Arcadia 2016; 51(1): 3–21
John Neubauer Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts: A Critical Review
DOI 10.1515/arcadia-2016-0002
Recently, the Dutch writer Arnon Grunberg wrote his latest story, Het bestand (meaning both ‘computer file’ and ‘truce’) while his brain was observed and measured by scientists using screen capture and various physiological measuring techniques that recorded his brain activity, emotions, and subjective feelings. When the book went on the market during the Netherlands Boekenweek (Book Week) in February 2015, Grunberg along with neuroscientist and researcher Ys- brand van der Werf together on a book tour discussed their experiment at various bookstores and lecture halls. Now readers of Grunberg are invited by the research institute TNO to participate in a follow-up test that monitors reader’s brains. These spectacular experiments on the contrary do not reveal spectacular results, they however do display the cutting edge of interdisciplinary studies between literature and the cognitive sciences. Moreover, they indicate a more controversial topic, ‘evolution and the arts,’ although quite surprisingly, the history of this historical approach is littered with some rather breathtaking cadavers. Let me remind you that the subject was introduced in 1857, not by Darwin but instead by Herbert Spencer’s pre-Darwinian essay on the evolution of music, which defined music as emotionally intensified speech. Skipping Darwin’s response, and some dangerous evolutionary ideas in early-twentieth-century folklore and anthropology, I only care to cite Richard Dawkins’s “meme” theory, a more recent cadaver important for cultural evolution studies. Since Dawkins’s ‘selfish’ genes undergo only rare mutations, ‘ordinary genes’ could become the models for cultural “memes.” That is, only if the “memes” were also semi-permanent. Indeed, Dawkins believes that memes resist mutations: “Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” (192) Memes, like genes, are supposed to possess longevity, fecundity, and copy- ing-fidelity (194).1
1 Dawkins admits that he is “on shaky ground” (194) on the copying fidelity of memes. His rather arbitrary list of memes includes tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, pot making, and arch building (192). 4 John Neubauer
Most revealing to me was Dawkins’s side remark about a meme in a Beetho- ven symphony that was “sufficiently distinctive and memorable to be abstracted from the context of the whole symphony.”2 When Daniel Dennett adopted the idea of memes (335–369),3 he silently corrected Dawkins by ascribing the meme to 4 Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 rather than his Symphony No. 9. Indeed, Dawkins meant, of course, the opening “tatatataa” of Symphony No. 5, which, he writes, he could no longer enjoy when “a maddeningly intrusive European broadcasting station” (the BBC), adopted it as its call sign (195). Alas, Dawkins’s mention undermines his meme theory, for it indicates that the opening of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 underwent a serious mutation when it jumped from Dawkins’s pre-war to post-war mind. The four notes may have remained the same but the radio abuse devalued the whole symphony for Daw- kins. Whatever meanings he attached to these notes, they differed from the ones I ascribed to them during my clandestine listening to the BBC during and after World War II in Budapest. From context to context, from mind to mind, the Beethoven meme has underwent radical mutations. Wilhelm Tappert, one of the earliest Darwinian musicologists in Germany, was more on track when he suggested that melodies unceasingly undergo muta- tions because they are the most indefatigable globetrotters:
They cross roaring streams, pass the Alps, surface on the other side of the ocean, and lead a nomad life in the desert. […] Given the truly human interest for everything foreign, some melodic Cinderella will be held in high honor far from her homeland, or they become, perhaps, a patriotic song, a national hymn whose sounds unfailingly exert most arousing effects. The vagabonds often return home somewhat laced, masked, and reshaped, and they
2 “If a single phrase of Beethoven’s Ninth is sufficiently distinctive and memorable to be abstracted from the context of the whole symphony, and used as the call-sign of a maddeningly intrusive European broadcasting station, then to that extent it deserves to be called one meme. It has, incidentally, materially diminished my capacity to enjoy the original symphony.” (195) 3 Evolution occurs, according to Dennett, when the conditions of variation, heredity (or replica- tion) and differential “fitness” exist (343). The definition relies on biology, but “says nothing specific about organic molecules, nutrition, or even life” (343). This indeterminacy gives Dennett a chance to study the memes, as “complex ideas that form themselves into distinct memorable units” (344). 4 Dennett attempts to draw a threshold for minimum size. C-G-A is a single codon of DNA but too small to be a gene; similarly, the triad D-F sharp-A is not a meme, but the theme from the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh is; “you can’t copyright a three-note musical phrase: it is not enough to make a melody” (344). But the first four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony “are clearly a meme, replicating all by themselves, detached from the rest of the symphony, but keeping intact a certain identity of effect (a phenotypic effect), and hence thriving in contexts in which Beethoven and his works are unknown” (344). Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts 5
live a new and glittering life as “imports” in their old home. After all, there is no music police that would ask for a birth certificate and a testimonial on moral conduct. (7)
