Literary Darwinism

In "Against Literary Darwinism," Jonathan Kramnick attacks a straw man version of literary Darwinism. His conceptual framework implies that biology is restricted to a few modular cognitive processes, like those for the autonomic nervous system, and that everything else in human experience derives from "culture" and "history." That false dichotomy displays a shallow understanding of biocultural theory, and indeed Kramnick's essay is generally under-informed and out of date.

It’s always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include King Kong, Jaws, The Grey, Them!, Arachnophobia, Jurassic Park, Snakes on a Plane, An American Werewolf in London, and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration—and appreciation—of cinema’s many bad beasts.

“The brilliance of Dominic Lennard’s Brute Force is not only that it is long overdue, but one didn’t realize it was due in the first place! Yet upon reflection and, of course, through Lennard’s engaging book, one realizes not only the ubiquity of animals in horror, but their utter centrality to so many classic horror films. In reading this, we can hear the distant rumble of footsteps of a genetically reborn Tyrannosaurus or the hurried pounding of our beloved Rover who has decided that he wants more than kibbles and bits for dinner—and we look mighty appetizing. ‘Groundbreaking’ is often overused, but in this case it truly fits.” — David Desser, coeditor of Tough Ain’t Enough: New Perspectives on the Films of Clint Eastwood

Will man das Phänomen Literatur mit Hilfe kognitionspsychologischer oder allgemein kognitionswissenschaftlicher Konzepte und Erkenntnisse fundieren, bedarf es einer Metatheorie, die einerseits menschliche Kognition (kognitive Fertigkeiten, Informationsverarbeitung usw.) sowie Motivation und Emotion zu erklären vermag und andererseits, auch unabhängig von einer expliziten kognitiven Ausrichtung, einen Zugang zum Medium Literatur ermöglicht. Als solche Metatheorie bietet sich das evolutionspsychologische Paradigma an, das in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten, theoretisch wie empirisch, viel zum Verständnis menschlicher Kognition, Motivation und Emotion beigetragen hat und seit vergleichbar langer Zeit auch vielfältig fruchtbar auf Literatur angewendet wird (z.B. in Form des sog. Literary Darwinism bzw. der sog. Darwinian Literary Studies). Der vorliegende Aufsatz gibt einen Überblick über neueste empirische Forschung aus diesem Bereich und fokussiert dabei auf das soziale Tier Mensch, das Literatur produziert und konsumiert. Überdies zeigt der vorliegende Aufsatz Wege auf, wie ein moderner konsequent evolutionspsychologischer Zugang, einschließlich quantitativ-empirischer Methodik, auf Literatur aussehen könnte.

People read literature because they want to understand their own experience and the experience of others. Literature contains much violence because violence reveals the underlying conflicts in all social relationships. Evolutionary psychology offers the best explanatory framework for understanding social conflicts, but evolutionary psychology is still in the process of formulating theories about the way core motives interact with specific cultural constructs. To explain the significance of violence in particular works of literature, critics must analyze the interactions between human life history, specific cultural values, individual differences in authorial vision, and relations between the minds of authors and readers in response to characters. This chapter offers examples of that kind of analysis for three works of literature:  Grimms’ “Little Red Riding Hood,” Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf,” and Shakespeare’s King Lear. The analysis of “Little Red Riding Hood” identifies fear of predation and fear of strangers as core concerns in the story and examines the way symbolic images affect the emotions of child readers. The analysis of “The Werewolf” contrasts the author’s relations with characters and audience in that story with the authors’ relations with characters and audience in the other two works. The analysis of King Lear contrasts the emotional effects of tragedy with the emotional effects of action movies, identifies normative human universals as the basis for audience response, examines the way characters in the play and critics of the play seek meaning through religious ideas, contrasts religious ideas with Shakespeare’s naturalistic world view, and argues that intuitive insights into human life history form the moral core of the play.

The emergence of a full blown representation of same-sex sexual relationship in the Nigerian literary tradition, courtesy of Walking with Shadows (2005), demonstrates a unique expression of the universal human will hitherto unknown in the Nigerian literary tradition. In analyzing Walking with Shadows, this article argues that the Darwinist tendency, the evolutionary character embodied in conventional Nigerian narratives is undermined in a number of respects. Since no same-sex sexual partners are primed by evolution for reproduction of humankind, this sexual phenomenon as demonstrated by the central character of this work is thus not only monumentally anti-evolutionary, but also immensely against human occupation of the earth through biological reproduction. The above tendency partly accounts for why the major same-sex character's kin and society cannot understand him. Walking with Shadows would be read against some conventional works in the Nigerian tradition in order to show how the vital indices of identity and marked kinship enhancements indigenous to Africa and, hence Darwinian, are upstaged, even as it adds an interesting but varying literary dimension to Nigerian literature.

