Professional Documents
Culture Documents
One would think that there might be some mention of folk tales, myths, legends
and other short narratives in a book dedicated to explaining how and why stories
originated. One would think that literary fairy tales might receive a few words as well.
But one had better shed such expectations before reading On the Origin of Stories.
Boyd's study, based on Darwinist theory, provides few historical clues to explain how
types of tales originated and developed. Instead, he is more interested in writing a bible
denounces current theoretical approaches to culture and literature and spins hypothetical
and often unfounded notions about the origins and appeal of stories in the name of
"evocriticism," his coined term for evolutionary criticism, which he wants to validate in
this book. Moreover, his misinformed tirades against "Theory" -- his amorphous term for
what he considers the pestilent abstruse thought (lumping together Derrida, Foucault,
Barthes, and other critical theorists) that has infected the academy -- which run through
his book make it difficult for anyone who might be sympathetic to evolutionary
psychology and anthropology to appreciate some of his unusual "materialist" insights that
can help us understand why stories are so invaluable in human evolution and why they
I would like to sort out some of his more valid ideas about evolutionary psychology and
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Darwinism that could be helpful and applicable in the study of folk and fairy tales.
(Indeed, it is important not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.) But before I do this,
I want to summarize the main arguments of Boyd's book so that there is some context for
understanding how his project, to rescue the agency of the storyteller/author as a member
of the evolving human species, and thus to rescue the humanities from itself, might bear
some fruit.
Boyd divides On the Origin of Stories into two books with five parts. The first
book consists of three parts that deal with evolution in relation to nature, art, and fiction.
The second book has two parts in which Boyd applies his theoretical principles to
interpret Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey and Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! From
the outset, he states that he has two main aims: "first, to offer an account of fiction (and
of art in general) that takes our widest context for explaining life, evolution; and to offer a
way beyond the error of thought and practice in much modern academic literary study,
which over the last few decades has often stifled and has even sought to stifle -- the
pleasure, the life, and the art of literature" (11). These are huge claims and grave
accusations, and it takes a great deal of hubris and/or ingenuousness to make them.
Boyd's major thesis in the first book is that, since humans all share the same
genetic wiring and evolved brain formation that enable them to adapt effectively to their
environments, they have developed universal concerns manifested in all forms of art.
Adaptation is necessary for reproduction and survival, and for Boyd, as humans adapted
to the environment and the brain grew and became more complex, it developed neural
systems and modules that enabled it to process information faster and with less effort.
The honing of the mind made humans more disposed to selecting fitter partners,
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cooperating with one another more effectively, forming norms and regulations that
furthered fitness and survival, and creating patterns and designs that provided knowledge
and security. In short, nature generated culture, and art, though often considered useless,
can best be explained by understanding how it has become ingrained in the psyche of the
species and the individual as an adapter and has special functions. Boyd maintains that art
is universal in human societies; contains the same major forms of dance, music, design,
story, and verse; involves high costs in time, energy, and resources; moves the emotions
in much the same way; and needs no special training as it develops early in the play of
infants. Most of all, art is a form of human adaptation. Boyd reminds us, "an evolutionary
adaptation . . . is a feature of body, mind, or behavior that exists throughout a species and
shows evidence of good design for a specific function or functions that will ultimately
make a difference to the species' survival and reproductive process. If art is a human
adaptation, it has been established throughout the species because it has been selected as
a behavior for the advantages it offers in terms of survival and reproduction" (80-81).
Boyd stresses that art evolved from animal play and "serves as a stimulus and
training for a flexible mind, as play does for the body and physical behavior. The high
concentrations of pattern that art delivers repeatedly engage and activate individual brains
and over time alter their wiring to modify key human perceptual, cognitive, and
expressive systems, especially in terms of sight, hearing, movement, and social cognition.
