Literary Darwinism

D. T. Max's article in yesterday's magazine was the first I'd heard of literary darwinism. Generally, I've been nothing but hostile to evolutionary psychology and sociobiology, finding them to rely on specific social and gendered assumptions that they then project back into the past and across onto all cultures. These sorts of explanations also seem to me to be hostile to political interventions and projects of social solidarity (it's pretty hard to get to social solidarity if our selfish little genes are just trying to have their way). But, maybe it works in literature.

So, here is a list of possible dissertation topics for graduate students in English seeking to make their way as literary darwinists.

1.  Crime and punishment: what's the big deal? she was past breeding years.
2.  Lolita: an aging man's last effort to send his genes into the world.
3.  Beloved: so, you lost your own best thing. Not to worry! You've got other kids!
4.  The Magic Mountain: protecting the healthy from the degenerating effects of sickly genes.

Try it! It's easy. And, a way to write a disseration really, really fast! Be sure to check the second link above for the list of the seven behavioral systems at the foundation of human life.

Comments

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I think Bill Benzon's the person to talk to about this, since he does the science and is critical of its popularization. But who isn't? Popular evo. psych. is about as convincing as hard-core social constructivism; you can tell that they're defining themselves against the other by formulating the most extreme oppositional positions. That said, there's something more to it than the truism that "of course our behaviors are the result of evolutionary processes, 'cause you know, we evolved." There's some matrix between the cultural and biological, and we ought not veer too far in one direction or the other. (The obvious one is behavioral patterns altered by an injury suffered or a mental defect or disease acquired late in life; culture influences how a patient recovers from, say, massive head trauma, but to a larger extent, so does the brain.)

Which is only to say that the most reductive form of everything sucks. That said:

Moby Dick. (Need I even elaborate?)

[John]

That's hilarious, Jodi. My take:

I want to preface this by saying that I'm no great expert on science and only ever read, when I read about science, popularizations. So I'll proceed from a position of wary sympathy for literary Darwinism: the idea is probably not crazy, or not a lot crazier than anything else. But the method is surely wanting.

I wouldn't like to judge literary Darwinism on the basis of this article, since what it describes is fairly naive. Maybe LD will get better! It can start to get better by skimping just a little bit more on the reductiveness. Surely the complexity and the richness of human culture and its product in literary texts is not as incidental, as perfunctory, as is their treatment of it.

The mating dances, if such they are, at the heart of Pride and Prejudice and The Iliad is what these critics want to get to; so they shear away style, structure, tone, mood and indeed the general description of human life embodied in those texts and the surrounding cultural context of which it is the sediment or whatever you want to call it. But these things are the most important part!

If genetic predispositions to maximize the reproduction of one's genes determine human behavior in some part, if we accept that this theory explains much about human behavior, then the fact that two works of literature separated by two and a half millennia and every consideration of style both concern the disposition of genes is precisely what is not surprising or interesting about them. (That's the idea we started with!) What is interesting about them, and thus about the human cultures that produced them, are precisely their differences.

Isn't it amazing that Homer and Jane Austen both describe conflicts over who gets to make babies with whom? Frankly, no. What's amazing is that, on top of this elementary premise they share, everything else is so very dissimilar between them. And this is--roughly speaking--just within one culture, or at least along one line of definite cultural influence. Evolutionary literary criticism might best evolve by turning its attention to literary style and its implications, to texts as texts, instead of acting like texts are windows onto human behavior. (And if they do this, they will certainly have to ask themselves questions about their social and gendered assumptions.)

[Jodi]

John, I loved the way you put it (that's the idea we started with!) And, I agree that the differences and variations are what's interesting. I wonder if literary darwinism tells us anything about poetry or the shift from, say, epic to the novel, or changes in the novel or why some folks don't even have novels or why there are so many harlequin romances or why there is detective fiction. It seems a bit, well, reductive, to say that good writers are more likely to 'reproduce.'

I also wonder whether a darwinian approach tells us why there are lots of cookbooks and self help: does the market ultimately come into some kind of alignment with the desire to attract a mate? And, if so, why would anyone have ever made turkey tetrazini?

[Jodi]

One other thing, and this is no doubt the problem of ignorant of science: it seems that there is something really wild in darwinian thought, an interesting combination of infinite variation and difference, of contingency and alteration and abundance and all sorts of odd little details, combined with a highly reductive explanation for all of it: genes.

