Recent Theories and Debates about Evolution and the Arts: A Critical Review

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 adaptation, 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 praiseworthy by human standards.” (170)

Though Steven Pinker’s rhetoric is often flippant, he identifies here a key problem both within scientific and artistic adaptation studies. Cognitive approaches 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 disturbances 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 sometimes 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, 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 literature’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 studies. Pinker criticized in this sense David Sloan Wilson’s contribution to the Literary Animal volume, which suggested that fictional narratives could contribute 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 altruistic attitudes had a competitive advantage. Meanwhile, however, scientific perspectives 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 survival interest? There is no a priori reason why sharing imaginary events should 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, moreover, 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 “evocritical” approach to literature as the richest and most sophisticated attitude coming out of the evolutionary criticism movement – even if, as I shall indicate, I sometimes 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.

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. Readers 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 distinguish 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 lonesome 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 responded 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 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 restricts 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 evolutionary competitive advantage in survival and reproduction, is highly questionable. 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 communities, 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 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 evolutionists 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 evolutionary 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]

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 evolutionists 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, evolutionists 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 spontaneously 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).

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 ascribes 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 catastrophes, 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 remark 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 exist^[22], 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.

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 evolutionary history of music. When Tomlinson defines human beings as “musicking creatures” (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-evolution. 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 anthropologist Maurice Bloch, Tomlinson suggests that the congruency of a widened social context with the cognitive modes of language and music allowed for a comprehensive 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 “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. Following Kramnick (“Response” 445, 452), Tomlinson deprives the literary evolutionist 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 evolutionists of “biological determinisms and narrow adaptational causality,” of “adaptationist fundamentalism,” and of a “reductive selectionism” that emphasizes sexual 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 between 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 “release 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 corresponds 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 approaches 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 developed 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 histories 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 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 adaptations 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 evolution 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 everything ceaselessly changes.