Hi Everybody,

            I occasionally send out notices about publications or postings to people interested in the evolutionary study of the arts. I recently updated the list of recipients for such notices, adding some names.  If you would like to have your name removed from the list, please let me know..

            I’m writing now to announce that the National Humanities Center is hosting an online “Forum” about the adaptive function of the arts. I’ve posted a short essay on that subject there. Anyone who likes can comment on the essay, respond to other comments, or otherwise contribute to the discussion.  Here is the link to the site: http://onthehuman.org/humannature/?p=274

Best regards,

Joseph Carroll

Curators' Professor

English Department

University of Missouri, St. Louis

St. Louis, MO 63121

jcarroll@...

home phone 314 432 4483

cell phone    314 614 1469

http://www.umsl.edu/~carrolljc/

Home Address

9038 Old Bonhomme Road

St. Louis, MO 63132

Hi folks,

            Scientific American posted a comment on recent journalistic attacks on EP. 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=evolutionary-psychology-under-fire-09-07-17&sc=WR_20090721

Here’s a comment I posted on their blog:

These recent journalistic criticisms of evolutionary psychology mistakenly present narrow-school or orthodox evolutionary psychology as if it were the dominant or even exclusive form of evolutionary psychology. Many evolutionary scientists have long been criticizing the narrow school associated with Tooby, Cosmides, and Pinker.  And indeed, within the broader community of evolutionary thinkers, the narrow-school version of evolutionary psychology is now largely obsolete. The broader view—associated with names such as David Sloan Wilson, Kevin MacDonald, Dave Geary, Steven Mithen, Edward O. Wilson, Ellen Dissanayake, Brian Boyd, and Joseph Carroll—represents the actual state of the art in the field. In this case, as in so many others, accounts by science journalists lag far behind the actual development of thinking.  In these recent accounts, journalists attack a narrow version of EP and set it in sharp contrast with a still more narrow idea—the old idea of “social constructivism.” All of this takes place in some shadowy virtual world populated by dead horses, straw men, and red herrings. Meanwhile, in the real world, scholars on all fronts are going forward with the more interesting project of working out in detail the interactions among conserved dispositions, flexible general intelligence, and imagination.

Joseph Carroll

Curators' Professor

English Department

University of Missouri, St. Louis

St. Louis, MO 63121

jcarroll@...

home phone 314 432 4483

cell phone    314 614 1469

http://www.umsl.edu/~carrolljc/

Home Address

9038 Old Bonhomme Road

St. Louis, MO 63132

Here’s a paragraph from an article in press, on multiple adaptive functions.  A lot of people identify various functions. Boyd usually gets in four or five, though he tends to come down on “pattern recognition” as the biggie:

Perhaps the most important problem in evolutionary literary study concerns the adaptive functions of literature and other arts—whether there are any adaptive functions, and if so, what they might be. Steven Pinker has suggested that aesthetic responsiveness is merely a side effect of cognitive powers that evolved to fulfill more practical functions (524-43), but Pinker also suggests that narratives can provide information for adaptively relevant problems—an idea also championed by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama. Geoffrey Miller suggests that artistic productions serve as forms of sexual display. Brian Boyd argues that the arts are forms of cognitive “play” enhancing pattern recognition. Boyd and Ellen Dissanayake also argue that the arts provide means of creating shared social identity. In company with Dissanayake, E. O. Wilson, Tooby and Cosmides, Salmon and Symons, and Denis Dutton, I argue that the arts create “meaning.” They provide imaginative structures that give emotionally and aesthetically modulated form to the relations among all the features of our lives—natural, supernatural, individual, and social. The hypothesis of “meaning” subsumes the ideas that the arts provide adaptively relevant information, enable us to consider alternative behavioral scenarios, enhance pattern recognition, and serve as means for creating shared social identity. And of course, the arts can be used for sexual display. In that respect, the arts are like most other human products—clothing, jewelry, shelter, means of transportation, etc. The hypothesis that the arts create meaning is not incompatible with the hypothesis of sexual display, but it subordinates sexual display to a more primary adaptive function.

I went ahead and ordered the Holland book, too, though with some misgiving.  Back in the day, Holland did some of the flakier and more flamboyant Freudian readings.  I use his reading of “Kubla Khan” to illustrate Freudian literary criticism in courses on literary theory.  A demon love is like a father, so the poem is about Oedipal repression, etc.  The deep romantic chasm awakens sexually suggestive echoes for my male students, but then, they are very suggestible.  “Stare at this ink blot. Does it remind you of female genitalia?”  “Well, shoot, doc, everything reminds me of female genitalia.”

Joe Carroll

I’ll copy below the paragraphs that follow the quick summary of the various adaptive functions people have suggested.  This is from an article on “agonistic structure” in Victorian novels—one specific structural feature.  The editors wanted some more elaboration on how far we generalize from this one feature to the question of adaptive function in general:

In this current study, our central hypothesis was that protagonists and their associates would form communities of cooperative endeavor and that antagonists would exemplify dominance behavior. If this hypothesis proved correct, the ethos reflected in the agonistic structure of the novels would replicate the egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherers, who stigmatize and suppress status-seeking in potentially dominant individuals (Boehm). Hunter-gatherers use spoken language to enforce an egalitarian ethos. Written narratives are of course merely a cultural technology extending the usages of spoken language. In hunter-gatherer cultures, language as a medium for articulating a social ethos is restricted to face-to-face interactions. With the advent of literacy, language could be used as a medium for articulating a social ethos on a national and international scale. In a literate culture, authors and readers who have never met and never will meet can form communities of shared values through the medium of written narratives. A basic presupposition in our study was that the novels do in fact form a medium of shared values. We hypothesized that on the average protagonists, in their motives and personality traits, would reflect values the authors approve and that they expect their readers to approve. Antagonists would reflect values authors and their readers do not approve. Approval and disapproval would be registered in the emotional responses of our respondents.