And, I confess that I am not comfortable with the possible homology with other approaches that combine strict formalism, limited explanation (yet another twist of the dialectic....) with variation (anything can be objet a! yippee!)...yet I wonder if the difference, a difference that matters, is actually the place of human consciousness, a movement of negativity and freedom (lack of determination) in Zizek's thought. So, perhaps for me the problem is that darwinism doesn't allow for an Act.

[Jason]

Like most literary spats regarding science, the issue points to a fairly traditional problem: intention vs. determinism, more or less. Genetics, cognitivism, evolutionary psych complicates the matter, but any sort of knowledgable assessment requires a great deal of research. Dennett is sort of proceeding along those lines, and his research on intentionality seems to largely reinforce traditional deterministic views (both genetic and environmental). People do seem to make decisions, yes, but many of these are unconsiously driven to some extent, and any sort of acts done intentionally are shaped by needs and desires, as well as by genetics; and the environment does condition and mold a person as well. Raskalikov is a product of his environment, yet he is also preprogammed to act to further his own interests and that of his gene pool. Yass, it's more complex and poetic than that, but what is the alternative to determinism, either genetic or environmental? That old favorite of literatteurs and metaphysicians, the Ghost, and the various categories of the Ghost. It is far easier to hold that Raskalnikov was the representation of a genetically programmed animal---highly intelligent and malleable to some extent--than a Ghost who has fallen away from some undetecatble realm of theistic or platonic Justice with a capital J.

[Jodi]

so, one can try to think about the 'unconscious' drives psychoanalytically or perhaps with genes/evolutionary biology, with some tasty brain studies thrown in to make sure that MRI guys make a profit.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

"I wonder if literary darwinism tells us anything about poetry or the shift from, say, epic to the novel, or changes in the novel or why some folks don't even have novels or why there are so many harlequin romances or why there is detective fiction."

I think the obvious answer is "No," but Darwinism proper can account for some of the impulses behind such shifts, as in say the novelty of novelty, and why humans, unlike all other animals, value novelty. But then what about harlequin romances? Well, novelty within variations, or within a a set of discreet variations, &c. Yes, reductive, but I'm not mounting a defense of literary Darwinism so much as positing some more valid form of evolutionary psychology, one which looks at how the adaptivity of the human brain evolved AND how it continues to.

The idea that human society either is still governed by evolutionary logic (social Darwinism, almost always a straw man, as I'm dissertating) or that humans have stopped evolving and now evolve culturally (cultural Lamarckism) are both wrong; the human brain evolves, somatically, differently in different situations; but that individual evolution, while not hereditary, is dependent upon genetic potential (and/or head trauma, thought of expansively to include alcohol, drugs, &c.). In other words, I fall squarely outside the hard determinist school of thought, but also outside the constructivist; people cannot become what their genes won't allow them to become--say, a tone deaf person becoming a musician--but within the rich infinity of the genetic code, there are many other things a given person can become.

Another way to say this may be that evo. psych. builds brittle shacks on solid foundations, and that may be the best it can ever do. This may sound like I'm being vaguely determinist, but let me put it this way: the human genome contains 3 billion DNA base pairs. Of that 3 billion base pairs, only 2% are genes. The rest of those base pairs deal with the what, where and why of protein production...and that's what matters in development. The idea that a given sequence of "genes" regulates a given behavioral pattern is beyond ridiculous (something that the supposedly most reductive of the evo. psych. people, Pinker, repeatedly remarks); there is no gene for violence, but there are biological reasons some people have a greater propensity for violence than others...but, of course, that propensity may never manifest itself over the lifetime of the individual, depending on the social situation.

An impossible experiment: raise 5,000 men with a propensity for violence in upper-middle class homes, and maybe 10 of them will ever be arrested for violent crimes. Rewind the tape, raise them again in abject poverty, and maybe 100 or 1,000 will. Why? Because class and cultural environs matter. Brains don't develop in isolation; the brain of a child raised in abject poverty may be malnourished, effecting the growth of his or her brain; they may drink dirty water, be stricken by disease at a higher rate, which effect the brain; they may be forced into necessary affiliations with violent contemporaries in order to survive; &c. Biology isn't an excuse, nor is it a condemnation; and what it should tell us is (as Pinker says) the amelioration of social injustice should be an ancillary goal of all evo. psych. work. I hope the biological/cultural nexus I've described here is more suggestive than anything else; it is reductive, yes, but it also points to the impossibility of genetic determinism, given that humans have evolved to live in cultural communities.