I trust Tappert’s vagabonds more than Dawkins’s ‘selfish’ music memes. However, the issue of cultural adaptation resurfaced in recent debates about evolutionary approaches to the arts that call themselves ‘evolutionary criticism,’ ‘Darwinian criticism’ or ‘evocriticism.’ Two impulses stimulated these studies: the emergence of cognitive and evolutionary studies and the deconstruction of cul- ture and history in recent humanist studies. The evolutionists stressed such universal human attributes as brain size, evolutionary brain heritage, and biped- alism, and they denied that these reduce cultural diversity by adding that the human evolution has been basically bio-cultural rather than purely biological. Most evolutionist scholars of the arts argue that the arts ought to be seen as a variable trait of evolutionary adaptation since they have made substantial contri- butions to human survival and reproduction. But this cannot be explained by attributing ethical principles to the arts, for the ethics of scientific adaptation have always been highly controversial. Biological notions of ‘selfishness’ that led earlier to the slogan ‘survival of the fittest’ and in 1976 to Dawkins’s concept of the ‘selfish gene’ have been contested by attempts to show the function of altruism in evolu- tion. These theories include William D. Hamilton’s ‘inclusive fitness,’ V. S. Rama- chandran’s ‘mirror neurons,’ Frans de Waal’s evidence that empathy exists among animals, and David Sloan Wilson’s ‘multilevel selection’ (which shall be discussed later). In short, cognitive concepts have emerged that locate social cooperation and cohesion, rather than competition, at the heart of evolution. Yet, humanist evolutionary scholars who are eager to claim scientific founda- tions for their theories often have overestimated the reliability and acceptance of the scientific evidence cited. This was the thrust of the Critical Inquiry article “Against Literary Darwinism” that Jonathan Kramnick published in 2011, stimulat- ing thereby a flurry of reactions. Kramnick attacked evolutionary psychology and then criticized the literary Darwinists for relying on it. As I shall show, Kramnick’s account of both evolutionary psychology and literary evolution are undifferen- tiated. He does not mention, for instance, the 2001 double issue of SubStance titled “Imagination and the Adapted Mind,” which was based on a conference held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1999. The evolutionary psychology of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, now called the Santa Barbara School, so seriously divided the participants that the editor split the issues into “Formula- tions” and “Reconsiderations.” The final twist was that the lead essay by Tooby and Cosmides, titled “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds?,” no longer regarded artistic behavior as a functionless “byproduct” of adaptations (Abbott 4), which represented a break with their former colleague and teammate Steven Pinker. 6 John Neubauer
1 The First Phase of Evolutionary Criticism
Allow me to better illustrate these general remarks. Darwinism fell in disfavor after World War II,5 but rose again after the discovery of DNA and through the emergence of neo-Darwinism in the biological sciences, which included the work of Richard Dawkins as well as Edward O. Wilson’s controversial sociobiology. Ellen Spolsky, Brett Cook, Frederick Turner, and other literary scholars responded to the new scientific developments, but it was Joseph Carroll who launched a movement of new Darwinist literary studies with his Evolution and Literary Theory in 1995, followed in 2004 by a collection of his articles in the book Literary Darwinism. The circle widened when Jonathan Gottschall and the biologist David Sloan Wilson published in 2005 the collection The Literary Animal, with articles by Edward O. Wilson, Frederick Crews, Ian McEwan, Denis Dutton, Brian Boyd, and others. Instead of looking at these publications directly, I shall link my comments to Steven Pinker’s 2007 review of the The Literary Animal, which was encouraging, though the authors under review had little sympathy with his earlier quip that music was like “cheesecake,” sweet but of no evolutionary value.6 Pinker found that evolutionary approaches to the arts wrongly believed “that it is important to show that art is an adaptation, that there is good evidence that art is an adapta- tion, and that the function of art is some version of bringing the community together” (“Toward a Consilient Study” 169). The “consilience” of all knowledge that Edward O. Wilson sought in his 1998 book was to be sought elsewhere. As Pinker put it: “The arts could be evolutionary by-products, and [still] be among the most valuable human activities,” whereas morally outrageous events could be genuine biological adaptations. “Biological adaptations need not be praise- worthy by human standards.” (170)
5 See, for instance, René Wellek’s negative conclusion after a survey of the 19th and 20th century applications of Darwin and Spencer to literary history came: “[T]here are no fixed genres compa- rable to biological species which can serve as substrata of evolution. There is no inevitable growth and decay, no transformation of one genre into another, no actual struggle for life among genres.” (“Concept of Evolution” 51) See also Wellek’s critique of Brunetière’s evolutionary theory of genres in his History of Modern Criticism (3: 65–71) and Theory of literature (256). 6 Pinker remarked in How the Mind Works that while literature may have some cognitive and adaptive value (539–543), music is an “auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of a least six of our mental faculties” (534). [Compared] “with language, vision, social reasoning, and physical know-how, music could vanish from our species and the rest of our lifestyle would be virtually unchanged. Music appears to be a pure pleasure technol- ogy, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once.” (528; see Carroll, Literary Darwinism 65–68) Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts 7
