Brian Boyd

Laughter and Literature: A Play Theory of Humor

Humor seems uniquely human, but it has deep biological roots. Laughter, the best evidence suggests, derives from the ritualized breathing and open-mouth display common in animal play. Play evolved as training for the unexpected, in creatures putting themselves at risk of losing balance or dominance so that they learn to recover. Humor in turn involves play with the expectations we share-whether innate or acquired-in order to catch one another off guard in ways that simulate risk and stimulate recovery. An evolutionary approach to three great literary humorists, Shakespeare, Nabokov and Beckett, shows that a species-wide explanation not only cuts deeper but in no way diminishes individual difference.

Literature and Evolution: A Bio-Cultural Approach

literary studies—infields as diverse as anthropology, economics, law, psychology, andreligion—have recently come to recognize that the deep past thatshaped our species can help to explain our present and recent past.Since a bio-cultural model of the human can only be richer than asolely cultural model, and since it implies neither genetic determinismnor limitation to the

Fiction and Theory of Mind

Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction aims “to put the cognitiveevolutionary concept of the theory of Mind on the map of contemporary literary studies” (p. 84). any literary critic who has stumbled upon this active research program in recent clinical, cognitive, comparative, developmental and evolutionary psychology will have realized that theory of Mind (toM)—our intuitive systems for understanding the minds of others—must be relevant to literature. as someone who has long deplored its neglect in literary studies (often on the very pages of this journal) i regret to report that as a cartographer of this new terrain Zunshine has an unsteady hand. as its title suggests, her book makes a large claim: that we read fiction in order to give ourselves a cognitive workout, to exercise our capacity for toM. We normally understand readily four levels of embedded intentionality (you doubt that Brian accepts that Lisa knows what robin says), but we find it rapidly more difficult to handle further levels. Fiction often pushes “our ability to process embedded intentionalities beyond our cognitive zone of comfort” (p. 130). Why We Read Fiction also makes a second, implicit but no less central, claim: that analyzing fiction in terms of toM offers criticism greater explanatory power, precision, and clarity.

Art and Evolution: Spiegelman's The Narrative Corpse

Has art evolved, like opposable thumbs and the whites of our eyes? if it has, will knowing so help us understand better not just art in general but particular works, even works of avant-garde art? over recent decades many have come to accept that not only have humans evolved from other animals but that many features of their minds and behavior can be explained by the deep past of evolution.1 Yet art remains a puzzle for biocultural analysis. How can we explain art in the hard-nosed terms of biological advantage, especially if it lacks analogies or precursors in other species and seems so pleasurably part of being distinctly human?2 nevertheless we have good reasons to examine whether art might be an adaptation. All cognitively normal individuals in all known societies engage in some form of art, actively or at least passively: music and dance, story, visual art. no one has to be pressured into listening to music on a radio or an ipod. And like language but unlike reading and writing, art develops reliably to a basic level without special training. Art could be what evolutionary biologists call a byproduct, a mere side-effect of our bigger brains or of culture. Yet that seems unlikely. Byproducts by definition do not offer advantages in terms of survival and reproduction: a bodily or behavioral feature whose design offers such advantages we classify as an adaptation. But if art were a byproduct, if it offered on average no advantage in terms of survival and reproduction, many generations of intense evolutionary competition would have eliminated it. if art offered no benefits but exacted the costs it does in time,

The evolution of stories: from mimesis to language, from fact to fiction

Why a species as successful as Homo sapiens should spend so much time in fiction, in telling one another stories that neither side believes, at first seems an evolutionary riddle. Because of the advantages of tracking and recombining true information, capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, and communication evolved in a range of animal species—yet even chimpanzees cannot communicate beyond the here and now. By Homo erectus, our forebears had reached an increasing dependence on one another, not least in sharing information in mimetic, prelinguistic ways. As Daniel Dor shows, the pressure to pool ever more information, even beyond currently shared experience, led to the invention of language. Language in turn swiftly unlocked efficient forms of narrative, allowing early humans to learn much more about their kind than they could experience at first hand, so that they could cooperate and compete better through understanding one another more fully. This changed the payoff of sociality for individuals and groups. But true narrative was still limited to what had already happened. Once the strong existing predisposition to play combined with existing capacities for event comprehension, memory, imagination, language, and narrative, we could begin to invent fiction, and to explore the full range of human possibilities in concentrated, engaging, memorable forms. First language, then narrative, then fiction, created niches that altered selection pressures, and made us ever more deeply dependent on knowing more about our kind and our risks and opportunities than we could discover through direct experience. WIREs Cogn Sci 2018, 9:e1444. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1444 This article is categorized under: 1 Cognitive Biology > Evolutionary Roots of Cognition2 Linguistics > Evolution of Language3 Neuroscience > Cognition

Popper’s World 3 Origins, Progress, and Import

Karl Popper’s world 3 theory proposes that the products of the human mind can be considered a third world, partially autonomous of the mental and physical worlds, and real, because it can produce effects on both. When he first introduced the idea in 1960, he took even his close colleagues and students by surprise. Yet tracing the development of his idea shows a great deal in Popper’s previous work and thought led up to what seemed his startlingly new proposal. And far from being the philosophy of his dotage, as some sneered, his world 3 proposal, once fully shaped, became a keystone of his thought.