"so, one can try to think about the 'unconscious' drives psychoanalytically or perhaps with genes/evolutionary biology, with some tasty brain studies thrown in to make sure that MRI guys make a profit."

For my tastes, I'd like to find some alternative. I think psychoanalysis is, at this point, too rigid a discourse, too invested in its internal articulations of mental processes to seriously consider work going on in the biological sciences. In other words, in the reductive "we know not what we do" sense, humans have an unconscious; but in the "it's structured like a language" sense, not so much.

[John]

Jodi:

Don't you know that your experience of freedom, of the Act, is a gene-friendly adaptation to conditions of despair brought about by human consciousness that might otherwise swamp your desire to reproduce your genes? (I say this by way of wondering whether or not you can resist evolutionary psychology without your resistance being interpreted as further evidence for it.)

And what Zizek himself has to say in the orbit of this topic can't be said enough:

"It is therefore crucial to distinguish between science itself and its inherent ideologization, its sometimes subtle transformation into a new holistic, etc., 'paradigm' (new codename for 'worldview'): a series of notions (complementarity, anthropic principle...) are here doubly inscribed, functioning as scientific *and* ideological terms.

[...]

We are dealing here with an all-too-fast metaphorical transposition of certain biological-evolutionist concepts to the study of the history of civilization, like the jump from 'genes' to 'memes'..." (*Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism*, pp.213, 215)

Anyone reading this who is wary of Zizek can pursue a similar line of argumentation, but from a liberal humanist perspective, in *Science and Poetry* by the moral philosopher Mary Midgley, who primarily reminds us that interpretations of scientific facts are often figurative, volitional interventions in social life.

Jason:

I have no problem with determinism in principle, however emotionally difficult it may be to give up the ghost. I just think that these critics seem to focussed on the wrong determinations, or at least on an incredibly truncated field in which determinism runs its course. Raskolnikov *is not real*, he has no genes: he is made out of a complex arrangement of words. That arrangement is the object of criticism, Darwinian or otherwise. (An arrangement too that is aware of and so very disdainful of people like you and the evolutionary critics. I'd rather hear about evolutionary reasons for the disdain than about where Rodion puts his genes--and, in the end, he didn't select the healthiest gene pool, did he?--why not, what evolutionary sense does that make?

Also, this is something else Zizek pointed out but it would be obvious even if he didn't: it's many scientists themselves who are invested in the Ghost. Just from watching TV or reading pop science magazines you see: superstring theorists holding forth on the hidden unifying weave of the universe, quantom physicists who speak of human consciousness as telos of the cosmos and perhaps even the creator of them, chaos theorists talking about the impossibly complex higher order and patterning and deep structure of the universe that humans can't perceive, scientists insisting that modern physics is akin to Taoism or to the Kaballah, etc.

Intelligent design, I think, is a Trojan Horse, but the scientists themselves let it into the city--perhaps not without reason, I grant, but we can't just go around saying that your belletrists are the quasi-religious obscurantists, while steel-minded scientists repulse their archaic spiritual notions with blunt materialism.

I suspect I am right up against my own ignorance at this point, so I will say no more!

[Jason]

Tracing the path from gene to act or intention is a long ways off. However much the strong determinist would like to claim that every act has some genetic
basis, there is little to no basis to prove that, other than the fact that humans have genes, and humans do act. It is a dangerous idea in the old-school Orwell-Huxley sense: at some point Fed or Corp. genetic engineers could identify gene types and then correlate with various data: "this genotype has 50% probability of being an alcoholic and logically-challenged seminary student--abort."

Besides, the genes are not simply creating a brain and any putative "innateness": they are an incredibly complex code for making (and repairing) the human machine. Once the machine exists, it has certain requirements: food, for one. Call that basic needs, economic materialism, biopolitics, but the ideology should start from that point. It does seem there is in both psychoanalysis and the evolutionary psych. school a tendency to reduce Homo Economicus to sexual drives, or sadism/ masochism, or to the typical Malthusian/Darwinian survival/advancing of the gene pool; but the drives, desires, and instincts (even if those are allowable inferences) are predicated on fulfilling those basic needs.