Though Steven Pinker’s rhetoric is often flippant, he identifies here a key problem both within scientific and artistic adaptation studies. Cognitive ap- proaches to adaptations, whether biological or cultural, should not be governed by our emotional disposition towards nature and our belief that it acts according to our ethical principles. This is, for instance, my reservation about Carroll’s all too cheesy response to Pinker’s “cheesecake” remark:
[I]t seems very likely that people raised with no exposure to music, art, or literature would be psychologically and emotionally stunted – that they would be only marginally capable of developing normal ways. They would probably have great difficulty learning to deal with their own emotions or to relate to other people with any sensitivity and flexibility. (Literary Darwinism 65)7
Should this be true, Carroll would still have to show that such mental distur- bances have genetic adaptation consequences. Paul Hernadi, not an evolutionary critic but one of the organizers of the Santa Barbara conference, approached the question from a positive side by asking whether literature could be a “School for Budding Altruists” (64), and cautiously answered that “literary world-making has proven quite effective in curbing our egotistical inclinations toward malice and freeloading” (65). Hernadi admits, however, that “selfless solidarity with one’s own group” can be promoted “at the expense of the ruthlessly scape-goated Other” and that “impressive evocations of virtual villainy and violence may some- times beget rather than deter actual villainy and violence” (65). In Pinker’s view, evolutionary critics who advocate literature’s approval of altruism use “gluey metaphors” that “don’t do justice to the ambivalent mixture of selfish, nepotistic,
7 Carroll’s case study on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice – a work he regards as unspecific a research choice as fruit flies are for the geneticists (190) – comes to similarly weak results: “The marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy embodies and reaffirms the normative principles within their whole cultural order […]. The story thus illustrates in a harmonious concord among all the factors within the total meaning structure and the total meaning situation: the protagonist, the author, and the implied audience are brought together in a single community of discourse. The protago- nists satisfy normative sociobiological expectations and at the same time embody the normative virtues of their own culture. The fulfillment of their happiness thus strongly suggests an ideal concord between their specific cultural order and the elemental aspects of human experience” (Literary Darwinism 134). Carroll presents a more detailed interpretation of Pride and Prejudice on pp. 206–213 of the same volume. See also Carroll’s passage on David Copperfield’s reading (68), which Kramnick rightly criticizes: “Literary Darwinism […] is committed to the proposition that literature must have helped us to become the species we are.” (“Against Literary Darwinism” 345) “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 who wrote them. […] 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.” (345–346) 8 John Neubauer strategic, and self-advertising motives [...] that fiction deliciously plays out for us” (“Toward a Consilient Study” 177). Indeed, the ethical impact of literature is not always evident, and evolutionary critics who eagerly want to demonstrate litera- ture’s survival value tend to shy away from its ‘a-social’ aspects. Pinker is also skeptical about the biological theories of social-cohesion and multi-level selection that emerged in the wake of Hamilton’s ‘inclusive fitness’ approach, reversing the ‘selfish’ disposition of earlier Darwinian evolution stu- dies. Pinker criticized in this sense David Sloan Wilson’s contribution to the Literary Animal volume, which suggested that fictional narratives could contri- bute to an “Evolutionary Social Constructivism” (29) – suggestion that Brian Boyd picked up a few years later. However, Pinker was most skeptical of Wilson’s theory of “group selection,” which accorded as much importance to selection between groups as selection within groups.8 According to Pinker, this “multi-level selection” fell out of favor in the sociobiological revolution of the 1970s (“Toward a Consilient Study” 177). Selection between groups came to be regarded as negligible, while mathematical calculations indicated that selfishness overcomes in competitions that take place within groups. At the time, few scientists agreed with Wilson that inter-group competition was important and groups with altruis- tic attitudes had a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, however, scientific per- spectives seem to have undergone a change, for Wilson triumphantly cites in the book he published this year, Does Altruism Exist?, a slogan he formulated with Edward O. Wilson a few years ago: “Selfishness beats altruism within groups. Altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.” (23)9 It is possible that Pinker would still not agree to this. For us, the main question remains what this implies for the arts. Wilson says nothing about them in his new book and Pinker probably continues to believe that people in the humanities overestimate the power of fictional narratives. Why should imaginary characters and events bring people closer together than their evolutionary survi- val interest? There is no a priori reason why sharing imaginary events should