By using a wide, representative array of motives, personality traits, criteria for selecting mates, and basic motives, we created a “palette” of potential value structures that could have produced an almost limitless number of possible combinations. Focusing on the contrast between protagonists and antagonists made it possible to determine whether this array of potential values produced any strongly dichotomized contrast—whether the array of potential values could be understood as an opposition between “good” and “bad” characteristics. How does all this bear on the question of the adaptive function of literature and the other arts?  We concentrate on just one basic adaptive characteristic: the evolved human disposition for suppressing dominance and enforcing an egalitarian, communitarian ethos. If suppressing dominance in hunter-gatherers fulfills an adaptive social function, and if agonistic structure in the novels engages the same social dispositions that animate hunter-gatherers, the novels would, as a literate cultural technology, fulfill the same adaptive function that in non-literate cultures must be fulfilled through face-to-face interaction.

Assuming we can make the case that agonistic structure in the novels displays an ethos stigmatizing dominance behavior and promoting cooperative, prosocial behavior, how far can we generalize from that finding to all literature, in every period and every culture? Logically, it is possible that no other literary texts anywhere in the world display highly polarized differences between protagonists and antagonists or fulfill any adaptive function at all. Hypothetically possible, but not very likely. If our arguments hold good for this body of texts, they demonstrate that at least one important body of fictional narratives fulfills at least one adaptive function. It seems unlikely that in this important respect this body of novels is wholly anomalous.

In arguing that agonistic structure in these novels fulfills an adaptive social function, we do not suppose that we have isolated the sole adaptive function of all literature. Quite the contrary. Along with other evolutionary literary theorists, we strongly suspect that literature fulfills other functions. We argue that the social dynamics animating these novels derive from ancient, basic features of human nature. Such features would in all likelihood appear in some fictional narratives in most or all cultures. We would of course be interested to know whether the kind of agonistic structure we identify in these novels is in fact a human universal. If it is a human universal, we would also be interested to know how it varies in form in different cultural ecologies. (Marriage is a human universal but varies in form from culture to culture. We might expect agonistic structure, like marriage, to vary in form.) These questions would make good topics of research for other studies. Until those studies are conducted, though, the topics are only a matter for theoretical speculation. For this current study, we can positively affirm only the conclusions we think our data allow us to draw. Hence the limiting terms in our title: paleolithic politics in British novels of the nineteenth century

Is the Wilson/Carroll argument that humans no longer have instincts, or that we no longer rely on them at all, or that we no longer rely on them exclusively? 

                Option three is of course the correct answer.

As indicated in the paragraphs on the adaptive function of agonistic structure, I envision human nature as an array of conserved “dispositions,” strong tendencies to act in species-typical ways.  All animals have evolved conserved dispositions, but the “higher” animals (dolphins, crows, chimpanzees, etc.) have some flexibility in behavioral patterns. Humans obviously have vastly more behavioral flexibility than animals of other species.  They are driven by strongly conserved passions (sex, survival, parenting, social interaction, etc.), but they also have an exceptional capacity for suppressing impulse and for organizing their behavior in accordance with complex, long-term plans. Those complex, long-term plans are regulated by imaginative constructions—images we hold of our own identity, our social roles, and the whole complex of relations (natural, supernatural, and social) in which we are always embedded. When I speak of literature and the other arts producing “meaning,” it is to those complex imaginative constructions that I refer.

            If you think about it, all this is just common sense.  People have common, species typical impulses derived from genetically encoded anatomical, physiological, and neurological structures.  But they also have a uniquely rich cognitive and imaginative life.  The “human condition” consists in the interaction between those two things—powerful animal passions, and the power of creating abstract imaginative structures that regulate our passions.  It is because we can regulate passions that human behavioral patterns are so much more variable than the behavioral patterns of other animals.

            Here are a few paragraphs on that topic:

            To solve the puzzle of adaptive function, we have to satisfy three criteria: (a) define art in a way that identifies what is peculiar and essential to it—thus isolating the behavioral disposition in question; (b) identify the adaptive problem this behavioral disposition would have solved in ancestral environments; and (c) identify design features that would efficiently have mediated this solution. Various writers have formulated propositions that collectively meet these three challenges. We can define art as the disposition for creating artifacts that are emotionally charged and aesthetically shaped in such a way that they evoke or depict subjective, qualitative sensations, images, or ideas. Literature, specifically, produces subjectively modulated images of the world and of our experience in the world. The disposition for creating such images would have solved an adaptive problem that, like art itself, is unique for the human species: organizing motivational systems disconnected from the immediate promptings of instinct. The design features that mediate this adaptive function are the capacities for producing artistic constructs such as narrative and verse and emotionally modulated musical and visual patterns.

The core element in this hypothesis—the adaptive problem art is designed to solve—is formulated most clearly by E. O. Wilson in Consilience. Wilson directly poses the question also posed by Pinker:

If the arts are steered by inborn rules of mental development, they are end products not just of conventional history but also of genetic evolution. The question remains: Were the genetic guides mere byproducts—epiphenomena—of that evolution, or were they adaptations that directly improved survival and reproduction? And if adaptations, what exactly were the advantages conferred?

Wilson’s answer to this question draws a decisive line between the mental powers of humans and other animals. Other animals are “instinct-driven.” Humans are not. “The most distinctive qualities of the human species are extremely high intelligence, language, culture, and reliance on long-term contracts.” The adaptive value of high intelligence is that it provides the means for behavioral flexibility—for generating plans based on mental representations of complex relationships, engaging in collective enterprises requiring shared mental representations, and thus producing novel solutions to adaptive problems. Behavioral flexibility has made of the human species the most successful alpha predator of all time, but achieving dominance in this way has come with a cost. Wilson speaks of the “psychological exile” of the species. To the modern human mind, alone among all minds in the animal kingdom, the world does not present itself as a series of rigidly defined stimuli releasing a narrow repertory of stereotyped behaviors. It presents itself as a vast and potentially perplexing array of percepts, inferences, causal relations, contingent possibilities, analogies, contrasts, and hierarchical conceptual structures. The human mind is free to organize the elements of cognition in an infinitely diverse array of combinatorial possibilities. And most of those potential forms of organization, like most major mutations, would be fatal. Freedom is the key to human success, and it is also an invitation to disaster. This is the insight that governs Wilson’s explanation for the adaptive function of the arts. “There was not enough time for human heredity to cope with the vastness of new contingent possibilities revealed by high intelligence. . . . The arts filled the gap.”^[1] If instincts are defined as stereotyped programs of behavior released automatically by environmental stimuli, we can say that in humans the arts partially take the place of instinct. Along with religion, ideology, and other emotionally charged belief systems, the arts form an imaginative interface between complex mental structures, genetically transmitted behavioral dispositions, and behavior.