All of art's other functions lead from this. Second, art becomes a social and individual
system for engendering creativity, for producing options not confined by the here and
now or the immediate and given. All other functions lead up to this" (86-87). Boyd
maintains that 1) art as solitary and shared cognitive play is self-rewarding because it
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reshapes human minds; 2) art draws attention to and raises the status of the artist; 3) it
furthers cooperation among individuals; 4) finally, art creates creativity, that is, it enables
Since our brains have evolved to allow us to make better decisions to adapt to
changing environments, art in the form of narration can provide us with strategic social
information and principles for making short-range and long-range decisions. As Boyd
benefits audiences, who can choose better what course of action to take on the basis of
strategic information, and it benefits tellers, who earn credit in the social information
exchange and gain in terms of attention and status. That combination of benefits, for the
teller and the told, and the intensity of social monitoring of our species, explain why
narrative has become so central to human life" (176). Though both narrative non-fiction
and fiction help us make better decisions for adaptation, fiction gives, so Boyd believes,
fictional stories and to demonstrate evocriticism as the most "effective" if not most
humane way of enjoying and interpreting literature, Boyd proceeds, in book two, to
devote two hundred pages to Homer's Iliad and Odyssey and Seuss's Horton Hears a
Who!. In both parts Boyd focuses on the narrative strategies that Homer and Seuss
employ in balancing audience benefits against audience costs in time and comprehension,
on how they use natural patterns to draw attention to their characters and plot, and on
how these narratives continue to resonate in our lives today by touching universal
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predisposed human drives for mate selection and mutual cooperation. At the end of his
thoughtful and nuanced interpretations of works purposely chosen because they are
"classics" from different time periods and cultures, Boyd states: "My discussions of
Homer and Dr. Seuss have often drawn on scholarship of a nonevolutionary kind,
such detailed work, and in fact can offer a theoretical justification for employing it more
Certainly, his goals for evocriticism are admirable, but if it were not for the
of the works of Homer and Seuss would not really distinguish themselves from many of
the essays and books of mainstream literary critics and academics who still favor
including the author, history, culture, and universal themes in their analyses. Ironically,
Boyd the theorist exhibits a kind of paranoia when he dismisses so-called "postmodern
theory" altogether. In fact, he is much too much like many other Darwinists, who are
somewhat paranoid when they complain about conditions of literary criticism in the
American academy and the tendencies in the Modern Language Association. In a recent,
and if I may add, superb review of six books that belong to the Darwinian camp, William
Deresiewicz explains that evocritics or literary Darwinists emerged from the intellectual
and institutional cul-de-sac crisis in which proponents of ruling Theory supposedly found
themselves by the beginning of the 1990s. (Whether this is true is a matter of debate, for
there is not one particular thing called "Theory" that dominates the academy, nor has the
interest in many different theories and cultural studies diminished the knowledge and
acumen of students and professors or the pleasure they gain from reading literature and
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dealing with possible readings.) According to Deresiewicz the "Theorists" have denied
rather than human universals. In contrast, Darwinists want to establish a new humanities
thinking. Deresiewicz notes that "Literary Darwinism dates back to the mid-'90s, with the
publication of Joseph Carroll's Evolution and Literary Theory, but the field has picked up
steam of late (and like all things evolutionary psychological, garnered a healthy amount
of media attention). The Literary Animal, with contributions from more than a dozen
scholars, came out in 2005. Last year, Jonathan Gottschall, the field's most prominent
young voice (and energetic propagandist), published two works, The Rape of Troy, a
Darwinian study of Homer, and Literature, Science, and a New Humanities, a blueprint
for disciplinary transformation. Denis Dutton's The Art Instinct, which covers the arts
more generally, came out earlier this year. Dutton, founder of the Arts & Letters Daily
website, is also editor of Philosophy and Literature, which has become the go-to journal
for Darwinian literary scholarship -- no doubt in part because such work is shunned by
pitying, but that doesn't mean it's wrong, and it explains their desire to appeal over the
evocriticism, especially Boyd's work, than some of the more shallow studies suggest.
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Indeed, if we discard the misrepresentation of "Theory" in Boyd's books and some of his
speculative generalizations about human nature, we can begin to reap benefits from his
focus on some observations that Boyd makes about patterns and attention and comment
on how his theoretical reflections might help us understand the deeply rooted relevance
Boyd downplays the significance of language for storytelling and argues that the
dance, and music before language. However, none of these assertions can be proven
because we are not certain when and where language developed. Nor is there a mass of
evidence to support numerous claims about how the brain functioned and people
interacted with one another over thirty thousand years ago. However, it is clear that once
humans developed the ability to speak and use language, they began developing
recognizable signs and words and arranging them in patterns and designs that fostered
greater communication. Boyd states: "Pattern tends to signal regularities in the world
rather than mere chance. . . . Because space teems with regularities from quarks to
quasars and because life builds from the simple to the complex by endless recombination,
we live in a world that swarms with patterns at every level, beside or within or across
from one another. Computers still fare dismally at pattern recognition, but because
predicting what may come next can make life-or-death differences to living things,
organisms -- even unicellular animals, even bacteria and plants -- have evolved to be
pattern extractors, and at least the more intelligent animals, like higher primates and
corvids, decidedly prefer regular symmetrical, or rhythmic patterns. In both space and
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time, in sight and sound, we therefore sense beauty in 'the rule of order over randomness,
Boyd proceeds to discuss how and why we crave patterns and how our curiosity
and cognitive play led us to form all sorts of patterns and designs so that we could better
adapt to our environments.2 Here it seems to me that Boyd is touching on one of the
fundamental ways in which folk tales originated: as linguistic patterns designated to help
us grasp our worlds, to adapt to them, to provide security, and to re-create patterns for
adaptation. Boyd notes that we tend to repeat patterns that make us feel secure. At the
same time, we continue to play with patterns in experiments to change and improve our
environments. Storytelling and other forms of art affect the brain, sharpen cognition and
In one of the most stimulating passages in his book, Boyd makes note of systems
of evolutionary processes built by evolution that are called "Darwin machines" and have
become intrinsic parts of brain function. He maintains that the brain operates very much
like nature by blindly and randomly producing variation. "But without selective retention,
randomness alone could not generate creativity that accumulates in force; as in dreams, a
cascade of new ideas would take and lose shape almost without trace. Art involves not
just private ideas but patterned external forms, sound, surface, shape, story, durable or at
least replicable, like the patterns of melodies and rhymes that make music and verse
memorable and transmissible. Pure imagination, on the other hand, alters unstably and
irretrievably as brain activation spreads. Because art appeals to our cognitive preferences
(121). Boyd then goes on to discuss how the brain tests patterns in a self-monitoring
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process before they are produced in a particular art form such as a tale, and once the art is
in the public domain, it is tested in the minds of other humans. Here is where attention
plays a major role, for if a tale (or some other kind of art work) does not earn attention in
other humans' minds, it dies. If the tale is rewarded with attention, it will be imitated and
serve as a "building block," so to speak, which will last as long as it is relevant for
adaptation. To quote Boyd again, "in a system designed to secure attention, habituation
innovation. Since repeating the same thing over and ever again guarantees it will lose its
impact, art faces a consistent pressure for novelty. Over generations traditions hone their
attention-grabbing power (the symphony, the murder mystery, the computer game), but
new successes raise the bar for still fewer entrants and reward still further novelty" (122).