8 Already in Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (230). 9 Wilson writes: “The existence of multiple groups and variation among groups provides the fitness differences required for natural selection to favor A[ltruist]-types over S[elfish]-types. What happens if there is a cost associated with providing the public good? In this case, natural selection within and between groups pull in opposite directions. The fitness differences among individuals within groups weigh in favor of S-types, while the fitness differences among groups in the multi- group population weigh in favor of A-types. What evolves in the total population depends on the relative strength of these opposing forces. The tug-of-war can result in one type going extinct or can maintain a mixture of both types in the population. […] Let’s call a behavior selfish when it increases relative fitness within groups and altruistic when it increases the fitness of the group but places the individual at a relative fitness disadvantage within the group.” (22) Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts 9 efficiently keep members of a social species together (“Toward a Consilient Study” 173–174). What contribution can literary evolutionists make to their own field if their goal is merely to show that narrative fiction embodies evolutionary laws? Pinker rightly thinks that biological laws obviously also define fictional worlds and claims merely that fictional figures and actions display survival and reproduction values which has limit value. In Pinker’s view, the arts constitute a “technology” to produce pleasure, though he concedes that literature may possess a cognitive power to deepen the way we see ourselves, the others, and the world. As he writes, fiction may partially coopt “language and imagery as a virtual reality device” in order to let readers enjoy “pleasant hallucinations like exploring interesting territories, conquering enemies, hobnobbing with powerful people, and winning attractive mates” (“Toward a Consilient Study” 171). Fiction, more- over, can excite an interest in people without even having to project them into a thrilling vicarious experience. In this respect, it is akin to gossip, which Pinker considers “a kind of due diligence on possible allies and enemies” (171). Fiction may be a form of adaptation if we consider it as a form of “simulated gossip,” as “a kind of thought experiment, in which agents are allowed to play out plausible interactions in a more-or-less lawful virtual world” (172). Individuals may store in their memory the details of a fictional interaction and use them in the future when they are confronted with similar constellations: “[H]umans might cognitively profit by observing plausible scenarios through fiction” (172).
2 Boyd
Brian Boyd developed precisely this idea in his 2009 book on the origin of stories. Although he criticized Pinker’s by-product theory of the arts, Pinker welcomed Boyd’s contribution to The Literary Animal.10 I myself consider Boyd’s “evocriti- cal” approach to literature as the richest and most sophisticated attitude coming out of the evolutionary criticism movement – even if, as I shall indicate, I some- times disagree with it. His book on the origin of stories, his reading of the Shakespeare sonnets (Why Lyrics Last, 2012), and the reader edited together with Carroll and Gottschall under the title Evolution, Literature, and Film (2010) took a cognitive approach that no longer focused on literature’s mimetic power to represent evolutionary laws and relations.
10 Boyd’s contribution is called “Evolutionary Theories of Art.” Boyd expanded his criticism of the “by-product” view of the arts in On the Origin of Stories (81–83). 10 John Neubauer
Boyd’s agenda is to trace the arts to the cognitive games of young animals and children; hence; the disposition of art being deeply rooted in evolution. Not the content of art but rather the cultivation of cognitive human competence, which can increase confidence in problem solving, has prime evolutionary value. Read- ers of fiction reflect and tend to revise their reflections as they read on, a procedure that resembles the honing of scientific hypotheses. Artists are problem solvers that produce ‘unnatural’ novelty, often by accumulating small variations, like natural selection itself, though much faster. Complexity emerges from simplicity via minute increments. Fiction offers virtual experiences that allow us to go beyond our own present self. It may acquire survival value when we face challenges but it remains unclear whether this yields directly measurable mutations. More problematic is Boyd’s special notion of “attention.” One may distin- guish within an evolutionary perspective between selfish and altruistic forms of attention. But their meanings are ambiguous. Selfish attention is an inward turn, a preoccupation with oneself, which may express itself in autobiographical creativity or a contemplative absorption in an artistic theme – both of which may eventually acquire altruistic values. Think of the deaf old Beethoven or the lone- some Van Gogh. The “intentional fallacy” argument convincingly shows that the artist’s attentional disposition does not determine the work’s meaning. However, Boyd is preoccupied by altruistic attentions, and the selfish ones are not on his agenda. He is solely preoccupied with attentions that are “altruistic” from the first moment on, a creativity that gives special attention to the potential public and consciously furthers the adaptation value of social cohesion. Pinker had asked once before in 2007 why sharing attention via fiction should have an adaptation function (“Toward a Consilient Study” 174), and Boyd re- sponded perhaps to this when he stated in his book that “we need to attend to attention” to explain art (99).11 In his view, communities gain an evolutionary adaptation advantage when artists and their public spread attention. However, Boyd goes even a step further by specifying that he means attention to cost/ benefit calculations – and these do not seem to involve aesthetics. Artists seek in each new work “to raise the benefit – the attention-earning power – of their compositional efforts and to lower their composition costs, through recombining existing solutions in new ways, while also raising the benefits and lowering their audience’s cost in time and effort” (326). Storytellers need to secure and maximize audience attention, and the less effort the audience is asked to make, the more it will value its rewards. Hence, artists as well as audiences can gain status: “The attention-earning power of art can lead not only to a primary market in status for