High human intelligence is part of a larger, systemic structure of species-typical adaptations that include altricial birth, extended childhood, male-female bonding coupled with male coalitions, dual parenting, post-menopausal survival, longevity, the development of skills for the extraction of high-quality resources, an enlarged neocortex that enhances powers for suppressing impulses and engaging in long-term planning, symbolic capacities enabling identification with extended social groups (“tribal instincts”), egalitarian dispositions operating in tension with conserved dispositions for individual dominance, and the power to subordinate, in some degree, impulses of survival and reproduction to the formal dictates of imagined virtual worlds. . . . 

“Human nature” means that humans share species-typical dispositions: basic motives tied closely to the needs of survival, mating, parenting, and social interaction. Cognitive and behavioral flexibility are part of human nature, but they have not eliminated the underlying regularities in basic motives. In different ecologies and different forms of social organization, the elements of human nature combine in distinctive ways, but “culture” cannot build structures out of nothing. It must work with the genetically transmitted dispositions of an evolved and adapted human nature. The arts give imaginative shape to the experiences possible within any given culture, reflecting its tensions, conflicts, and satisfactions. One chief aim for evolutionary studies in the humanities is to analyze the way any given culture organizes the elements of human nature, evaluate the aesthetic, emotional, and moral qualities inherent in that organization, and probe the way it influences—by conformist pressure or antagonistic stimulus—specific works of literature. . . .

Consider the reality of our experience. We live in the imagination. For us, humans, no action or event is ever just itself. It is always a component in mental representations of the natural and social order, extending over time. All our actions take place within imaginative structures that include our vision of the world and our place in the world—our internal conflicts and concerns, our relations to other people, our relations to nature, and our relations to whatever spiritual forces we imagine might exist. We live in communities that consist not just of the people with whom we come directly into contact but with memories of the dead, traditions of our ancestors, our sense of connection with generations yet unborn, and with every person, living or dead, who joins with us in imaginative structures—social, ideological, religious, or philosophical—that subordinate our individual selves to some collective body. Our sense of our selves derives from our myths and artistic traditions, from the stories we tell, the songs we sing, and the visual images that surround us.

We have all had moments in which some song, story, or play, some film, piece of music, or painting, has transfigured our vision of the world, broadened our minds, deepened our emotional understanding, or given us new insight into human experience. Working out from this common observation to a hypothesis about the adaptive function of literature requires no great speculative leap. Literature and the other arts help us live our lives. That is why the arts are human universals. In all known cultures, the arts enter profoundly into normal childhood development, connect individuals to their culture, and help people get oriented to the world, emotionally, morally, and conceptually.

If it is true that the arts are adaptively functional, they would be motivated as emotionally driven needs. The need to produce and consume imaginative artifacts would be as real and distinct a need as hunger, sexual desire, maternal and filial bonding, or the desire for social contact. Like all such needs, it would bear within itself, as its motivating mechanism, the pleasure and satisfaction that attend upon the fulfilling of desire. That kind of fulfillment would not be a parasitic by-product of some other form of pleasure, nor merely a means for fulfilling some other kind of need—sexual, social, or practical. Like all forms of fulfillment, the need for art could be integrated with other needs in any number of ways. It could be used for sexual display or the gratifications of sexual hunger or social vanity, and it could be used as a medium for social bonding. Nonetheless, in itself it would be a primary and irreducible human need.

Thanks, Maya.  Yes, I mean “regulate” in just the way you do: “mitigate, stimulate, control, augment and synthesize the body's more immediate thoughts and experiences.”

            Slogging along here—just turned in the manuscript for the first volume of The Evolutionary Review, going over the copyediting for the anthology Brian, Jon, and I edited, doing the daily work for classes and committees, reading tenure and promotion dossiers and writing reports on them—the usual sort of thing.  My hard drive (60 gigs) filled up yesterday and refused to budge.  I had to go buy an external hard drive and move a bunch of stuff over to it.  Now, if I could just buy an external hard drive for my own brain, I’d be in good shape.  Instead, I’ve started turning down requests for articles.  Just too damned much to do.  Eventually, maybe next summer (once the current queue of backlogged tasks is cleared off), I’ll start another book.  Meanwhile, though, I’d like to spend at least three of four months just catching up on reading.  Haven’t had time to do any reading for over a year now.  Starting to feel a little like Greta Garbo.  (“I only want to be left alone.”)  Of course, if people had really left her alone, she might have begun feeling neglected.

Joe

Hi Everybody,

            Michael Ryan and Amitava Kumar co-edit an online journal, Politics and Culture: http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/index2.cfm.  They have a special issue coming up on “Bioculture: Evolutionary Cultural Studies.”  I’m going to contribute to it, and they asked if I’d contact people I know and see who else might be interested in contributing.  The editors would “like to get as many ‘lights’ as possible in.” 

On editorial policy for the journal: “We generally do not publish standard scholarly articles or essays (a study of Jane Austen, for example). We do mostly book reviews and literature reviews as well as more essayistic pieces. We're a bit more free form than the standard scholarly journal.  But for an issue like this, we would be open to more scholarly pieces.”

There is no stipulated word length or citation style.  There’s a tight time line—mid-December.

            If you’re interested in contributing, you can contact the editors:

Amitava Kumar: amkumar@...

Michael Ryan: mpryan@...

Best regards,

Joseph Carroll

Curators' Professor

English Department

University of Missouri, St. Louis

St. Louis, MO 63121

jcarroll@...

http://www.umsl.edu/~carrolljc/

Hello again,

I’ve agreed to be guest editor for a special issue of the online journal Politics and Culture devoted to the topic: “Bioculture: Evolutionary Cultural Studies.”  If you wish to contribute to this special issue of Politics and Culture, please send your essay to me (jcarroll@...).

Here’s the web address for the journal: http://sct.temple.edu/web/politics-culture/.” The editors are switching servers, so all the features of the website might not yet be functional, but you can look at current and back issues of the journal.

