Volume 3, Issue 1

An integrative psychological concept that bridges the sciences and humanities, narrative identity is the internalized and evolving story a person invents to explain how he or she has become the person he or she is becoming. Combining the selective reconstruction of the past with an imagined anticipated future, narrative identity provides human lives with a sense of unity, moral purpose, and temporal coherence. In this article, I discuss how the evolution of human storytelling provides the basic tools for constructing self-defining life narratives. I then consider theory and research on the development of narrative identity over the human life course, socially consequential variations in narrative identity, and how culture shapes the stories people tell about themselves. My overall perspective on narrative identity was formulated within the fields of personality and developmental psychology, but it is also informed by concepts and constructs in evolutionary biology, cognitive neurosci­ence, philosophy, and literary studies.

Narratives of human-induced environmental effects such as climate change and biodiversity decline have long been dominated by narratives of loss in which humankind is concep­tualized as a destructive force. But in addition to narratives of loss, there is a narrative of gain and resilience in nonfiction books intended for a general audience. Books employing this narrative emphasize that nature is dynamic and that some species are adapting to and flourishing thanks to human-induced changes. This review essay discusses two new books in this vein: Chris D. Thomas’s Inheritors of the Earth (2017) and Menno Schilthuizen’s Darwin Comes to Town (2018). I argue that these two books, besides being interesting in their own right, are important contributions to the popular literature on climate change and the Anthropocene because they denaturalize dominant apocalyptic narratives of nature. However, they underestimate the severity of human effect on the biosphere and advocate a form of anthropocentrism that may be misguided if our goal is to maintain a functioning biosphere for the future.

Humans are neophile, curious, and explorative animals with impressive capabilities for creative problem-solving. I discuss some of the ultimate roots behind human creativity while reviewing two books on creativity and problem-solving. To E. O. Wilson, the driv­ing force behind creativity is our instinctive love of novelty, and creativity’s ultimate goal is “self-understanding.” I elaborate on and question this assumption. The theories of inclu­sive fitness and group selection are discussed, with Wilson in favor of the latter. Finally, the theory of gene-culture coevolution is introduced as fundamental to the unity of science and the humanities and to closing the gap between these two cultures. Eagleman and Brandt’s volume is more of an entertaining history of design and human inventiveness than a study in creativity as such. We hear about the three main operations of creative process: bending, blending, and breaking, and these operations are the primary means by which all ideas evolve, according to the authors.

A review essay of three recent publications that focus in different ways on the evolution­ary basis of religion. Asma (2018) focuses on the ways in which “religion” energizes the emotional needs of humans. Torrey (2017) pays close attention to the evolutionary stages of brain development that are necessary for the emergence of religious concepts and the attitudes that accompany them. Finally, Turner et al. (2017) develop a complex theory of different types of selection that they regard as necessary in order to account for the institu­tionalization of religion: they think that biological natural selection, even though building human capacities, is insufficient to explain the sociological facts about religion.