11 See sections 99–112 and 392–96. Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts 11 artists but also to a secondary market in acceptance or status for audiences” (394). Needless to say, such modern, commercial forms of attention do not fit to the purposeless play of children. Furthermore, such internalized public-opinion research on cost cutting would severely limit creativity. While attention to the market is undoubtedly important, especially today, selling directly to an audience’s expectations re- stricts art’s potential cognitive benefits to a knowledge of what will sell. Today, this expectation fits all too well to the decisions institutions are confronted with in regards to the dilemmas of awarding subsidies, but judging from ongoing British, Dutch, and other debates on commercializing the sciences and the arts, such attention does not further group cohesion. Whether it can provide an evolu- tionary competitive advantage in survival and reproduction, is highly question- able. Indeed, Boyd advocates an economic variant of the criterion that Cecil Sharp imposed in 1907 upon folk songs. In Sharp’s Darwinian theory, which was widely influential for decades, hypothetically, the folk songs that survive will be the ones that have served their ‘community.’ Sharp, foregrounded, moral, ethnic, national, and historical community values, whereas Boyd replaces these with status and money.12 Ironically, the theory that the arts can further a closer cohesion within com- munities, has led to bitter fights between postmodernist and evolutionist literary critics. According to Boyd, academic literary study in the previous decades has often been defensive about literature, “as if it were a peripheral indulgence justifiable only as a stalking-horse for political reform” (384). He agrees with Carroll that since all human beings are at the same biological level of evolution, cultural differences ought to be understood as secondary effects: “Partly through sheer ignorance of culture and conventions in the animal world, [postmodern] Theory has decreed the world of human life to be entirely shaped by culture and convention [...].” (386) Since Boyd sees no fundamental disjunctions between people from different periods and cultures, he lumps together also all theorists who have foregrounded difference. Ironically, Boyd regards them as a unified
12 Still, Boyd also finds models in stories. Odysseus’s practical intelligence was, for instance, a model to be imitated, and the Odyssey has engendered the hope that the human mind can gain a cognitive control of its world. According to Boyd, Homer’s storyteller inculcates community values because he depicts the consequences of their violations. Polyphemus and the suitors pay for violating the divinely prescribed Greek code of hospitality (xenia), a cultural phenomenon that extended reciprocal altruism beyond its limits. Odysseus practices xenia only in a limited way because his personal revenge against the suitors induces the suitor relatives to revenge Odys- seus’s revenge. Anticipating modern impersonal justice, the gods intervene to prevent a poten- tially endless chain of revenges, and Odysseus has to submit to this symbolic superior justice. 12 John Neubauer military corps: “Capital-T theory” has become, according to him “an initiation ritual, a graduate student boot camp for the intellectual officer corps” (384). While Boyd certainly does make historical distinctions, some other evolution- ists in the arts are so preoccupied with universal and permanent laws, that they disregard historical change, which is, after all, at the very heart of evolution. They do so, because they adopt the biological view that human beings had reached their basic gene structure tens of thousands of years ago. Hence, they tend to minimize cultural mutations, which should be at the heart of histories in the arts. Weak historicity has also been a target in those very recent attacks on evolution- ary studies to which I now want to turn.
3 Kramnick
So far, my history of evolutionary studies in the arts may be broken down into two phases: a contested rise of these studies between 1995 and 2007, and a short second phase of 2008–2009, during which not only did new studies emerge but also some positive new media attention. According to Jonathan Kramnick, it was this new media attention that irritated him so much that he wrote his mentioned article for the Critical Inquiry (“Against Literary Darwinism”).13 Carroll and Boyd responded to it, as well as a number of “non-Darwinist” scholars who tended to side with Kramnick. The debate terminated with Kramnick’s response in 2012 (“A Reply to my Critics”), but criticism of evolutionary art theories continued in the Critical Inquiry with Gary Tomlinson’s 2013 article on evolutionary studies of music and with Angus Fletcher’s 2014 contribution titled “Another Literary Darwinism.” Kramnick used a quarter of his text to show that the literary evolutionists used the evolutionary psychology of Tooby and Cosmides to build “a scientific rationale for seeing literature as the repository of timeless themes” (“Against Literary Darwinism” 346).14 The literary Darwinists were, in Kramnick’s words, “unashamedly fond” also of Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson, the ancestors of the evolutionary psychologists (318). Both Carroll and Boyd justifiably protested to this filiation. After all, Pinker thought that Carroll had “thundered” against Tooby and Cosmides (Pinker 166).15