After discussing the format for this special issue with Michael Ryan, one of the regular editors of Politics and Culture, I’ve decided that contributions to this issue can follow either of two basic options. I’ll describe the two options below. 

Contributors to this issue can choose to participate under option one alone, under option two alone, or under both options. 

*************************************************************  

OPTION ONE:

            This option is the same as that in the original call for papers for this special issue:

Essays and reviews on any topic of your choosing, so long as it falls under the rubric “Bioculture: Evolutionary Cultural Studies.”

Deadline: March 15, 2010

Any citation style you like—MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.

Word Count: no limits as to length. (Essays and reviews can be short or long, anything from, say, 1,000 words to 15,000 words.  Bear in mind, though, the likely tolerance of readers; shorter pieces are more likely to be read than longer pieces; condensation and concision are better than inflation; direct and incisive prose is more likely to hold attention than niggling over details of exposition.)

These contributions can be primarily theoretical or primarily exercises in practical criticism, but practical criticism should have some explicit bearing on general principles of biocultural critique, and theoretical pieces would probably be helped by reference to specific examples.

******************************************************************   

OPTION TWO:

In addition to essays and reviews on any topic in biocultural critique, this special issue will feature a round-table discussion on a single question. 

Here is the question under discussion: “How is culture biological?” 

The roundtable discussion will consist in three phases:

(Phase 1) short essays answering the question under discussion (“How is culture biological?”) (up to 3,000 words) (We’ll call these essays “primary essays.)

(Phase 2) responses to the short essays (up to 1,000 words)

(Phase 3) rejoinders to the responses (no word limit)

___________

Stipulations for phase one of option two: primary essays answering the question “How is culture biological?”

Word Count: The essays in this first phase will be limited to 3,000 words and can be as short as 500 words.

Deadline for the essays in phase one: January 20, 2010. 

Any citation style you like—MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.

It might be a good idea if essays on this topic were to make illustrative reference to at least one specific example of a cultural phenomenon (for example, a human cultural universal, a specific cultural period, a specific work of art or literature, a specific cultural movement, a technology, a feature of social organization, a particular ideology, or a specific political issue).  However, that is not an absolute requirement. Essays operating in purely theoretical terms would also be acceptable.

Note that in answering this question, you can but are not required to position your arguments relative to other published arguments on the relations (or lack of relations) between biology and culture. You could for example position your arguments in relation to “cultural constructivism,” the idea of “memetics,” “cultural evolution,” or “gene-culture co-evolution.”  You could work out from the ideas in other specific theoretical schools such as the Freudian, Marxist, or feminist.  Or you could build your own arguments from the ground up. 

__________

Stipulations for phase two of option two: responses to the short primary essays:

On January 21, after having received all the essays designed to answer this specific question (“How is culture biological?), I’ll distribute all the essays to every person who has written one of the essays.  

Everyone who has contributed an essay answering the discussion question will be asked to comment on at least one of the other essays answering the discussion question. Respondents can choose the essay or essays to which they wish to respond.

Deadline for the responses:  February 20, 2010.

Word limit for responses to individual primary essays: 1,000 words.

Any citation style you like—MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.

There is no limit to the number of primary essays to which a respondent can respond.  A respondent could, if he or she wished, write a response to every primary essay.

Anyone contributing an essay under option one (that is, writing on any aspect of biocultural critique) can also, if he or she wishes, write a response to one or more of the primary essays under option two.

If I hear from others who are not contributing to the special issue but who would like to read and respond to the essays answering the question under discussion, they will be allowed to do so.  Respondents might thus even include commentators who think that biology has no relation to culture.  (So, if you know of people who might offer a stimulating critique, feel free to have them contact me to ask to see the primary essays so that they can decide whether to write responses to those primary essays.)

I shall distribute the primary essays to anyone who has already turned in an essay or review on some other topic (the first of the two options in this special issue).  I’ll also send the primary essays to anyone who plans to contribute an essay under option one and lets me know that he or she would like to see the essays answering the question posed under option two.

The format here, then, is something like that of a symposium in which the main participants present papers and comment on each others’ papers, and in which the audience is also allowed to ask questions or make comments.

Responses to the essays submitted under option two can be critical (“I beg to differ”), supportive (“As my distinguished colleague so astutely observes”), qualifying (“Yes, but”), or elaborative (“Yes, not only that, but also. . . “).

Authors writing responses to the primary essays should stipulate, at the top of the response, the target of their commentary, thus: “Response to George Lincoln.”  If writing responses to more than one primary essay, authors should write individual responses to each primary essay, not a single commentary responding to multiple primary essays.  Thus, an author responding to essays by both George Lincoln and Abraham Washington would write two separate responses, one labelled “Response to George Lincoln” and the other labelled “Response to Abraham Washington.”  The reason for avoiding conglomerate responses is that the responses will be published directly under the primary essays to which they are responding. Authors can still make points that apply to more than one author.  For instance, “The point I made in response to George Lincoln’s essay applies with even greater force to the essay by Abraham Washington. In brief, . . . “

Note: the 1,000 word limit applies only to responses to individual essays.  An author responding to two primary essays, for example, would have a word limit of 1,000 words for each of the two essays.

__________

Stipulations for phase three of option two: rejoinders to the responses:

On February 21, after having received all the responses to the essays, I’ll send all the responses to their target authors.  For instance, let’s say Charles Huxley has written an essay answering the discussion question. Karl Engels and Sigmund Jung have both written commentaries on Huxley’s essay. I’ll send Engel’s and Jung’s commentaries to Huxley.  Huxley will then have until March 15 to write a rejoinder.

Deadline for the rejoinder to the responses:  March 15, 2010.

Word limit for rejoinders: no word limit.

Any citation style you like—MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.

Authors who have received responses to their primary essays can answer or not answer the responses as they please.  No author is required to write a rejoinder to any particular response.

____________ 

In the part of the special issue devoted to the roundtable discussion, the primary essays will be arranged in alphabetical order of the authors names.  Responses will also be arranged in alphabetical order. 

When responding to comments by specific, named people, please put the respondents’ names in bold-face font.  For example: “In his thoughtful commentary on my paper, Sigmund Jung raised a question I’d like to answer. Karl Engels raised a similar question, so my answer to Jung can be taken also as an answer to Engels.”