There's another issue which is usually overlooked: what if the population is comprised largely of Raskalnikovs (or worse)who will rob and whack an old lady if they can get away with it? Psychoanalysis and the evolutionary psych. people both seem to skirt that issue: even Sartre, when in his Freudian mode, suggested that most people were sadists (and a few less were masochists.) Is there a Sadist Meme? What do either Freudians or evo. psych people say of like Hermann Goering: something like bad toilet training, getting revenge against his Vati, a small schwanz, just trying to claim territoriality, advance the gene pool, or control food and potential mates. etc. Was Goering just a very bad monkey, not conditioned properly? Aberrant or something else. It seems a purely physicalist response--either psychoanalytic or biological--misses a great deal, but precisely what that is is not clear. But I think any platonic or theistic explanations of pathopsychology--"evil" must be completely rejected.

[Matt]

from the Times article (the one currently under discussion):

""The Literary Animal," the first scholarly anthology dedicated to Literary Darwinism, is to be published next month[...]The essays consider the importance of the male-male bond in epics and romances, the battle of the sexes in Shakespeare and the motif in both Japanese and Western literature of men rejecting children whom their wives have conceived in adultery. "The Literary Animal" spans centuries and individual cultures with bravura, if not bravado. "There is no work of literature written anywhere in the world, at any time, by any author, that is outside the scope of Darwinian analysis," Joseph Carroll, a professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, writes in an essay in "The Literary Animal." Why bring literature into what is essentially a social science? Jonathan Gotschall, an editor of "The Literary Animal," offers an answer: "One thing literature offers is data. Fast, inexhaustible, cross-cultural and cheap.

"There is a circularity to an argument that uses texts about people to prove that people behave in human ways. (I'm reminded of the Robert Frost line: "Earth's the right place for love:/I don't know where it's likely to go better.") But Literary Darwinism has a second focus too. It also investigates why we read and write fiction. At the core of Literary Darwinism is the idea that we inherit many of the predispositions we deem to be cultural through our genes. How we behave has been subjected to the same fitness test as our bodies: if a bit of behavior has no purpose, then evolution - given enough time - may well dispense with it. So why, Literary Darwinists ask, do we make room for this strange exercise of the imagination? What are reading and writing fiction good for? In her essay "Reverse-Engineering Narrative," Michelle Scalise Sugiyama tries to simplify the question by picking stories apart, breaking them down into characters, settings, causalities and time frames ("the cognitive widgets and sprockets of storytelling") and asking what purpose each serves: how do they make us more adaptive, more capable of passing on our genes?

"For the moment, Literary Darwinism is a club that may grow into a crowd; there are only about 30 or so declared adherents in all of academia. (The wider field of biopoetics - which relates music and the visual arts to Darwin as well - can claim another handful.) But it has captured the imagination of a number of academics who grew up with other literary critical techniques and became dissatisfied. Brian Boyd, for instance, a well-known scholar of Vladimir Nabokov and professor at the University of New Zealand in Auckland, changed his focus in his 40's to Literary Darwinism, gripped by what he calls its "one very simple and powerful idea.""

Sounds like Brian Boyd has caught the René Girard virus to me (admittedly, a meagre leap from The Notorious Russian Crank's pat Freud antipathy, perhaps. Although placing Girard in the near company of Denis Dutton as well is surely pushing the threshold for unwarranted insults).

But as a wise man once said: "If there were ever a case to revive the term 'hermeneutic circle' this would be it."

Has anyone else read through the article? This bit, especially touching:

"In a recent telephone conversation, I asked Wilson to assess the state of the revolution he helped touch off. How far had sociologists and psychologists gone in folding evolutionary principles into their work? Wilson laughed and said silkily, "Not far enough, in my opinion." Nonetheless, he looks forward to seeing sociobiology dust the wings of the arts - especially literature - with its magic. "Confusion is what we have now in the realm of literary criticism," Wilson writes in his foreword to "The Literary Animal." He amplified the point on the phone: "They just go on presenting it, teaching it, explaining it as best they can." He saw in literary criticism, especially the school led by Derrida, a "form of unrooted free association and an attempt to build rules of analysis on just idiosyncratic perceptions of how the world works, how the mind works. I could not see anything that was truly coherent." Predicting my objection, he went on: "We're not talking about reducing, corroding, dehumanizing. We're talking about adding deep history, deep genetic history, to art criticism."

Literary Darwinists use this "deep history" to explain the power of books and poems that might otherwise confuse us, thus hoping to add satisfaction to our reading of them. Take for instance "Hamlet." Through the Literary Darwinist lens, Shakespeare's play becomes the story of a young man's dilemma choosing between his personal self-interest (taking over the kingdom by killing his uncle, his mother's new husband) and his genetic self-interest (if his mother has children with his uncle, he may get new siblings who carry three-eighths of his genes). No wonder the prince of Denmark cannot make up his mind."

