So, do Literary Darwinists tend to read books in search of innate or universal patterns of human behavior?
There’s a lot of that, yes. But I hope that’s not all. Ideally, Literary Darwinism will combine the biologically universal with the culturally particular. The idea of this approach isn’t to demote nurture. For me, it’s a more balanced perspective that says nurture is very important but so, too, is nature. We have to pay attention to what the scientists have discovered, which is that there is a human nature. ___page break___ Is human nature somehow made more fit—or biologically resilient—by way of storytelling? This is one of the really big questions right now. Although yet to be tested scientifically, there are two camps of thinking on this. One, the human capacity to tell fictional narrative was designed into us for a specific reason; it enhanced our fitness and helped us leave behind more offspring. The second is that storytelling has no function whatsoever; it’s just a side effect of human intelligence, an evolutionary byproduct. The human capacity for narrative is universal among h