**********************************************************************   

Acknowledgment: Michael Ryan suggested the question for the roundtable discussion.  I like this question a lot.  It cuts right past the idea that culture is not biological, but it also challenges essayists to formulate ideas focused specifically on culture, not just behavior. 

I think it’s easier to answer a specific question, even a hard specific question (“How is culture biological?”) than to speak to some general topic: “Discuss the interactions between genetically transmitted dispositions and specific cultural forms.” 

*************************************************************************   

That’s it for the format of the special issue.  Just two options: either an essay or review on any aspect of biocultural critique, or a contribution to the roundtable discussion answering the question “How is culture biological?”  If you choose to contribute only under the first option (an essay or review on any aspect of biocultural critique), you needn’t trouble yourself with the details of the second option. 

The rest of this note, below, just offers some reflections on the topic of the special issue.  These comments are designed to suggest the scope of the topic and perhaps offer some starting points for discussion.

*******

Culture is the great unexplored interior of the evolutionary human sciences. The evolutionary anthropologist Kim Hill puts his finger on this problem:   

“Given the recent convergence of evolutionary psychology and human behavioural ecology-sociobiology, one might expect that the next generation of researchers will rapidly untangle all the major mysteries of human behavior and cognition. Unfortunately, I do not think that this will happen quickly.  The main reason is that no branch of the evolutionary social sciences has an adequate understanding of human culture.  Culture is a product of evolved cognitive mechanisms, but its very existence may significantly alter behavioral patterns from those normally expected (from non-cultural organisms), and its emergence has probably uniquely shaped evolved human cognition and emotion. Because of culture, evolutionary researchers will need to develop some special theoretical models to predict adequately and understand human behavior.” (In The Evolution of Mind: Fundamental Questions and Controversies, ed. by Steven W. Gangestad and Jeffry A. Simpson [Guilford, 2007], p. 351, emphasis added.)

So, historically, you and I are exceptionally privileged.  We have a unique historical opportunity—a chance to join a collective effort in one of the great transitions in human understanding.  Everybody on this address list knows a good deal about specific cultural formations, and we all know a lot, too, about the biological constraints on human behavior.

Kim Hill thinks we need theoretical models, and we do.  That’s “top-down” work.  We also need studies that take the “bottom-up approach,” teasing out the precise relations between human nature and culture in particular works and particular contexts.  To offer the most illumination, top-downers need to illustrate their models with reference to specific cases, and bottom-uppers need to extrapolate from their specific cases to general principles. 

In a forthcoming essay, I discuss about the kind of challenge “literary Darwinists” face in writing interpretive essays that are genuinely “biocultural,” that is, both biological and cultural.  Here below are a couple of paragraphs excerpted from that essay:

To qualify as evolutionary, an interpretive reading would have to bring all its particular observations into line with basic evolutionary principles: survival, reproduction, kinship (inclusive fitness), basic social dynamics, and the reproductive cycle that gives shape to human life and organizes the most intimate relations of family. While retaining a sense of the constraining force of underlying biological realities, literary Darwinism would also have to emulate the chief merit of Foucauldian cultural critique—its understanding that the forms of cultural representation are highly variable, that these variations subserve social and political interests, and that every variation has its own specific imaginative quality. As it is currently practiced, cultural critique usually arrives at its conclusions in a theoretically illegitimate way, by assuming the causal primacy of representation. This is what it means to say that reality and social identity are “constructed.” Despite the obvious fallacies in this idea, Foucauldian critique often has rich descriptive power. The Foucauldians have achieved dominance in literary study partly because they recognize that the chief purpose of literary study is to examine the forms of cultural imagination. . . . 

Practitioners of the more sophisticated forms of evolutionary cultural critique recognize that literature does not simply represent typical or average human behavior. Human nature is a set of basic building blocks that combine in different ways in different cultures to produce different kinds of social organization, different belief systems, and different qualities of experience. Moreover, every individual human being (and every artist) constitutes another level of “emergent” complexity, a level at which universal or elemental features of human nature interact with cultural norms and with the conditions of life that vary in some degree for every individual. Individual artists negotiate with cultural traditions, drawing off of them but also working in tension with them. The tension derives from differences in individual identity, the pull of universal forms of human nature, and the capacity for creative innovation in the artist. Individual works of art give voice to universal human experience, to the shared experience of a given cultural community, and to the particular needs of an individual human personality. Literary meaning consists not just in what is represented—characters, setting, and plot—but in how that represented subject is organized and envisioned by the individual human artist. Moreover, literary meaning is a social transaction. Literary meaning is only latent until it is actualized in the minds of readers, who bring their own perspectives to bear on the author’s vision of life. A thorough interpretive effort would subsume represented subjects and formal organization into an overarching concept of literary meaning, and it would expand the concept of meaning to include its transmission and interpretation. Still further, instead of looking only at intentional meanings and the responses of readers, a thorough evolutionary critique would look at the kinds of psychological and cultural work specific literary texts actually accomplish—the functions they fulfill—and it would locate those functions in relation to broader ideas of adaptive function, thus bringing the interpretation of individual works to bear as evidence on the larger, still controverted question of the adaptive function of the arts.

****

David Brooks had an op-ed column in the New York Times yesterday that suggests just how much an evolutionary understanding of cultural imagination has become a viable idea within elite popular culture: 

We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re thrust into social conditions that we detest. Often, we react in ways we regret even while we’re doing them.

But unlike the other animals, people do have a drive to seek coherence and meaning. We have a need to tell ourselves stories that explain it all. We use these stories to supply the metaphysics, without which life seems pointless and empty.

Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world. Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves.

I quote this partly to serve as a possible prompt: Do we “have some control over our stories?”  Are we passive reflexes not just of historical conditions and internal chemistry but also of the imaginative forms of the cultures into which we are born?  How much can self-aware critical reflection enter into the way we construct the narratives that make sense of our personal lives and the larger communities in which we live? 

