Volume 4, Issue 1

We treat meaning as nonphysical connection and potential organization. Meaning is a resource that can be used by animals to improve survival and reproduction. The evolu­tion of brains to exploit meaning occurred in two heuristic steps. First, solitary brains developed mental representations of patterns for learning and guiding adaptive action. Second, humankind greatly expanded the usefulness of meaning by using it collectively, such as by deliberately communicating information, creating a body of shared beliefs and understandings, and using meaning to organize social life. The intentional application of meaning to life, as in the quest for a meaningful life, is a later development linked to ways of organizing behavior to maximize future outcomes and relate the individual to societal systems.

The “4E” approach to cognition argues that cognition does not occur solely in the head, but is also embodied, embedded, enacted, or extended by way of extra-cranial processes and structures. Though very much in vogue, 4E cognition has received relatively few critical evaluations. By reflecting on two recent collections, this article reviews the 4E paradigm with a view to assessing its strengths and weaknesses.

The last two years have seen the publication of two books in the genre of how-to fiction writing manuals that use science both as a selling point and as a genuine analytical par­adigm. The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr and The Science of Screenwriting by Paul Joseph Gulino and Connie Shears use insights from the cognitive sciences and evolution­ary psychology, while retaining their practical, how-to character. This review article goes through some of the main clusters of advice shared by the two books, dealing with infor­mation processing, attention allocation, the implications of human sociality for fiction, and story structure, while fitting their takes on these issues within the fields of biocultural criticism and cultural evolution. Despite containing occasional flaws and confusions about theory common in pioneering works, these books could be harbingers of change for the genre and an important step in the bottom-up infusion of biocultural theory into literary studies.

These three books consider the nature and evolutionary context of the individual and collective behavior of modern humans. Moffett’s The Human Swarm and Christakis’ Blue­print focus on the “big picture.” What, if anything, is distinctive about the ways groups of modern humans behave? What do modern human societies have in common that distin­guishes them from aggregations of non-human organisms? Wrangham’s The Goodness Par­adox focuses more narrowly on aggression, and the enigma that modern humans seem to be individually relatively docile, but collectively capable of planning and executing highly aggressive activities. I was intrigued and educated by all three books.