Science Magazine 6 MAY 2011 VOL 332 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org 654 C R E D IT : M .T W O M B L Y / S C IE N C E IN THE EARLY 1990S JOSEPH CARROLL, AN English professor at the University of Mis- souri, St. Louis, presented a paper on the possibility of studying literature through the lens of Darwinian evolution. Not long afterward, he heard from a colleague that the paper had generated lots of discus- sion, though not for the most fl attering rea- son. “People didn’t think that anyone in literary studies cared about such things,” Carroll recalls. “There was an argument over whether it was a hoax.” Carroll was indeed serious. For 2 decades prior, Freudianism, Marxism, poststructur- alism, postcolonialism, and other fashion- able “isms” had dominated the academic study of literature. These schools dismissed the idea that evolutionary pressures have shaped human nature, attributing all human nature to culture instead. Frustrated by this thinking, which he has grumbled is “unable to contribute in any useful way to the serious world of adult knowledge,” Carroll rebelled. In 1994, he helped found a new f ield by publishing his self-described “big, baggy monster,” Evolution and Literary Theory, a 536-page book promoting an approach to literature based on evolution science. Carroll wasn’t alone in his despondency. Other literary scholars have described their fi eld as “a backwater” and “embarrassingly out of step” with science. Following Carroll, some began incorporating neuroscience, cognitive science, anthropology, and— most prominently and controversially— evolutionary psychology into their work. Some of that work reads like traditional, pre-1970s English scholarship: discussions of tone, style, context, and theme. But it also explores how evolution might have shaped aspects of literature. On a deeper level, writ- ers investigate the potential adaptive benefi ts of storytelling for our Pleistocene ancestors and the mystery of why humans spend so much time immersed in it. (By one measure, we spend 4 hours per day consuming, dis- cussing, and creating stories, and 4 minutes per day having sex.) Most scientif ic lit scholars incorpo- rate at least some evolution into their work because evolution provides a framework for understanding human behavior. And many focus on evolution- a r y p s y c h o l o g y because it explores the origins of men- t a l p h e n o m e n a , i n c l u d i n g n a r r a - tives and aesthetics, and can bridge evolutionary biology and the humanities. Some recent evopsychology also emphasizes the plasticity of the human mind, which helps explain how universal human behaviors (such as storytelling) can exist but can nevertheless be expressed in different ways in different cultures. Straddling multiple fi elds, this analysis has earned a mixed response. Carroll says most scientists encourage his work: Sup- porters include evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker and biologist Edward O. Wilson of Harvard University and biologist David Sloan Wilson of Binghamton Univer- sity in New York state. In contrast, apply- ing evolutionary thought to the human mind has never been popular in the humanities, and scientifi c lit crit has met with bemuse- ment and occasional hostility. (Three scholars who used scientifi c ideas in their analyses were denounced as “protofascists” at a prominent academic meeting for liter- ary scholars in the 1990s by a critic who admitted he hadn’t read their work.) But since 2007, the number of books and articles incorporating Darwinian and other scientifi c thought into literary studies has more than doubled, Carroll says. Carroll himself released a new book in March, Read- ing Human Nature, which summarizes the accomplishments of evolutionary criticism and anticipates where it might be headed. It’s not a unifi ed fi eld; some of its members in fact distance themselves from Carroll. But these scholars are united in one sense: They’re convinced not only that evolution- NEWSFOCUS Online sciencemag.org Podcast interview with author Sam Kean. Red in Tooth and Claw Among the Literati Upset by the isolation of their fi eld, some critics are trying to bring Darwin’s ideas and recent science to the study of literature. They haven’t been popular Published by AAAS o n M a y 5 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/ www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 332 6 MAY 2011 655 NEWSFOCUS ary thought can improve literary research but also that literature can teach scientists a thing or two about human evolution. Out with Freud, in with Darwin Humanities scholars have criticized scientifi c lit crit as too general or too reductive to say anything meaningful about individual works. Pinker makes a similar argument, saying that although the approach may help us identify how our craving for fi ction evolved, he’s not convinced it will enrich our understanding of specifi c texts. In his new book, Carroll contests these claims, saying that science can offer insight into even the most pored-over works in the canon. In a chapter devoted to Hamlet, he explores the neuroscience of depression, among other topics. Carroll also cites the work of Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, a cog- nitive scientist at the University of Oregon, Eugene, who reinterpreted the Oedipus trag- edies. Standard commentary has been dom- inated by Freudian theories about people’s repressed desires to have sex with their par- ents, but she argues that, in light of wide- spread anthropological evidence of cultural taboos against incest, that reading simply isn’t tenable. Another examination of the classics is The Rape of Troy by Jonathan Gottschall, an English professor at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Penn- sylvania, who completed his Ph.D. thesis under the aegis of David Sloan Wilson. The book examines The Iliad and The Odyssey and employs anthropological work on war- fare and evolutionary work on