Does Austen Need Narrators? Does Anyone?

Modern literary study tends to accept both as a dogma and as a mark of critical sophistication (or at least a proof of disciplinary initiation) that all narratives must have a narrator distinct from the author. Jane Austen or Lev Tolstoy cannot tell us their stories directly but only via a narrator specific to each of their fictions. In each work, we should hold this non-authorial narrator responsible for selecting, arranging and communicating the events of the story set before us. This Necessary Narrator thesis is not only false—as has been ably shown in recent American, English, French and German literary theory and philosophy of art, disregarded by those who have sworn allegiance to the thesis as a first principle—but damages narrative theory and the criticism, teaching, reading and appreciation of fiction. The Necessary Narrator thesis obscures the inextricable link between the invention and the presentation of fiction and taints the pleasure of engaging with the minds and the art of great storytellers. Examples from Emma show the kinds of features, ubiquitous in fiction, that the Necessary Narrator thesis fails to explain.

The Tragic Evolutionary Logic of The Iliad

Jonathan gottschall has conquered the oldest and craggiest peak of Western literature, the iliad, by a new face. he stakes out the Darwin route to homer so directly and clearly that he makes the climb inviting and inspiring even to curious newcomers without highaltitude evolutionary training. and the vista he opens up offers us a chance to look in multiple directions: at homer, at literary evolutionism and its possibilities, and at gottschall’s role in exploring this new route to discovery. one previous monograph has investigated a single literary work from a Darwinian viewpoint: Brett Cooke’s analysis of evgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 science-fiction classic, We.1 Cooke’s human Nature in Utopia, by showing how Zamyatin appeals to the evolved nature of readers, in the face of the denial of human nature in his imagined one State and in early Soviet Communism, deepens our natural response to a modern classic. But where Cooke merely succeeds, gottschall triumphs. the Rape of troy not only deepens our response to a classic discussed for almost three millennia but also explains the world of homer in a way no one could have seen without the multi-million-year perspective evolution allows—and does so with conceptual clarity, tight argument, effortless imagery, and copious verbal energy.

Art and Selection

In the interests of full disclosure: Denis Dutton, the author of The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, not only edits this journal but has also published here a number of my essays. We share enthusiasms and aversions, but we also now and again disagree. And we both enjoy spirited discussion, which is why I asked him if I might review his book for this journal. Now can we begin? Ellen Dissanayake, the first to take a modern evolutionary approach to art, in her What Is Art For? (1988), doubts that sexual selection can explain much about art. After all, she notes, men can compete about anything, even about who can pee the highest.1 Denis Dutton, the first philosopher to take a sustained evolutionary approach to the arts, suggests that much in art arises from sexual selection—and he spends a good deal of time discussing and dismissing the kind of philosophy of art that orients itself around the urinal that Marcel Duchamp christened Fountain. Dutton begins by reporting recent research into the universality of human landscape preferences. Although these preferences explain little about art in the round, they vividly demonstrate the link between human emotions and preferences across cultures now and human sur-

Art, Innovation and Attention

Colin Martindale’s (2009) witty provocation parades personal distaste as inexorable law. But his “law” amounts only to an overextension and oversimplification of the trends he finds in The Clockwork Muse (Martindale, 1990). He writes: “When an art form has come to its end, the only way to restore its comprehensibility would be to abrogate the rule for novelty. However, this path is barred. If they do not constantly increase in entropy, artifacts are no longer art.” With the phrase “increase in entropy,” Martindale echoes the inexorability of the increase in entropy in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But he equivocates here between two senses of entropy, as unpredictability and as lack of order. A chapter or a sentence of Ulysses may be more unpredictable than a chapter or a sentence in Austen or James, but not because there is less order: there is more. More decisively, Martindale has no warrant for his decree. A little later, he writes in the same vein that poets “must say something different than what all prior poets of whom they are aware said. Simple difference is not enough. They must say something more novel, creative, or surprising rather than something less novel or striking. This is true for all of the arts.” Why? Attention can indeed be dulled by habituation, but an artist can refresh audience attention by increasing novelty not along every dimension but along only some or even one. Since Martindale mentions poetry, take poetry first. Billy Collins is the most popular new American poet to emerge in over half a century. Although his work rates highly enough to be taught around the world, it shows no increase in novelty over that of, say, Emily Dickinson or T. S. Eliot. It is homely, accessible,