Against Literary Darwinism

1 Jonathan Kramnick English Department Rutgers University Against Literary Darwinism Literary Darwinists integrate literary concepts with a modern evolutionary understanding of the evolved and adapted characteristics of human nature. They aim not just at being one more “school” or movement in literary theory. They aim at fundamentally transforming the framework for all literary study. They think that all knowledge about human behavior, including the products of the human imagination, can and should be subsumed within the evolutionary perspective. Joseph Carroll, "What is Literary Darwinism?" What is undeniable is that theories of human behavior must be consistent with the fact of evolution; so too must they be consistent with the fact that the human body is made of matter. However, it does not follow from this that either evolutionary biology or physics can tell us anything interesting about human behavior. Elliott Sober, Philosophy of Biology Darwinian literary criticism has a strange place in the current intellectual scene. Only a short while ago, evolutionary perspectives on art and literature were scarce and exotic. In the past few years, studies connecting literary texts to processes of natural and sexual selection have come forth in handsome volumes from the major trade and university presses and have received a fascinated response from magazines, newspapers, and even television.1 Arguably no movement in literary studies has attracted so much attention in quite some time. "Literary Darwinism" would seem to be all the rage. Yet for all this attention outside the academy, the movement has not provoked much of a response within, where if it has 2 been noticed at all, it has often been treated with trepidation or contempt.2 This is a shame. Were the claims of Literary Darwinism true, we might be at the threshold of what one of its advocates calls a "new humanities," in which the natural sciences and literary studies speak directly to each other.3 Even if its central arguments are misguided or unprovable, we might learn something about the place of literary study among the disciplines from the manner in which Literary Darwinism fails to make its case. At the very least, it would seem odd not to engage work that has so captivated a public otherwise dismissive of what happens in literature departments. For these reasons, the present essay attempts to take seriously the central premises of the Darwinian program in literary studies. I will argue against Literary Darwinism but only as I reconstruct the story about literature it attempts to tell. My argument has three parts. I first discuss the attempt to fit literature to the model of evolution by natural selection. I'll argue that Literary Darwinism has trouble specifying what features of literary narratives are heritable traits (phenotypes) and so also has trouble specifying how literature serves some sort of adaptive end.4 The Literary Darwinists readily admit that the phenotypes they are interested in are not exactly anatomical. Their lot is thrown in with the relatively new discipline of evolutionary psychology and with the proposition that many features of mental life trace back to the dawn of our species in a manner analogous to our physiology. In the second section, I discuss whether the kind of mind hypothesized by evolutionary psychology could find a special place for composing or attending to literary texts. Many of the candidate features for evolved cognition, I'll argue, would seem to be a poor fit to literature on almost any definition of the term. Because of this poor fit, I'll then suggest, the Literary Darwinists often are sent back on a broadly thematic and sentimental approach to individual texts. In the final section, I will attempt to draw out the implications of Literary Darwinism's failure to make its case. I don't think the 3 lesson should be that literary study ought to be kept apart from exciting developments in the sciences of mind. I want to argue against the idea that literature is an adaptation and for a messier account of how we did or did not come to like stories. This messier account is, I will suggest at the end, closer to the kind of thing that science can help us say about the arts. Criticism and Natural Selection Literary Darwinism is the name for a school of criticism that attempts to ground the interpretation of literary works in a theory of evolution by natural selection. According to self-described Literary Darwinists like Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Denis Dutton, Jonathan Gottschall, and Michelle Sugiyama, we write and read stories because in the past it enhanced our fitness to do so. Literature on this view is an adaptation. We like to read and write novels (say) because our very distant ancestors liked to tell stories, and their telling stories provided some sort of advantage for survival and reproduction. This claim "for an adaptive function that is specific to art or literature proper" is perhaps what separates the Literary Darwinists from other critics interested in bringing ideas of evolution to literary study.5 "Adaptationist literary scholars," writes Joseph Carroll in his manifesto collection Literary Darwinism (2004), "are convinced that through adaptationist thinking they can more adequately understand what literature is, what its functions are, and how it works—what it represents, what causes people to produce it and consume it, and why it takes the form that it does."6 "The art of storytelling," echoes Brian Boyd in his recent On the Origin of Stories (2009), "is a specifically human adaptation, biologically part of our species. It offers tangible advantages for human survival and reproduction."7 "Far from derived from sets of cultural conventions," opens Denis Dutton in his crossover bestseller The Art Instinct (2008), "the enjoyment of fiction 4 shows clear evidence of Darwinian adaptation."8 On its own admission, Literary Darwinism stands or falls on the idea that literature is an adaptation. But what exactly is an adaptation, and how would we go about arguing that literature should be considered as one? Why would we want to? Much of the more polemical side to the Literary Darwinist program lies in reminding readers of the prudential virtues of literature for this or that facet of human living. Several generations of historicist or theoretical criticism have apparently forgotten that literature is good for you. The claim for adaptation, however, is considerably more demanding than this. According to mainstream evolutionary biology, an adaptation is not merely something that is good for an organism; rather, it is something that is preserved in the genes of an organism and passed on because it is or was once good for an organism. In this respect, adaptations are historical concepts: they are traits whose existence may be explained by their selection for fitness to a past environment. As the philosopher of biology Elliott Sober puts it, "Characteristic c is an adaptation for doing task t in a population if and only if members of the population now have c because, ancestrally, there was a selection for having c and c conferred a fitness advantage because it performed task t."9 My blood clots because in some ancestral environment blood clotting was selected for its fitness to a world with sharp edges. Therefore blood clotting should be considered an adaptation. Should blood clotting in some distant future turn out to be a bad thing, however, it would still be an adaptation among those who possessed the trait. Likewise should some special new kind of blood turn out to be a better match to the environment it would not be an adaptation unless and until it was passed on to subsequent generations and spread in the population. In other words, the argument is not so simple as to say that any bundle of traits perfectly matches its environment at any time. Since adaptations are relics of past generations of selection, a trait 5 may lose its fitness if the environment changes.10 Likewise a new trait may be advantageous without being an adaptation, if for example it is a product of relatively recent mutations. Nor finally is the argument so inclusive as to say that every feature of anatomy or physiology (let alone psychology) is adaptive. Some are byproducts or side effects, others transformed or acquired with time.11 According to the sort of biology the Literary Darwinists would recruit for the study of literature, in other words, adaptation explains much but not everything and should be used with some caution. In his classic study of the topic, G. C. Williams cautions at the outset, for example, that "adaptation is a special and onerous concept that ought only to be used when it is really necessary."12 At a minimum, adaptations result from asymmetrical distributions of alleles (pairs of genes) in the population. Some members of a species have some alleles (whether for blood clotting or liking stories) and others do not. Over long swaths of time, those alleles that promote survival and reproduction remain while those that do not fade away. To claim that literature is an adaptation therefore is to say that it is represented in the genome, selected for in an ancestral environment, and passed on through reproduction.13 So we can begin untangling the difficult agenda set for the Literary Darwinists by asking what it would mean for something like a capacity or competence for literature to have evolved under selection pressure. Unlike livers or joints, literary texts are not features of anatomy or physiology. They are very specific kinds of behaviors. So at an elementary level the proposition means that nature selected a certain habit of mind: a "compulsion to invent or enjoy stories we know to be untrue" or, in slightly baggier terms, "a uniquely human, species-typical disposition for producing and consuming imaginative verbal constructs."14 We have in expressions like these a pretty clear sense of the trait the Literary Darwinists are after: an internal, mental characteristic that causes humans to create 6 or attend to works of literature.

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