Golly gee, how it deconstructs itself.

"As the British novelist Ian McEwan notes in his contribution to "The Literary Animal," "If one reads accounts of . . . troops of bonobo . . . one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English 19th-century novel."
[...]
Darwin was drawn to books that were Darwinian. Similarly, Literary Darwinists are better on Émile Zola and John Steinbeck than, say, Henry James or Gustave Flaubert."

(http://this-space.blogspot.com/2004/10/struck-by-death-on-birth-of-art.html )

[Matt]

Oh God, but the conclusion is really the clunker, isn't it?

"When it succeeds, evolutionary psychology impresses us with the elegance and economy of that vision and, when it fails, gives us a sense of waste and unthriftiness on the author's part.[!] It may be true or it may just have some truth in it, and once you have encountered it, you can never see things quite the same way again: it works a kind of conversion in you.[!] Isn't it, then, already a lot like literature?"[!!!]

Dude, totally. In fact, I hereby declare "Literary Darwinism" nothing less than The New Literature. It is literary and scientific all wrapped up in one, and the conversion lasts twice as long!

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Matt,

I've actually read a number of the articles published in the book (as well as some of Carroll's other books and articles), and I can tell you that they're doggedly biological. That's all I'll say: Doggedly. Biological.

The one I haven't read, and the one that really interests me, is the Ian McEwan article included in that collection. I've loved his novels--think them wonderfully topical and subtle beasts, both high in the literary sense and low in the "based around a hideous, horrifically described balloon-accident sense"--and would like to hear what he has to say about it.

Because seriously, few novels have disturbed me as much as The Cement Garden did (since I'd read the novel, the movie didn't do quite to me what it did to others, but from what I've read, it's comparably disturbing). For someone whose novels rely so heavily on social custom, on habit, as McEwan's do, I'm shocked that he'd be included in this collection. Shocked, but piqued.

(And for the record: Henry James didn't know what to do with Zola. His account of Zola sounds like the proverbial Martian's account of human cultures. Not that Carroll does, mind you, which is sort of the whole point of my dissertation: people misusing evolutionary theory and what-not.)

[Matt]

Let's just say I've heard mixed things about McEwan, to put it mildly.

http://www.spikemagazine.com/splinters/2005/02/do-not-miss-sharp-side-on-saturday.php

[amie]

"better abort than be barren." (Beckett)

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I read that review, but I'm not convinced by it. McEwan is, I admit, a prose stylist, but what makes his novels so fascinating are the unsettling coincidences; that he toes the line between Jamesian realism and Pychonian paranoia are what make the novels so invigorating. Even detail introduced has its payoff before the novel closes. He creates the same manner of paranoid reader that Pynchon does, and expresses the same dissatisfaction with contemporary life that Mark Greif (*ducks*) so eloquently outlines in "Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop" (*ducks again*) (*and again*).

Seriously though, I think that review misses the point of McEwan's novels; yes, prose style, Jamesian, somteimes fluffy; but the meat of the novel's in the collision of the details, of the spines slammed into the ground at 42 ft./sec. and the reprecussions thereof...as I said, I can imagine many criticisms of McEwan, but I'm at a loss for how he fits into the literary Darwinism camp.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

"even detail" = "every detail"

[CR]

I wondered why McEwan was in there as well, but I'm currently guessing that he was asked because of the neuropsychological preoccupations of Saturday... The fact that Saturday seems to have developed out of coversations with Actual Scientists and Real Doctors.

We'll see... But I'm sure that's the initial link...

(That said, McEwan is a brilliant writer with terrible politics, political instincts, judging from what I've seen him say about the Collosal Misadventure. To be f'n British and to say what he's said - not so good...)

(blanking on a helpful link... sorry...)

[roger]

Since Darwinian evolution requires a population, variation, and replication to get started, I wonder what literary darwinism could possibly be. In terms of novels, unless you had a population of, say, Jane Eyres, you'd never get the kind of variations of Jane Eyre you'd need in order to see the evolution of Jane Eyre

As for the reproductive success of novelists brought about by best selling novels -- well, you do have the immense Mailer progeny. On the other hand, you have the almost undented celibacy of Henry James.

