the magic test of fiction? Is it natural selection? Is it phylogenetic diversification? Sexual selection? None of these, nor anything Darwin would have accepted. Instead, it is this (under the fold):

While the specifics of the 1960s bestseller [The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris] were outdated, its general attitude towards human behaviour was not. Morris argued that although humans have complicated culture and a stunning capacity to learn, this does not change the fact that we are also animals, vertebrates, mammals, primates and, ultimately, great apes.

Aspects of our culture and intelligence mean we are different from other apes but do not emancipate us from biology or lift us above other animals onto an exalted link of the chain of being. What's more, it follows that the behavioural characteristics of the human animal, just like the physical ones, should be understood as the products of a long evolutionary process. Morris did not claim this rendered all other perspectives on human behaviour obsolete, just that an important fact had been neglected to the detriment of our understanding: people are apes.

One should call it Literary Linneanism then, for it was that worthy who noticed this (and was attacked by Lutheran Bishops and others for so doing). What Darwin added to this was merely the expectation that as apes we should share many traits with our cousins, and his book The Expression of the Emotions is just such a discussion. But the distinction Gottschall relies on, that nature and nurture are opposed, was not Darwin's view. In fact, Darwin had no clear distinction between nature (innate traits) and nurture (acquired traits), which had to wait for the triumph of August Weismann's doctrine of the sequestration of the germline in heredity.

Gottschall notes that warriors in classical literature spend a lot of time competing for women, and here he is on firmer ground. But while this is true, is it especially Darwinian? In point of fact, the explication he gives of this is classical Marxian analysis - low status males sought to increase their access to resources including mates by battle. It is true, I think, that an evolutionary account can be given an economic flavour, and vice versa. And it is also true that we are apes, and they are very like us, as Frans de Waal's work indicates. At best, though, this is comparative ethology, not "Darwinism", which is, of course, what Morris was doing. Morris had been a student of Niko Tinbergen's.

We actually are in a better state now than in the 1960s and 1970s when Morris was popular, to make a fist of a biosocial account of human behaviour. I especially recommend the work of James Sidianus and Felicia Pratto on Social Dominance, which, despite being attacked as an explanation for immediate social behaviours (and I'm not sure it doesn't work there) is I think an excellent beginning into the explication of the social dominance hierarchy behaviours of that naked social ape. Clibing the dominance hierarchy is not merely chasing mates, or conspicuous consumption. We are guided in our behaviours by larger concerns than sex and money, and they all return to the question of what worked for us when we first evolved as we are now. In short, what was the fitness of these things once upon a time.

A species typically evolves in a given locale, and its adaptations are reinforced by compatibility with other traits or genetic dispositions. Hence, if it is successful at migrating into novel environments, these traits will tend to be retained, or modified only slightly. A lot of behaviours can therefore be inadaptive or even maladaptive. However, something worth noting about us human apes is that we do a lot of niche construction. The environment is adapted to us, not we to it. So if you were to consider fiction through the eyes of a modern ethologist, apart from needing to get the "innate" psychology right (i.e., what humans actually do), you also need to consider why they built the social context, the landscape, and the urban systems they do, just as Ferdinand Braudel noted without any aid from biology. [I might also mention the greatly underappreciated book by Charles Dyke listed at the end of this post in this connection.]

So what worth to history, fiction and sociology can biology have? I think there is a sense in which evolution can affect the ways we think about ourselves, and it is rather radical. In effect, evolution takes the pre-eminence of agency out of the picture - people can have all the intentions they wish, and all the rationales justifying their actions they can invent. It really doesn't matter for explaining how history goes. A smart intention may work, but so may a dumb one; an action may have intended effects, or it may not. The explanation that really matters, though, is why we do these things, intend these things, and justify these things the ways we do. And that boils down to the fact that we are social, hierarchical, resource gathering, sexually reproducing, apes.

So I will suggest that we call this "Literary Primatology", not "Darwinism", which is, as I have noted before, a word that means everything and nothing.

Dyke, C. 1988. The evolutionary dynamics of complex systems: a study in biosocial complexity, Monographs on the history and philosophy of biology. New York: Oxford University Press.