I published a review of Davies's The Artful Species in the Italian journal Aisthesis. Davies wrote a response. The editor invited me to write a rejoinder to Davies's response. I did, but when Davies declined to answer my rejoinder, the editor declined to publish my rejoinder. Evidently, the editor wished Davies to have the last word. I am here attaching my original critique, Davies's response, and my rejoinder to Davies's response.

The evolutionary human sciences are still in the process of forming a paradigm. Their model of human nature is not yet complete because it has not yet taken adequate account of the experience that forms the subject matter of the humanities. This essay is designed to help correct that deficiency. In the first part of the essay, I explain how scholars in the humanities can help construct the still developing model of human nature. In the second part, I argue that the proper subject of literary commentary is “meaning” and that meaning can be localized in the interaction of perspectives in authors, readers, and characters. In the third part, I argue that the main categories of human life history are also the main themes of fiction. In the final section, I offer suggestions about directions for future research.

A response to Jonathan Kramnick's "Against Literary Darwinism." From opening paragraphs:

Evolutionary criticism argues that evolution has shaped human minds
to be partially reshapable, not least by our species-wide predisposition to
culture, to art in general, and to literature in particular. Evocritics show
how the fact that human minds owe their structure to evolutionary pressures
makes a difference to literature—to features of human minds and
behaviors that literature deploys, represents, appeals to, engages, and
modifies.
At least, that’s how I understand what we do. Jonathan Kramnick understands “literary Darwinists” differently: as committed to (1) a narrow and controversial evolutionary psychology, whose controversial nature we
ignore; (2) an untenable modular view of the mind, whose modules were
shaped in the Pleistocene and have not changed since; (3) the adaptive
value of a modular “literary competence”; and beyond that (4) a purely
thematic approach to literature incapable of attending to form, variation,
or history. I do not recognize our work in his version.

The article reads Anton Chekhov's The Duel as the enactment of a complex and ambivalent argument of Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. It demonstrates how the concepts central to The Duel, such as degeneration, eugenics, the struggle for existence, sympathy, and cooperation, are rooted not just in the scientific discourse of the late nineteenth century, but specifically in Darwin's treatise. Chekhov reproduces Darwin's conceptual framework simultaneously on several planes of text, which results in the complete "Darwinization" of artistic reality. Masterfully pitting aporias of Darwin's rhetoric against each other, Chekhov finally eliminates them in the scene of the duel.

First, this paper will explain why human enhancement has always been part of humanity and why to refuse human enhancement is to negate the human fundamental drive for improvement. Second, we will distinguish between a “natural state” and an “artificial state” before defining humans as artificial agents that desire artificial conditions. As artificial agents, human species tend to depart from the original and primitive natural state to a more advanced artificial or technological state. Third, we will examine the two important arguments against transhumanism and explain why they are inaccurate or mistaken. On the one hand, the believe that enhancement trivializes the human identity and, on the other hand, the argument that considers that human enhancement is “playing God”.

It is no mere coincidence that the authors of Stanford Literary Lab’s Pamphlet 1 called their approach quantitative formalism. The idea of distant reading, i.e., of reading literature in terms of its evolutionary patterns, and approaching form itself as meaning-laden rather than an appendage of “content”—all this brings together quantitative formalism with Russian Formalism of the late-1910s and 1920s. At the same, the theoretical legacy of Formalism challenges DH as in Shklovsky's defamiliarization theory, which insists on literature’s inherent unpredictability and the impossibility to systematize the study of it. This makes Russian Formalism more than a mere precursor or yet another adversary of DH, but its intellectual contemporary.

H.G. Wells was one of the first literary authors to depict human beings from an explicitly Darwinian perspective. The enduring appeal of his fiction testifies to his artistic intuition and imaginative understanding of evolution. However, Wells drew a sharp line between nature and culture, trusting culture to work against nature toward his ideal social state. From a modern evolutionary perspective, that split gave him an inadequate view of two important parts of human nature: imaginative culture and dispositions toward cooperative group behavior. In this article, I put Wells back on the Darwinian ground from which literary scholars have detached him. Taking The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau as examples, I use historical, biographical sources and modern evolutionary science to explain the psychological functions, imaginative effect and ambiguous canonical status of Wells’s early fiction.

