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Recent Theories and Debates About Evolution and the Arts: a Critical Review

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Recent Theories and Debates About Evolution and the Arts: a Critical Review 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
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