13 Kramnick somewhat carelessly bunches together Boyd, Carroll, Dutton, Gottschall, and Michelle Scalise Sugiyama as the major figures of literary Darwinism. 14 The social scientist Tim Lewens also criticized evolutionary psychology in his 2012 article titled “Cultural Evolution: Integration and Skepticism.” 15 See Boyd, Carroll, and Gottschall on Pinker and Tooby (107). Typical of Kramnick’s distortion is that referring to Boyd’s polemic with Louis Menand he associates Boyd with E. O. Wilson’s Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts 13
What was actually at issue? According to Kramnick, the standard practice in evolutionary psychology was to posit a selection pressure in the Pleistocene’s evolutionary environment and to hypothesize then about a cognitive mechanism designed to respond to it (“Against Literary Darwinism” 327).16 The literary evolu- tionists reversed this, by moving “from the putative mechanism to the pressure,” meaning that they first postulated “a uniquely human, species-typical disposition for producing and consuming imaginative verbal constructs” and then asked what sort of adaptation problem this disposition was designed to solve (328). Though reversing evolutionary psychology is not exactly following it, I agree with Kramnick that the literary evolutionists foregrounded the mind and said little about evolutionary pressures. To my knowledge, no literary evolutionist has claimed that literature, or the arts in general, responded to a specific environmental pressure. Instead, evolu- tionists regard literature as an innate disposition that somehow fosters better survival. According to Chomsky, the arts are innate, just as language is (see Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism” 335–337).17 Thus Dutton titled his book The Art Instinct, for he believed that the “arts, like language, emerge sponta- neously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value in prehistory” (5; see Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism” 334). Citing Noam Chomsky, Kramnick rightly claims that the early cognitive revolution reintroduced the notion of nativism by claiming that certain skills or abilities are hard-wired into the brain at birth. Environmental pressure was insufficient to generate language, as the behaviorists had claimed earlier.18 Hence, Chomsky’s view that the mind must have an innate repertoire of grammatical rules that go beyond empirical evidence (Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism” 340).
sociobiology, though Boyd merely objected to Menand’s rejection of Wilson’s “consilience” idea (Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism” 318; Boyd, Origin of Stories 338–339). Subsequently, Kramnick does acknowledge the differences between sociobiology and the evolutionary psychol- ogy of Tooby, Cosmides, and Pinker (320). The difference is the “modular mind” (characterized as a multi-purpose “Swiss army knife”) that the evolutionary psychologist adopted from Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor, though the latter would not join (321–322). 16 Kramnick cites Buller’s Adapting Minds (92–99) and “Evolutionary Psychology” (109–112) by Confer et al. 17 Boyd does not mention Chomsky, and Carroll is mentioned in Literary Darwinism only in passing. See Boyd, Carroll, and Gottschall 106, 231; Dennett 381–393, 395, 397–400, 403, 427, 468, 471, 490, 527. 18 This is the main point of Chomsky’s famous review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (New York, 1959), though the phrase itself doesn’t appear until his Rules and Representations (34). 14 John Neubauer
Boyd traces the arts back to play, which engage not only children but also animals. Here we must differentiate between the arts,19 for, as Darwin himself has already argued, musical sound is older than stories, which employs language. Boyd and his fellow evolutionists refrained from specifying the environmental pressures that could have engendered literary adaptations,20 and Kramnick as- cribes to them a “strong nativism” (347). I, for one, imagine that stories and cave drawings, just like religion, responded to the fear of death, of natural cata- strophes, and of other physical threats, but this is speculation.21 Kramnick is justifiably concerned that seeing literature as an evolutionary adaption disregards the specificity of literary forms. Responding to Dutton’s re- mark that story plots are “structures” that inevitably follow “from an instinctual desire to tell stories about the basic features of the human predicament” (Dutton 132; Kramnick “Against Literary Darwinism” 345), Kramnick suggests that we ought to start by identifying “connections between certain features of mind and certain kinds of texts or forms” (347). Fair enough. But “certain kinds of texts or forms” becomes vague and inaccurate if we go back to the Pleistocene, when texts (and hence literature) did not yet exist22, not to mention that fiction had hardly separated neatly from factual narration (as we tend to perform) – since the rise of rationality and science.23 Even Boyd’s title Origin of Stories is slightly ambiguous, for stories are not always fictional. Just consider the genre ‘the story of my life.’ By saying “stories,” Boyd is referring to fictional narration, though occasionally he admits, and even expects, that they include factual elements.