Literary Darwinism is an emerging interdisciplinary research field that seeks to explain literature and its oral antecedents (“literary behaviors“), from a Darwinian perspective. Considered the fact that an evolutionary approach to human behavior has proven insightful, this is a promising endeavor. However, Literary Darwinism as it is commonly practiced, I argue, suffers from some shortcomings. First, while literary Darwinists only weigh adaptation against by-product as competing explanations of literary behaviors, other alternatives, such as constraint and exaptation, should be considered as well. I attempt to demonstrate their relevance by evaluating the evidentiary criteria commonly employed by Literary Darwinists. Second, Literary Darwinists usually acknowledge the role of culture in human behavior and make references to Dual Inheritance theory (i.e., the body of empirical and theoretical work demonstrating that human behavior is the outcome of both genetic and cultural inheritance). However, they often do not fully appreciate the explanatory implications of dual inheritance. Literary Darwinism should be extended to include these recent refinements in our understanding of the evolution of human behavior.

I identify converging lines of evidence for the proposition that the human mind has evolved, argue that the evolved character of the mind influences the products of the mind, including literature, and conclude that scholarly and scientific commentary on literature would benefit from being explicitly lodged within an evolutionary conceptual framework. I argue that a biocultural perspective has comprehensive scope and can encompass all the topics to which other schools of literary theory give attention. To support this contention, I appeal to axiomatic logic: the behavior of any organism is a result of interactions between its genetically determined characteristics and its environmental influences. Summarizing the debate over the adaptive function of literature, I argue that literature and its oral antecedents are adaptations, not merely by-products of adaptations.


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Arnold believes that culture is progressing steadily toward a culminating realization of a universal set of aesthetic and ethical values. He thus maintains that "the world is in a course of development, of becoming, towards a perfection infinitely greater than we now can even conceive," and he describes the purpose of culture as an endeavor "to draw towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems to be intended and aimed at in the world." Arnold himself regards such concepts as correspondent with what "science" can allow, but in both its teleological and transcendental aspects, Arnold's cultural theory is pre-Darwinian. In Darwin's conception, evolution, including human evolution, develops toward no specific goal, and the values of any given culture are relative to a specific adaptive situation.

Critics have often noted Darwin’s enthusiastic curiosity (Beer, Levine, Amigoni, Schmitt, Browne) in the Journal of Researches (1839)—particularly its “intensely libidinous” nature (Beer)—but his “strange antics” and numerous instances of “amusement” have been treated as little more than biographical gloss, or charming digressions on the way to a much larger story. But re-reading these understatedly comic episodes through the interpretive prism of incongruity produces a new set of emphases, and intellectual and affective affinities. For, like Michel Foucault’s laughter at the beginning of The Order of Things (1966), Darwin’s “scientific wit” has distinctly taxonomic implications.  Incongruity figures the splicing of two previously un-apprehended interpretive frames, a kink in the logic of expectation. While Darwin later naturalizes (rather than spectacularizes) incongruity into his scientific method, in its first iteration in the Journal, it performs vital cultural and aesthetic wor...

Er(r)go… ,
… ekologia, ekokrytyka, ekofilozofia, ekologia polityczna, etyka ekologiczna, pamięć o Ziemi, siostry i bracia mniejsi i jeszcze mniejsi. A więc, nie całkiem kolejno: odchodzący w przeszłość voyeurystyczny, odcieleśniony podmiot, Ja nieświadome swego ciała, panujące percepcyjnie nad zewnętrzem – w zamian podmiot nieuchronnie „skażony” zewnętrznością natury i technologii. Anulowanie dychotomii natura-kultura. Katastrofy ekologiczne a panika moralna, reglamentowanie poczucia sprawstwa, dekonstrukcja dyskursów cywilizacji technicznej, ryzyko świadomości ekologicznej a narracje winy i odpowiedzialności. Błędy natury i doświadczenie dziwności, kiedy to natura zbacza ze ścieżki, kontrolowana transgresja, umysł upadły, szlifowanie intelektu, potworności i metodologiczny reżim, osobliwości jako narzędzie metody i Bacona odnowa filozofii naturalnej. Literaturoznawczy darwiniści i nowy pozytywizm, kultura zdeterminowana biologicznie, kultura pozbawiona autonomii przez zjawiska przyrodnicze. Literatura jako środek adaptacji i przetrwania, konstruktywizm kulturowy a psychologia ewolucyjna jako pomost między kulturą i naturą, Iliada jako dramat nagich małp, umysł czy mózg, ordynarny redukcjonizm i stek banałów. Ekopoezja i ekopoetyka, natura i przeznaczenie, wściekłość i wrzask cywilizacji, utożsamienie z naturą, eschatologia cywilizacyjnej zagłady. Indianin jako Człowiek przed upadkiem, ślady stóp wodza i prawa etyczne, wygnanie z raju i pojednanie w Mieście Braterskiej Miłości. Ziemia jako beneficjent postmodernizmu, zapominanie przyrody a stworzenie świata, antropocentryzm religii i równość wszelkiego stworzenia, cisza i Logos, poetycka fenomenologia, śpiew ptaka i stwórca ukryty w stworzeniu. Ja jako rzecz między innymi rzeczami, materia języka i materia świata, przeźroczyste oko i oko rentgenowskie. Polityka natury jako oksymoron. Zwierzę jako tworzywo sztuki i jako osoba, awangarda moralna artysty, komunikacja transgatunkowa, uśmiercanie obiektów.