polygyny to show, Gottschall argues, that “patterns of violence in Homeric society are tantaliz- ingly consistent with … acute shortages of available young women relative to young men.” In this reading, whatever reasons the Greek mythic heroes invoked for waging war—status, money, honor—they were fun- damentally fi ghting for marriages and their evolutionary legacy. Gottschall has also looked outside the Western canon, by studying hundreds of ancient fairy tales worldwide. Although the tales differed in some ways, Gottschall concluded that the same basic underlying characters—handsome young males, pretty maidens, and shrewish older women— appear pervasively in all cultures. This coun- ters, he says, the popular feminist argument that such stereotypes appear only in the fairy tales of Western societies and merely rein- force Western patriarchy. Carroll and Gottschall have examined more modern fi ction as well. In a paper they wrote with psychologists John A. Johnson and Daniel Kruger, they asked hundreds of literary experts to rate their attitudes toward antagonists and protagonists in 201 Victo- rian novels and then tabulated the numbers. They found that experts rated antagonists as overtly dominant and selfi sh, whereas pro- tagonists displayed altruistic and selfless behavior. In one sense this is trivial: Good guys are good, bad guys bad. But the authors argue that experts overwhelmingly perceived consistent “prosocial” behavior among char- acters that people root for. Carroll and his colleagues then drew on anthropologi- cal research to argue why this behavior appeals. In our fraught hunter-gatherer days, when humans roamed about in small bands, people had to sacrifi ce selfi sh interests and work together, or they’d perish. In contrast, self-aggrandizing or dominant behavior threat- ened group survival. Victorian novels, in this view, merely dress up these ancient, evolved preferences in crinolines and top hats. If f iction does reinforce cooperative and egalitarian behavior, and if that behav- ior did ensure the survival of hunter-gatherers, then per- haps the ability to create and understand literature gave our ancestors a survival advan- tage; it is what evolutionary scientists call adaptive. It’s an appealing theory—it makes literature essential to life—but it has proved contentious. First, most scholars distinguish between modern, written literature and more funda- mental forms, such as oral stories. And sto- ries can indeed be adaptive in human culture because they work “like a fl ight simulator” for social life, says Brian Boyd, a Nabokov scholar at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His 2009 book, On the Origin of Stories, examines works as diverse as Hor- ton Hears a Who! and The Iliad. Boyd argues that animals often chase, frisk, and play- fi ght, and in a similar way, humans “refi ne their most important cognitive skills through art.” In f iction, “we learn to understand events and shift perspectives at a faster clip than usual, to enjoy simulations of a wide range of social situations, and to generate a wider range of options.” Storytelling could also have an evolu- tionary benefi t by bringing societies, espe- cially oral societies, closer together and fostering cohesion. Ellen Dissanayake, a professor of music at the University of Washington, Seattle, has argued that all the arts generally fulfi ll this purpose and are therefore adaptive. Evolutionary biologist Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico, Albuquer- que, has argued instead that literature and other arts arose through sexual selection. In brief, in his view, a talent for storytelling pro- vided evidence of a big brain and language skills, which make someone a more attractive mate. Lit- erature was our peacock tail. Boyd sees some truth in both the social-cohesion and sexual-selection mod- els, though he’s less keen on the latter. Sexual selection usually results in divergent behavior between the sexes, and both males and females (despite some differences in taste) indulge just as readily in fi ction. Boyd calls sexual selection “another gear, but not the engine” that drove the evolution of storytelling. Although receptive to the idea, Boyd and other scholars don’t necessarily believe that literature itself (in contrast to simple story- telling) is adaptive. Their case is subtle. William Flesch, a pro- fessor of comparative litera- ture at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, distances himself from “lit- erary Darwinists” like Carroll. But the fi nd- ing that self-aggrandizers are villains in Victorian fi ction meshes with Flesch’s own work on evolutionary game theory and lit- erature, in which rogues are generally pun- ished. Game theory (the prisoner’s dilemma is the classic scenario) explores how people cooperate with or screw each other over in various situations, and how they respond to later interactions with the same people. Flesch focuses on “altruistic punishment”: situations in which bystanders will punish a rogue, even if the rogue never hurt them personally. “There has to be a reward for altruistic punishment,” Flesch says; otherwise human cooperation can’t evolve. And he argues that the ability to grasp narratives and keep track of people’s reputations probably helped Most humanities scholarship today is “unable to con- tribute in any useful way to the serious world of adult knowledge.” —JOSEPH CARROLL, UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI, ST. LOUIS Published by AAAS o n M a y 5 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/ 6 MAY 2011 VOL 332 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org 656 NEWSFOCUS C R E D IT S ( T O P T O B O T T O M ): R O S S M A N T L E ; R E B E C C A G O L D S T E IN to distribute punishments and rewards and therefore proved adaptive. What’s more, if there were conflicting interests among people, he says, those who crafted persua- sive narratives—perhaps by fictionalizing them—would have gained