19 “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 each of them to come online according to separate schedules and to have separate rules, as in the case, for example, of vision and language.” (Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism” 339) 20 “Much turns on their combination of nativism and adaptation. Were the disposition to create or consume literature innate in the way argued by the literary Darwinists, it would be just as invariant across the species and across time as they maintain. 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.” (Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism” 346) 21 As Kramnick notes (323–324), Stephen Jay Gould and others had already questioned the claim that all species features were adaptations, but the literary evolutionists rejected Gould’s position, which could have, perhaps opened other perspectives on the arts (spandrels). 22 Boyd’s analysis of the Odyssey is fully cognizant of this. 23 Fiction, for instance, could not have existed in voiceless sounds. Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts 15
4 Tomlinson and Fletcher
The Kramnick debate must have incited influence at the Critical Inquiry, attracting to the journal the previously mentioned ‘recent evolution papers’ of Tomlinson and Fletcher. The latter focuses on two interwar Darwinian studies, The Science of Life (1929) by Wells and Huxley, and Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942) by Huxley. Fletcher claims that these reconfigured the slogan “survival of the fittest” into a comic biographical pattern that allowed for pluralism. The same comic pluralism adopted then by the New Biographers. I shall focus on Tomlinson’s essay because it delves deeper into the evolution- ary history of music. When Tomlinson defines human beings as “musicking crea- tures” (647), he must be suggesting that music making is universal, but he does not claim that it is innate. Eager to distinguish his undertaking from evolutionary literary studies, he relies on Terrence W. Deacon’s 1997 book The Symbolic Species, instead of on Cosmides and Tooby.24 The basic idea that Tomlinson adopts from Deacon is that the selective evolutionary pressures eased at one point, leading to a dedifferentiation of genetic governance. As a result, behavioral changes could gradually occur through social interaction and intergenerational transmission. Based on this, Tomlinson contrasts the generally faithful transmissions in genetic biology with the “cultural diversification” of the later human biocultural co-evolu- tion. Human culture “fosters a proliferation of variation” (658). The human voice became diversified within this general transition from biological genetics to bio- cultural diversity: as “the innate [!] calls of our ancestors” had been partially released from genetic control and selective pressures, “vocalization diversified through social and cultural transmission” (659). The incremental development of protomusical capacities must have intersected with the growth of language and the appearance of the imaginary in human cognition (662). Citing the anthropolo- gist Maurice Bloch, Tomlinson suggests that the congruency of a widened social context with the cognitive modes of language and music allowed for a comprehen- sive coalescence in co-evolutionary interaction (671). The story is exciting and plausible, but it still remains, as far as I can see, a story in Boyd’s sense, for it does not specify why, where, and how genetic governance underwent dedifferentiation, and how the human mind was eased to engage in more autonomous activity. Given the scarcity of hard evolutionary evidence, Tomlinson must take recourse to phrases like “must have” (662) and
24 However, Tomlinson believes that by “making symbolic cognition the abiding, preeminent feature of humanness” Deacon obscures certain non-symbolic aspects of behaviors and over- simplifies the emergence of the hominid (657). 16 John Neubauer
“suggests” – which undermine his critique of the literary evolutionists for telling similar stories. Genetic-cultural co-evolution was actually a term that Edward O. Wilson introduced and virtually all literary evolutionists have adopted. Fol- lowing Kramnick (“Response” 445, 452), Tomlinson deprives the literary evolu- tionist schemes of their cultural dimensions, and grants them only a genetic view, which is, in his words, “a blunt tool for analysis or description of specific manifestations of human culture” (674). Thus, he accuses the literary evolution- ists of “biological determinisms and narrow adaptational causality,” of “adapta- tionist fundamentalism,” and of a “reductive selectionism” that emphasizes sex- ual selection and their reflection in plot and content (673). None of these accusations of reductionism apply, for instance, to Boyd, who rightly responded to Kramnick that he does not recognize himself in the picture that he drew of him. While Tomlinson makes fine (though still often speculative) distinctions in the body of his essay, he becomes quite schematic and reductive when he continues Kramnick’s sniping at the literary evolutionists. He does not illustrate his accusations with concrete references or citations and offers only bibliographic references to Carroll and Boyd. Indeed, we can recognize several parallels be- tween Boyd’s and Tomlinson’s ideas, if we take into account that music and language emerged earlier than stories. For instance, Tomlinson’s notion of “re- lease from proximity,” namely “the dawning capacity to think things not present to the senses – to think offline, envisioning other places and the other social groups in them, even imagining things that never were” (670), precisely corre- sponds to Boyd’s argument that “fiction extends our imaginative reach, we are not confined to our here and now” (198).