            These are very general, abstract questions, but consider them in some context in which you yourself have expertise.  What kind of control does Shakespeare exercise over this stories?  Is Wordsworth merely the sum total of all the conditions that shape him?  Or does he have some originative power that alters the cultural stream in which he lives?  How does self-awareness influence the way Willa Cather or Edith Wharton construct their narratives? Are video gamesters robots, more than the rest of us?  Do producers of advertisements display critical self-awareness about the way their products enter into the larger cultural narrative?  How about consumers of advertisements?  To what extent do liberal-radical and conservative-reactionary political views display a grasp of human nature? To what extent are political protesters merely reflexes of their cultural conditions, and to what extent do they exercise some kind of critical choice in constructing the larger narratives in which we all live?

****

One last remark.  “Culture” is a large concept, extending all the way from the use of fire, the domestication of milk-producing animals, to language, the arts, and politics.  If you choose to contribute an essay under the first option (not the roundtable), and if you’d like to talk about capitalism, socialism, and libertarianism, the role of the black death in shaping the imagination of the middle ages, the curious ironies of industrialism—giving us comforts and calories while elevating cortisol and rotting our teeth—slavery, patriarchy, the tension between liberal-radical and conservative-reactionary temperaments, the way “folk psychology” interacts with religion and ideology (Christianity, Islam, Marxism, Nazism), the Holocaust, deep ecology, evolutionary feminism, the ethos of war, dog shows, vegetarianism, action movies, conceptual art, hooking up, twitter, spiritualism, video games, or anything else that falls under the capacious rubric “culture,” you should feel free. 

Joe Carroll

Joseph Carroll

Curators' Professor

English Department

University of Missouri, St. Louis

St. Louis, MO 63121

jcarroll@...

314 432 5583

http://www.umsl.edu/~carrolljc/

Hello,

            Judith Saunders gave me a good suggestion for the special evolutionary issue of Politics and Culture.  She suggested that I list some recent and forthcoming books relevant to the special issue so that one form of contribution under option one would be to review one or more books.  I’ll list books in the humanities first, then books in the evolutionary human sciences.  There are many more in the second category than in the first, so in the second category I’ll group them into general topic areas.  Reviews might focus on a single book or give an overview of several books.

            I’ve no doubt left out some items of real interest.  Do please write and let me know about books I’ve overlooked.  As co-editor of the new annual journal The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture, I’m keen to stay tuned to new books in this area.  I imagine there are forthcoming books in the humanities that I haven’t heard about yet. And there are other books that I’ve know were being written but that might already, unbeknownst to me, be completed and in production.

Best regards,

Joe Carroll

************

Books in the Humanities

Poetics of Cinema, by David Bordwell (2008)

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, by Brian Boyd (2009)

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton (2009)

Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, by William Flesch (2008)

The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness, by Harold Fromm (2009)

Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, by Jonathan Gottschall (2008)

The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer, by Jonathan Gottschall (2008)

Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film, by Torben Grodal (2009)

Interdisciplinary Essays on Darwinism in Hispanic Literature and Film: The Intersection of Science and the Humanities, edited by Jerry Hoeg and Kevin S. Larsen (2009)

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution, by Marcus Nordlund (2007)

Reading Edith Wharton through A Darwinian Lens: Evolutionary Biological Issues In Her Fiction, by Judith P. Saunders (2009)

Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative, by Lisa Zunshine (2008)

Forthcoming:

Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape, by Beatriz Rivera-BarnesBeatriz Rivera-Barnes (Author)

› Visit Amazon's Beatriz Rivera-Barnes Page

Find all the books, read about the author, and more.

See search results for this author

Are you an author? Learn about Author Central

 and Jerry Hoeg

Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading, by Clinton Machann

Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? by Blakey Vermeule

***************************** 

Books in the Evolutionary Human Sciences

Human Evolution (“How Did We Get To Be Human?”)

Paul Mellars, et al, eds. Rethinking the Human Revolution (McDonald Institute, 2007)

            Bernard Chapais, Primeval Kinship: How Pair Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society (Harvard UP, 2008)

Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon, 2008)

Derek Bickerton, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (Hill and Wang, 2009)

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (Basic Books, 2009)

Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009)

Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard UP, 2009)

Sex and Gender

Richard G. Bribiescas, Men: Evolutionary and Life History (Harvard UP, 2008)

Cindy Meston and David Buss, Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (Times Books, 2009)

David Barash and Judith Lipton, Strange Bedfellows: The Surprising Connection Between Sex, Evolution and Monogamy (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009)

Developmental psychology and family relationships

David F. Bjorklund, Why Youth Is Not Wasted on the Young (Blackwell, 2007)

Catherine Salmon and Todd Shackelford, eds. Family Relationships: An Evolutionary Perspective (Oxford UP, 2008)

Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2009)

Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard UP, 2009)

Affective and Social Neuroscience

Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (Arrow, 2007)

Dario Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World (U of Chicago P, 2007)

John Cacioppo, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (Norton, 2008)

Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, by Michael S. Gazzaniga (2008)

Iacomo Rizzolatti, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience (Oxford UP, 2008)

Marco Iacoboni and Corrado Sinigaglia, translated by Frances Anderson, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2008)

Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (Norton, 2009)

Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard UP, 2009)

Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (MIT P, 2009)

Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, 2009)

The Origins of Language

James R. Hurford, The Origins of Meaning (Oxford UP, 2007)

Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Viking, 2007)

Peter MacNeilage, The Origins of Speech (Oxford UP, 2008)

Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (MIT P, 2008)

Dean Falk, Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language (Basic Books, 2009)

Derek Bickerton, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (Hill and Wang, 2009)

Evolution and Religion

Eckart Voland and Wulf Schiefenhovel, eds. The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior (Springer, 2009)

Jay R. Feierman, ed. The Biology of Religious Behavior: The Evolutionary Origins of Faith and Religion (Praeger, 2009)

Michael McGuire and Lionel Tiger, God’s Brain (Prometheus, forthcoming 2010)

History

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, by Peter Turchin (2007)

On Deep History and the Brain, by Daniel Lord Smail (2008)

Darwin and the History of Evolutionary Thinking

Sean Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Norton, 2006) 

David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (Atlas, 2007)

Janet Browne, Darwin's Origin of Species: Books That Changed the World (Grove, 2008)

Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith (Henry Holt, 2008)

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

Michael Ruse, Defining Darwin: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology (Prometheus, 2009)

Keith Stuart Thomson, The Young Charles Darwin (Yale UP, 2009)

Dear Potential Contributors to the special evolutionary issue of Politics and Culture:

Many thanks to all of you who sent in notes about other books worthy of attention for evolutionists.  I’ve added them in and highlighted the new ones in yellow. 