The most conscientious user of the Darwinian model as a template for cognitive activity is Donald T. Campell. But Campbell wrote his best things in the sixties, seventies and eighties, before the cognitive revolution took a real Darwinian turn with Edelman, and before MRIs and the like, so there is a certain disconnect between his cognitive Darwinism and neurology. And even Campbell has trouble claiming that his Darwinian model explains the success of intellectual constructs. Partly that is because variations in intellectual constructs aren't random. Thus, their evolutionary paths "cheat" the blindness of the selection process.

[Dutton]

(1) Survival: avoid predators, obtain food, seek shelter, defeat enemies.

(literature as video game)

(2) Technology: shape cutters and pounders, use levers, attach objects, use fire.

(literature as trade school)

(3) Mating: Assess and attract sexual partners, overcome competitors, avoid incest.

(literature as James Wood would have it)

(4) Parenting: nurse, protect, provide, nurture, teach.

(literature as self-help)

(5) Kin: distinguish kin, favor kin, maintain a kin network.

(literature as the smug and smugger cloistering of colleagues)

(6) Social: build coalitions, achieve status, monitor reciprocity.

(ditto)

(7) Cognition: tell stories, paint pictures, form beliefs, acquire knowledge.

(everything else--so long as there is a clear and quantifiable goal...in the age of SIMS, literature as video game)

A full circle, without ever having to tremble.

[Steve]

Frankly I think all I ever needed to know about Darwinism was learned in Third Grade, specifically during Recess.

We weren't reading many novels then.

Some people stay there, granted. I hear they're called "professional athletes" and that they're paid ridiculous amounts of money to sell things.

[Matt]

Sorry but McEwan is "brilliant"? Care to elaborate on that at all CR?

He's so pop in the US, I know, but over there...like a watered down and softer, flabby conservative's ("liberal's") DeLillo pillow, no?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Matt,

DeLillo without the pretensions and solipsism, however. As I said in the DeLillo post over yonder, the man can craft a sentence...but they always seem to be about the very small class of 1) him and 2) people just like him. McEwan's novels are not are McEwan the way DeLillo's are about DeLillo.

CR,

I haven't read anything about his politics. If you find a moment to hit me with a link (the one's I'm finding on this dense Thursday morning are all fluff), I'd appreciate it.

[Bill Benzon]

I've written a longish formal review of The Literary Animal:

http://www.entelechyjournal.com/billbenzon.html

I've been following this brand of criticism for some time now and wish it were better than it is. I fear it's reductive and nostaligic. Consider, as an analogy, the game of chess. On the one had, we have the rules of chess. You can't play the game without knowing the rules, nor can you follow a chess game without knowing the rules. But there's more to playing chess than the rule of the game; knowing those rules, and nothing else, won't get you very far in following classic games played by the masters or, for that matter, not-so-classic games played by mediocre players.

Well, figue that canonical literary texts are like classic chess games. Evolutionary psychology is an attempt to figure out the rules of the game. Even if it gets the rules right, there's more to understanding the game than those rules. It is in that sense that evolutionary criticism is reductive.

It is nostalgic in that it seems to long for a criticism that fell asleep in 1960 and, upon awakening in the 1990s, has attempted to continue as it had been doing, only employing evolutionary psychology as its theoretical bulwark. This is most obvious in the case of Joseph Carroll. His chapter in the book has two components: 1) a review and synthesis of evolutionary psychology and 2) a reading of Pride and Prejudice. (You can find the text of this chapter at Carroll's website, though I forget the name it goes by there.) But for a term or two, his reading of P&P could have been written in 1955; and if we could pass it back through a time warp, I doubt that anyone back then would have much trouble understanding it.

This is a criticism that is relentlessly mimetic in its thrust. It's chief concern is how literature imitates life. It sees evolutionary psychology as a way of demonstrating that great literature imitates life truely.

[roger]

Dutton, surely the circles drawn there are vicious ones.

Your examples have little to do with Darwinian evolution. There is no unit of selection; there is no replication; there is no blind variation; there is, however, selection. As Darwin mentioned in the first chapter of orgin of the species, selection alone isn't natural selection (which may be why he used that word: "natural"). All evolutions aren't Darwinian evolutions -- out of that set, about which I imagine you could construct an indefinite number of variants, I need refer only to Lamarckian evolution, which soon gives us a very different model.
Truly, I hope you aren't serious. The inability to distinguish the chances of reproductive success between the soi-disant meme and the author are the best indications of a terminal conceptual confusion at the base of the whole project.

[Dutton]

Roger, the examples are straight from the second link in this post. The sarcastic parenthesis are entirely mine.