5 Histories of Cultural Adaptation
The original conflict between the postmodernists and the evolutionists has now turned into a confrontation between the evolutionists and the critics joining Kramnick on the pages of the Critical Inquiry. I refrain from calling the new phase an evolutionist struggle for survival, and merely note that for the moment, Kramnick’s party seems to be winning, partly by courting cognitive literary studies. The dispute continues, and I do not as of yet see how cognitive ap- proaches to the arts will yield decisive results about the distant evolutionary past. While I do have my own reservations about the literary evolutionists, I find the attacks on them to be often nasty and unjust. Where do we go from here? I suggest that we improve the exchange with cultural evolutionists such as Robert Boyd, Peter Richerson, David Sloan Wilson, Tim Lewens, and others, who may seldom speak about the arts but have devel- Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts 17 oped sophisticated theories about cultural evolution with important implications for the arts. One such aspect is the search for ‘cultural lineages.’ Lewens, for instance, suggests that theorists of cultural evolution should also attempt to reconstruct patterns of cultural change involving comparison with known his- tories of cultural items – and this immediately reminded me of Franco Moretti’s history of the novel. Cultural evolutionists would probably share my reservations about the “Tree” section of Moretti’s pseudo-evolutionary book Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005). Not that I agree with Christopher Prendergast’s comment on it that “any proposed marriage of nature and culture seems destined for the divorce courts” (58). The problem is rather that cultural evolutionists now think in terms of fine nets rather than trees and that they have become skeptical of so-called ‘diffusionist’ models of which Moretti’s history is a clear case. According to Lewens, there is no consistently identifiable cultural particle that can survive the transfer from one culture to another (Amen, would Tappert say!). As Maurice Bloch remarks in connection with memetics, “the habit of making noodles came to Italy from China” but this “does not explain why the Italians make noodles” (Lewens 11; Bloch 198). Moretti lets genres, sub-genres, and stylistic devices undergo mutations when they enter new historical or social conditions, but he regards definitions as the origin, as fixed landmarks, and he disregards mutations that shift a work from one genre to another. He relates the mutations against an unchanging original. Thus, for instance, he finds a “universe of values” in the classical Bildungsroman and traces the genre’s history, but he attaches an unchanging meaning to Goethe’s original novel, though readers and critics are ceaselessly reinterpreting it. In Moretti’s scheme, history and culture modify genres but not the meaning of individual works (Moretti, Bildungsroman 31). In conclusion I want to suggest an alternative history model for literature that is based on cultural evolution and a cultural concept of adaptation. Let me return to the Tappert passage on roaming melodies that I quoted in the beginning of this article:
The resounding fellows are always on the move: from the workshop they move unto the road; with the itinerant journeymen they move to the inns, to distribute themselves from here to the furthest little town, the smallest village. From the dance floor the intruders get to the children’s room, they slip away from the concert halls and mix with the harvesters in the fields, accompany the hunter, or they shorten the sentinel’s hours of duty. From theater and from the streets they find their way to the churches – and the other way round. Some melodies resemble the wandering Jew, the one that can never rest, never die! […] Those who go around in the world, those who must adjust everywhere to the land and the people, will undergo more or less noticeable changes. They accept here and there something from the 18 John Neubauer
language and the customs; in the end, they may be perceived indigenous abroad but a foreigner at home. This is precisely the way of our melody adventurers. Never, or only seldom, do they remain what and who they are. […] The “transformation” is endless. (7)
As an avid follower of Darwin, Tappert did not try to identify environmental or innate forces that would propel melodies, and he gave them no teleological goals. Had Tappert lived to see the rise of film, radio, television, and the new media, he could have joined Marshall McLuhan in recognizing a galaxy of sounds beyond Gutenberg and a proliferation of new musical adaptations. The new media have immensely enlarged the range of cultural sounds, and they have made hitherto unimaginable literary and musical adaptations possible. The new cultural adap- tations of the arts to radio, film, screen, and the digital world, have, accordingly, generated a wave of studies about artistic adaptations. I mention here only Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) and the journal Adaptation.25 These literary adaptations were made possible by technological innovation, and should be linked in the first place to cultural evolution rather than to biological adaptations. As Boyd and Richerson argued already two decades ago, human cultural and biological adaptations are interlinked but not identical. The artistic adaptions produced by this latest event of cultural/technological evolu- tion had important antecedents in adaptations generated by the introduction of writing and printing, the introduction of metal plates to print music notes, or the use of lithography to produce artistic prints. The introduction of writing, printing, and computers could provide period borders to replace those we still use to separate Western-based literary and artistic periods, though globalization has outdated them by now. These new global periods of cultural evolution would have to accommodate works to which Tappert’s dictum applies: “transformation is endless” (7). As Daniel Dennett argues against biological essentialists, our meanings are dependent on function, and this changes with the environment (411–412). In the words of Ellen Spolsky, Dennett reads Darwin “as a natural theory of permanently unstable ontological categories” (“Darwin and Derrida” 292). A literary adaptation history should in this sense include generic, linguistic, and cultural transfers, as well as a rewriting of earlier styles, metaphors, narrative modes, and artistic devices in new environments. Concatenations of cultural adaptations should constitute adaptation histories in which the meaning of every- thing ceaselessly changes.
25 Only Hutcheon and her biologist co-author Gary R. Bortolotti attempted to explore the interconnections, by calling ever so cautiously on the analogy with ‘memes.’ They were seeking aid for the thesis that adaptations should not be judged only by comparisons with the originals. Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts 19
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