If you are thinking about reviewing one or more books for the special issue, please contact me first.  Some of the books listed here might already have been selected for review by other reviewers.

Some good pieces have already been submitted for the special issue, and several other good ones proposed, so I’m confident the issue will be high in quality, of real interest and value for readers like those on this list.

Best as ever,

Joe Carroll

Books in the Humanities

Poetics of Cinema, by David Bordwell (2008)

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, by Brian Boyd (2009)

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton (2009)

Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, by William Flesch (2008)

The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness, by Harold Fromm (2009)

Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, by Jonathan Gottschall (2008)

The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer, by Jonathan Gottschall (2008)

Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film, by Torben Grodal (2009)

Interdisciplinary Essays on Darwinism in Hispanic Literature and Film: The Intersection of Science and the Humanities, edited by Jerry Hoeg and Kevin S. Larsen (2009)

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution, by Marcus Nordlund (2007)

Reading Edith Wharton through A Darwinian Lens: Evolutionary Biological Issues In Her Fiction, by Judith P. Saunders (2009)

Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory, by Peter Swirski (Routledge, 2007)

Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative, by Lisa Zunshine (2008)

Forthcoming:

Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature, Michael Austin

Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape, by Beatriz Rivera-BarnesBeatriz Rivera-Barnes (Author)

› Visit Amazon's Beatriz Rivera-Barnes Page

Find all the books, read about the author, and more.

See search results for this author

Are you an author? Learn about Author Central

 and Jerry Hoeg

Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading, by Clinton Machann

Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution, by Peter Swirski

Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? by Blakey Vermeule

***************************** 

Books in the Evolutionary Human Sciences

Human Evolution (“How Did We Get To Be Human?”)

Paul Mellars, et al, eds. Rethinking the Human Revolution (McDonald Institute, 2007)

            Bernard Chapais, Primeval Kinship: How Pair Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society (Harvard UP, 2008)

Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon, 2008)

Derek Bickerton, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (Hill and Wang, 2009)

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (Basic Books, 2009)

Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009)

Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard UP, 2009)

Sex and Gender

Richard G. Bribiescas, Men: Evolutionary and Life History (Harvard UP, 2008)

Cindy Meston and David Buss, Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (Times Books, 2009)

David Barash and Judith Lipton, Strange Bedfellows: The Surprising Connection Between Sex, Evolution and Monogamy (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009)

David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, How Women Got Their Curves, and Other Just-So Stories (Columbia UP, 2009)

Developmental psychology and family relationships

David F. Bjorklund, Why Youth Is Not Wasted on the Young (Blackwell, 2007)

Catherine Salmon and Todd Shackelford, eds. Family Relationships: An Evolutionary Perspective (Oxford UP, 2008)

Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2009)

Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard UP, 2009)

Affective and Social Neuroscience

Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (Arrow, 2007)

Dario Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World (U of Chicago P, 2007)

John Cacioppo, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (Norton, 2008)

Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (HarperCollins, 2008)

Iacomo Rizzolatti, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience (Oxford UP, 2008)

Marco Iacoboni and Corrado Sinigaglia, translated by Frances Anderson, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2008)

Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (Norton, 2009)

Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard UP, 2009)

Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (MIT P, 2009)

Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, 2009)

Jean Decety and William Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (MIT P, 2009)

The Origins of Language

James R. Hurford, The Origins of Meaning (Oxford UP, 2007)

Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Viking, 2007)

Peter MacNeilage, The Origins of Speech (Oxford UP, 2008)

Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (MIT P, 2008)

Dean Falk, Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language (Basic Books, 2009)

Derek Bickerton, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (Hill and Wang, 2009)

Evolution and Religion

Joseph Bulbulia, Richard Sosis, Russell Genet, Cheryl Genet, Erica Harris, and Karen Wyman, eds. The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques (Collins Foundation P, 2008)

Eckart Voland and Wulf Schiefenhovel, eds. The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior (Springer, 2009)

Jay R. Feierman, ed. The Biology of Religious Behavior: The Evolutionary Origins of Faith and Religion (Praeger, 2009)

Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Penguin, 2009)

Michael McGuire and Lionel Tiger, God’s Brain (Prometheus, forthcoming 2010)

History

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, by Peter Turchin (2007)

On Deep History and the Brain, by Daniel Lord Smail (2008)

Darwin and the History of Evolutionary Thinking

Sean Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Norton, 2006) 

David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (Atlas, 2007)

Janet Browne, Darwin's Origin of Species: Books That Changed the World (Grove, 2008)

Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith (Henry Holt, 2008)

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

Michael Ruse, Defining Darwin: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology (Prometheus, 2009)

Keith Stuart Thomson, The Young Charles Darwin (Yale UP, 2009)

Ullica Segerstrale, Nature’s Oracle: A Life of W. D. Hamilton (Oxford UP, forthcoming)

Comparative Psychology

R. Hood and W. P. Williamson, Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Snake Handling Tradition  (U California Press, 2008)

Lynne A. Isbell, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well (Harvard UP, 2009)  [[THESE TWO BOOKS ON SNAKES, by Hood/Williamson and Isbell, ARE ALREADY BEING REVIEWED]]

Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (U of Chicago P, 2009)

Amanda Rees, The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science (U of Chicago P, 2009)

Comparing Primate and Human Social Behavior

Dario Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World (U of Chicago P, 2007)

Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, 2009)

Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (Harmony, 2009)

Hello again,

            After sending out the updated list of books relevant to people with evolutionary interests, I collected a few more. I’ve added them to my own list, but rather than duplicating the whole list again, I’ll just give the identifying information below. The list runs back only to 2007.

Gad Saad, The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption (Erlbaum, 2007)

David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War (St. Martin’s, 2007)

Edward Slingerland, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body and Culture (Cambridge UP, 2008)

Geoffrey Miller, Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior (Viking, 2009)

Joe Carroll

Dear Potential Contributors to the special evolutionary issue of Politics and Culture:

Many thanks to all of you who sent in notes about other books worthy of attention for evolutionists.  I’ve added them in and highlighted the new ones in yellow. 

If you are thinking about reviewing one or more books for the special issue, please contact me first.  Some of the books listed here might already have been selected for review by other reviewers.