Ból zwierząt.

Ten numer Er(r)go powstał pod troskliwą merytoryczną opieką Marzeny Kubisz oraz Anny Chromik, którym w imieniu redakcji składam koleżeńskie podziękowania.

Wojciech Kalaga


Er(r)go… ,
… ecology, ecocriticism, ecophilosophy, political ecology, ecological ethics, the memory of the Earth, non-human or rather more-than-human sisters and brothers. Thus, not in the exact order: fading now away into the past, the voyeuristic, disembodied subject, the Self unconscious of its body, but holding the exterior under its perceptual control; instead, a subject inevitably “contaminated” with the exteriority of nature and technology. The abolition of the nature-culture dichotomy. Ecological disasters and the moral panic, the rationing of blame, deconstruction of the technological, the hazards of ecological awareness and the narrations of guilt and responsibility. The freaks of nature and the experience of the curiosity when nature strays from its path; controlled transgression, the fallen mind, the sharpening of intellect, monstrosities and methodological regime, curiosities as methodological tools and Bacon’s rejuvenation of natural philosophy. Literary Darwinists and new positivism, biologically determined culture; culture stripped of its autonomy by natural phenomena. Literature as a means of adaptation and survival; cultural constructivism and evolutionary psychology as a bridge between culture and nature; The Iliad as a tragedy of naked apes; mind or brain, vulgar reductionism and a procession of banalities. Ecopoetry and ecopoetics, nature and destiny, the sound and the fury of civilization, identification with nature, the eschatology of civilizational calamity. The Indian as the Man before the Fall, the footprints of the chieftain and the laws of ethics, the exile from Paradise and the reconciliation in the City of Brotherly Love. The Earth as the beneficiary of postmodernism, the forgetting of nature and the creation of the world, the anthropocentrism of religion and the equality of all creation, silence and Logos, poetic phenomenology, the bird song and the creator concealed in creation. The Self as an entity among other entities, the substance of language and the substance of the world, the transparent eye and the eye of Roentgen. The politics of nature as an oxymoron. The animal as the substance of art and as person, the moral avant-garde of an artist, transspecies communication, the killing of objects.

The suffering of animals.

The present issue of Er(r)go was prepared under the caring supervision of Marzena Kubisz and Anna Chromik, to whom, on behalf of the Editorial board, I extend our expression of gratitude.

Wojciech Kalaga

Dear Friends,

We are happy to inform you all that a funding agency kindly agreed to support the to and fro international travel of 10-12 speakers for Sixth International Conference "Science and Scientist-2018" scheduled to be held at KIIT-University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha India during 26-27 October 2018. The details of the event can be found at http://www.scienceandscientist.org/conference/2018

Science and Scientist annual conference series is a platform meant to encourage the scientific studies on Consciousness and Personalistic view of reality. "Exploring Beyond the Limits of Physical Sciences to Understand Life, Its Origin, Its Purpose and Biodiversity" is the main theme of this year's event.

To avail the international travel support from the funding agency, by the end of this month we need to submit the names of the international attendees for this conference. Therefore, we would like to inform you that the international scholars and academicians interested to avail this travel support to join the event Science and Scientist – 2018 must submit before 28th of July, 2018 the abstracts of their papers within 500 words. Please note that for consideration by the review committee of the conference for the support the abstract must be addressing the theme of the conference: http://mahaprabhu.net/satsanga/?download=Science_of_the_Concept.pdf

The abstract also must contain: 1. Paper title, 2. Author(s)'s name, 3. Designation, 4. Contact email, 5. Contact number and 6. Contact postal address.

Please email your abstract to the email address: [email protected] and copy it to [email protected]

Only those papers that are best representing the conference theme will be selected for the travel support.

Closing date for abstract submission for travel support: 28th July 2018.

Thanking you.

Sincerely,
Bhakti Niskama Shanta, Ph.D.
Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Institute
Bangalore, India

The human had not originated from an ape. The most simple proof The proof that the apes were not the progenitors of the humankind is the Slavonic and Russian (essentially Scythian) word «оБЕЗьЯна» (ape), which literally means «deprived of I», of the human Essence as the root of humankind. // Чтящим Бога и Промысл Его для понимания того, что человек не произошел от обезьяны, довольно одного ее имени.