advantages as well. But even if certain components of lit- erature are adaptive, Flesch says, it doesn’t follow that the ability to create or understand literature itself—the full, fl owery, emotion- ally charged production—is adaptive. Flesch instead calls literature a mental spandrel, an epiphenomenon of various evolved traits that happen to work well together. This resembles the “cheesecake” analogy put forth by Pinker in How the Mind Works. Evolution gave us cravings for the concen- trated calories in fats and sugars, and cheese- cake happens to deliver fats and sugars in concentrated doses. Similarly, we might crave ingredients of literature for sound evo- lutionary reasons, and novels might simply mainline those components to our minds. Pornography is another example. Still, arguments like that haven’t dis- suaded some literary Darwinists. Carroll still believes literature (or at least its oral predecessors) had adaptive value. So does Gottschall, although he admits he lacks suf- fi cient data to prove this: “Right now all I can do is tell a just-so story.” But instead of arguing, he wants to impor t methods from the sciences to frame this hypothesis and test it. “We need help from experi- mentalists,” he says, “exper- tise beyond what most of us [literary scholars] have.” What science can learn Pinker has criticized Dar- winian lit crit for focusing so heavily on evolutionary psy- chology and neglecting gen- eral psychology, linguistics, and other disciplines. But he says the focus makes sense. “Evolutionary psychology has concentrated on lurid and fraught aspects of human nature,” he says, including sex, beauty, jealousy, dominance, status—“all the juicy stuff that dominates people’s lives” and makes for lively fi ction. But evolutionar y liter- ary scholars have criticized evolutionary psychology as well—especially what they call “narrow” or “orthodox” evolutionary psychology. In fact, they feel their work can bend back and improve evo- lutionary psychology’s understanding of the human mind. Carroll and Gottschall point out that textbooks of evolutionary psychology often omit art and other aspects of imagi- nation. “Survival, mating, parenting, kin networks, and adaptations for social inter- actions within groups—[those books] think that that pretty much covers it” for human nature, Carroll says. “What they’re miss- ing is that art, religion, and ideology regu- late and direct behavior,” he adds. “Those imaginative features regulate people’s birthing systems and kinship networks, or whether they practice polygamy or monog- amy.” Without those nuances, “you’re just missing the subject, you’re not talking about human beings.” Blakey Vermeule, a professor of English at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Cali- fornia, approaches literature more from a cognitive science than an evolutionary per- spective, but she argues that literature can still illuminate how the mind evolved. For instance, we impose narrative patterns on the world, which reveals how our minds work. Children and Alzheimer’s victims both tend to f ind deep, ultimate causes in ran- dom events: They tend to say things like, “Clouds are really ‘for’ raining.” Stories offer an entry point for understanding how these narrative tenden- cies emerge, Vermeule says: “Literature is a massive data- base people can look at and fi gure out what questions to ask” about human cognition. Literary criticism might even inform biology gener- ally by showing how the mind can open up new avenues for evolution. For example, Flesch says studying lit- erature might help explain how altruistic behavior can develop among nonkin. “The emotions that good stories are particularly effective at elicit- ing, outrage and indignation” over unfair treatment, he says, are exactly the responses that lead to altruistic punishment and cooperation. Still, although literature might illustrate the roots of cooperation, many literary scholars themselves remain wary of cooperating with evolutionary literary critics. A few months ago, Critical Inquiry, a leading journal for literary theory, published a 33-page article with the blunt title “Against Literary Dar- winism.” And although Carroll and Gott- schall have a book-length manuscript on their Victorian novels study (titled Graphing Jane Austen), they’ve had diffi culty fi nding a publisher. Gottschall says the resistance to Darwin- ian lit crit among literary scholars reminds him of resistance among religious groups to evolution itself. “There’s the fear that if you were able to explain the arts and their power scientif ically, you’d explain them away,” he says. “Humanities are the last bastion of magic.” Yet ideas have emerged recently that might help reconcile the divergent worldviews of scientif ic and traditional literary studies. Edward O. Wilson and others now argue that human beings might have evolved not only specifi c mental skills—like language—but also a general tendency for mental fl exibil- ity. Our minds, in other words, evolved to be plastic. Carroll and others have taken up the idea and argue that literature has adap- tive value precisely because it promotes and enhances this plasticity. If that’s true, the notion may someday provide a bridge between the two cultures. “I try to stress that evolution has shaped human minds to be reshapable more than other minds,” Boyd says. “It’s really not so far from things said for a long time in some areas of the humanities.” –SAM KEAN “ We need help from experimentalists, expertise beyond what most of us [literary scholars] have.” —JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL, WASHINGTON AND JEFFERSON COLLEGE “ Evolutionary psychology has concentrated on lurid and fraught aspects of human nature … all the juicy stuff that dominates people’s lives” and makes for lively fi ction. —STEVEN PINKER, HARVARD UNIVERSITY Published by AAAS o n M a y 5 , 2 0 1 1 w w w .s ci e n ce m a g .o rg D o w n lo a d e d f ro m http://www.sciencemag.org/