"Evolutionary Theories of Art" In Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, eds., The Literary Animal. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005, 149-78.
Considers non-evolutionary and evolutionary theories of art and proposes evolutionary theory of art in terms of attention (now incorporated into and superseded by the proposals in On the Origin of Stories, 2009, and after.
The author identifies key concepts in the evolutionary social sciences, explains their usefulness for literary study, and explains how they offer alternatives to current major forms of literary theory. He identifies the historical provenance and main contentions in evolutionary literary theory, and discusses the institutional position of evolutionary literary scholars. After describing the controversy over the adaptive function of the arts, the author proposes a synthesis of multiple hypotheses, delineates the scope of evolutionary literary criticism, and describes one large-scale study that integrates methods from the social sciences and literary criticism. The conclusion offers reflections on the future of evolutionary literary study.
Pdf) The Theory Of Evolution: An Educational Perspective
I published a review of Davies's The Artful Species in the Italian journal Aisthesis. Davies wrote a response. The editor invited me to write a rejoinder to Davies's response. I did, but when Davies declined to answer my rejoinder, the editor declined to publish my rejoinder. Evidently, the editor wished Davies to have the last word. I am here attaching my original critique, Davies's response, and my rejoinder to Davies's response.
BB's first foray into evolutionary literary criticism, with summary of evolutionary psychology as I understood it in 1997 (decidedly superseded by more recent work, in On the Origin of Stories 2009 and after), and an account of Austen's development of free indirect discourse as a product of Theory of Mind and the particularly heavy demands placed on it during "mate selection" or choosing marriage partners. Mansfield Park is the main example discussed.
In the past thirty years, a revolution has taken place in the social sciences. When anthropology and sociology were founded as academic disciplines in the early years of the nineteenth century, both disciplines segregated themselves from evolutionary biology and insisted that" culture" or" society" were autonomous forces that shaped human behavior (Brown, pp. 1-38; DM Buss, 1999, part one; Degler; Fox, 1989, chaps. 3 & 4; Freeman, 1992, 1999, pp. 17-27; Tooby and Cosmides, 1992, p. 28).
Pdf) Art, Perception And Information Processing: An Evolutionary Perspective
In the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the work done in evolutionary literary study was polemical and programmatic. Scholars attacked the cultural constructivist ideas prevailing in the academic literary establishment, rehearsed the basic logic of the adaptationist program, and made exploratory efforts to formulate principles of interpretation that could be linked to specifically evolutionary ideas. Over the past decade, polemics and programmatic rehearsals have diminished while literary theory and interpretive literary criticism have matured. Many evolutionists in the humanities argue that basic human motives are channeled into specific cultural norms, that specific cultural norms are articulated in imaginative form through myths, legends, rituals, images, songs, and stories, and that humans universally regulate their behavior in accordance with beliefs and values that are made vividly present to them in the arts. Evolutionary literary scholars aim at analyzing the thematic, tonal, and formal features of literary works; locating the works in a cultural context; explaining the cultural context as a particular organization of the elements of human nature within a specific set of environmental conditions; registering the responses of readers; describing the sociocultural, political, and psychological functions the works fulfill; locating those functions in relation to the evolved needs of human nature; and linking works comparatively with other artistic works, using a taxonomy of themes, formal elements, affective elements, and functions derived from a comprehensive model of human nature.
Friedrich Nietzsche, male, aged 27, published his first book The birth of tragedy in January 1872, barely a year after Charles Darwin published The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex. Both books viewed human culture as a natural outcome of human sexuality and animal instinct. Although both were widely read and discussed, their views on the origins of human culture were widely forgotten. The assumption they were attacking, that culture is an autonomous sphere of human activity and belief above the biology of behaviour and instinct, persists as the dominant framework for thinking about the evolution of culture. That framework has provoked much writing about cultural transmission, memes, and gene-culture co-evolution. However, it has signally failed to deliver a good theory about what evolutionary selection pressures actually shaped the human capacity for producing and understanding concrete instances of ‘culture’. This chapter suggests that, a century and a quarter after Nietzsche and Darwin, cultural theory and sexual selection theory have advanced enough that we should once more consider their subversive idea: cultural behaviour is very much more instinctive in nature and sexual in function than most cultured people would care to admit.
SP_AND_09_048-054. indd 48 12/3/09 5: 02: 13 PM lan Wade, David Buss, Daniel Goleman—all these writers must also have agents driving up prices in Miami and San Diego. But no one before Dutton has had anything like this kind of popular success with an evolutionary book in the humanities. The Gottschall and Wilson collection The Literary Animal (2005) was a success with critics outside the postmodern establishment—in scientific journals and the lay press—but was not a blockbuster at the box office.
Directed Evolution Of New And Improved Enzyme Functions Using An Evolutionary Intermediate And Multidirectional Search
This paper examines explanations for human artistic behavior in two reductionist research programs, cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Despite their different methodological outlooks, both approaches converge on an explanation of art production and appreciation as byproducts of normal perceptual and motivational cognitive skills that evolved in response to problems originally not related to art, such as the discrimination of salient visual stimuli and speech sounds. The explanatory power of this reductionist framework does not obviate the need for higher-level accounts of art from the humanities, such as aesthetics, art history or anthropology of art.
Telling Stories / Geschichten Erzählen: Literature and Evolution / Literatur und Evolution, edited by Carsten Gansel and Dirk Vanderbeke (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012): 50-63.
This paper examines explanations for human artistic behavior in two reductionist research programs, cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Despite their different methodological outlooks, both approaches converge on an explanation of art production and appreciation as byproducts of normal perceptual and motivational cognitive skills that evolved in response to problems originally not related to art, such as the discrimination of salient visual stimuli and speech sounds. The explanatory power of this reductionist framework does not obviate the need for higher-level accounts of art from the humanities, such as aesthetics, art history or anthropology of art.
Telling Stories / Geschichten Erzählen: Literature and Evolution / Literatur und Evolution, edited by Carsten Gansel and Dirk Vanderbeke (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012): 50-63.
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