Some good pieces have already been submitted for the special issue, and several other good ones proposed, so I’m confident the issue will be high in quality, of real interest and value for readers like those on this list.

Best as ever,

Joe Carroll

Books in the Humanities

Poetics of Cinema, by David Bordwell (2008)

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, by Brian Boyd (2009)

The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, by Denis Dutton (2009)

Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, by William Flesch (2008)

The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness, by Harold Fromm (2009)

Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, by Jonathan Gottschall (2008)

The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer, by Jonathan Gottschall (2008)

Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film, by Torben Grodal (2009)

Interdisciplinary Essays on Darwinism in Hispanic Literature and Film: The Intersection of Science and the Humanities, edited by Jerry Hoeg and Kevin S. Larsen (2009)

Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution, by Marcus Nordlund (2007)

Reading Edith Wharton through A Darwinian Lens: Evolutionary Biological Issues In Her Fiction, by Judith P. Saunders (2009)

Of Literature and Knowledge: Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments, Evolution, and Game Theory, by Peter Swirski (Routledge, 2007)

Strange Concepts and the Stories They Make Possible: Cognition, Culture, Narrative, by Lisa Zunshine (2008)

Forthcoming:

Useful Fictions: Evolution, Anxiety, and the Origins of Literature, Michael Austin

Reading and Writing the Latin American Landscape, by Beatriz Rivera-Barnes Beatriz Rivera-Barnes (Author)

› Visit Amazon's Beatriz Rivera-Barnes Page

Find all the books, read about the author, and more.

See search results for this author

Are you an author? Learn about Author Central

 and Jerry Hoeg

Masculinity in Four Victorian Epics: A Darwinist Reading, by Clinton Machann

Literature, Analytically Speaking: Explorations in the Theory of Interpretation, Analytic Aesthetics, and Evolution, by Peter Swirski

Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? by Blakey Vermeule

***************************** 

Books in the Evolutionary Human Sciences

Human Evolution (“How Did We Get To Be Human?”)

Paul Mellars, et al, eds. Rethinking the Human Revolution (McDonald Institute, 2007)

            Bernard Chapais, Primeval Kinship: How Pair Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society (Harvard UP, 2008)

Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon, 2008)

Derek Bickerton, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (Hill and Wang, 2009)

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (Basic Books, 2009)

Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human (Basic Books, 2009)

Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard UP, 2009)

Sex and Gender

Richard G. Bribiescas, Men: Evolutionary and Life History (Harvard UP, 2008)

Cindy Meston and David Buss, Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (Times Books, 2009)

David Barash and Judith Lipton, Strange Bedfellows: The Surprising Connection Between Sex, Evolution and Monogamy (Bellevue Literary Press, 2009)

David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, How Women Got Their Curves, and Other Just-So Stories (Columbia UP, 2009)

Developmental psychology and family relationships

David F. Bjorklund, Why Youth Is Not Wasted on the Young (Blackwell, 2007)

Catherine Salmon and Todd Shackelford, eds. Family Relationships: An Evolutionary Perspective (Oxford UP, 2008)

Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2009)

Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard UP, 2009)

Affective and Social Neuroscience

Daniel Goleman, Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships (Arrow, 2007)

Dario Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World (U of Chicago P, 2007)

John Cacioppo, Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection (Norton, 2008)

Michael S. Gazzaniga, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (HarperCollins, 2008)

Iacomo Rizzolatti, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions, Emotions, and Experience (Oxford UP, 2008)

Marco Iacoboni and Corrado Sinigaglia, translated by Frances Anderson, Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2008)

Dacher Keltner, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (Norton, 2009)

Sarah Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard UP, 2009)

Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (MIT P, 2009)

Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, 2009)

Jean Decety and William Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (MIT P, 2009)

The Origins of Language

James R. Hurford, The Origins of Meaning (Oxford UP, 2007)

Christine Kenneally, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Viking, 2007)

Peter MacNeilage, The Origins of Speech (Oxford UP, 2008)

Michael Tomasello, Origins of Human Communication (MIT P, 2008)

Dean Falk, Finding Our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language (Basic Books, 2009)

Derek Bickerton, Adam’s Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans (Hill and Wang, 2009)

Evolution and Religion

Joseph Bulbulia, Richard Sosis, Russell Genet, Cheryl Genet, Erica Harris, and Karen Wyman, eds. The Evolution of Religion: Studies, Theories, and Critiques (Collins Foundation P, 2008)

Eckart Voland and Wulf Schiefenhovel, eds. The Biological Evolution of Religious Mind and Behavior (Springer, 2009)

Jay R. Feierman, ed. The Biology of Religious Behavior: The Evolutionary Origins of Faith and Religion (Praeger, 2009)

Nicholas Wade, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Penguin, 2009)

Michael McGuire and Lionel Tiger, God’s Brain (Prometheus, forthcoming 2010)

History

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires, by Peter Turchin (2007)

On Deep History and the Brain, by Daniel Lord Smail (2008)

Darwin and the History of Evolutionary Thinking

Sean Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Norton, 2006) 

David Quammen, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution (Atlas, 2007)

Janet Browne, Darwin's Origin of Species: Books That Changed the World (Grove, 2008)

Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith (Henry Holt, 2008)

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)

Michael Ruse, Defining Darwin: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology (Prometheus, 2009)

Keith Stuart Thomson, The Young Charles Darwin (Yale UP, 2009)

Ullica Segerstrale, Nature’s Oracle: A Life of W. D. Hamilton (Oxford UP, forthcoming)

Comparative Psychology

R. Hood and W. P. Williamson, Them That Believe: The Power and Meaning of the Snake Handling Tradition  (U California Press, 2008)

Lynne A. Isbell, The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent: Why We See So Well (Harvard UP, 2009)  [[THESE TWO BOOKS ON SNAKES, by Hood/Williamson and Isbell, ARE ALREADY BEING REVIEWED]]

Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (U of Chicago P, 2009)

Amanda Rees, The Infanticide Controversy: Primatology and the Art of Field Science (U of Chicago P, 2009)

Comparing Primate and Human Social Behavior

Dario Maestripieri, Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World (U of Chicago P, 2007)

Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, 2009)

Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society (Harmony, 2009)