Boyd might have or should have added the folk tale and fairy tale at this point
when discussing how traditions hone their-attention grabbing power. (One of the reasons
I consider his lack of attention to folk and fairy tales a weakness in his book is that the
short oral tales were linguistically the building blocks for all longer narrative art forms.)
Since he does not do this, I want to add some commentary about his Darwin machine for
those of us interested in folklore and the study of literary fairy tales. Here I want to draw
attention to the minds of western folklorists and scholars who, as soon as they began
collecting and writing about folk tales in the nineteenth century, were drawn to the
regular patterns of tale types that eventually were categorized as genres. Not only did
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm(Germany) stress similarities in motifs in the tales they
collected in the nineteenth century but also Aleksandr Afanas'ev (Russia), Paul Sébillot
and François Marie Luzel (France), Giuseppe Pitrè (Sicily), Marian Cox, Joseph Jacobs,
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Andrew Lang, William Ralston (England), and Thomas Frederick Crane (USA) to name
but a few. As we know the interest in regularities and similarities of tale types flourished
in the twentieth century in the works of Antti Aarne, Stith Thompson, Johannes Bolte,
Georg Polívka, Vladimir Propp, Claude Levi-Strauss, and many others up through the
recent work of Hans-Jörg Uther, who recently revised the Aarne-Thompson The Types of
the Folktale.3 International folklore has relied greatly on this work to identify regularities
and variants of tale types in all parts of the world. The power and resiliency of short oral
folk tales of various kinds ranging from fables, exemplars, animal tales, creation tales, to
wonder tales that have been mediated and transformed through the technology of the
modern world (print, radio, cinema, videotape, DVD, Internet) reflects our craving for
both regular security and experimental novelty. To take just one example, we have tended
to repeat and recreate certain tales like "Beauty and the Beast" (ATU 425C) in regular and
irregular ways for hundreds if not thousands of years because they deal with desire,
attraction/attention, and mate selection, and their patterns enable us to recognize the
complex issues of mate selection, psychological and cultural adaptations, and the
differences in diverse cultures throughout the world. We are drawn and attend to mate
selection and desire among other things through art: that is, we give courting and mating
our attention, and they attract our attention through storytelling, and we tend to shape and
hone beast/bridegroom tales carefully so that they express crucial aspects of human
nature, and some tales become memetic, as I have endeavored to explain in my two
recent books.4 Memetic tales are not eternal, but they are significant because they contain
patterns that enable us to recognize social and natural incidents and configurations
quickly so that we can discuss, reflect, and decide for ourselves how we might want to
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behave and act or react in a given situation. A memetic classical fairy tale will attract our
attention and perhaps ingrain itself in a module of our brains because it pertains to some
aspect of our genetic disposition and helps us (in variant form) to adapt to an evolving
world. Boyd's discussion of how art functions can, I believe, shed more light on why folk
and fairy tales stick in our minds. He writes: "In art as a Darwin machine, works are not
somehow created to fit the cultural environment. Instead they are generated,
unpredictably, in the minds or actions of artists, and selected first by them in accordance
with their intuitions about their social world, and then by this world itself" (123).
Boyd's emphasis is always on humans as agents of their own lives and on the
natural evolution of humans as a species with only but a nod to culture, even though he
says his evocriticism is biocultural. In a recent book, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture
Transformed Human Evolution (2005), Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd maintain that
culture is "information capable of affecting humans' behavior that they acquire from other
members of their species through teaching, imitation, and other forms of social
transmission. By information we mean any kind of mental state, conscious or not, that is
communication, stories similar to wonder tales such as those from the Bible or Koran can
latch on to humans' brains and affect their behavior because the narratives are
institutionally reinforced through the networks of cultural institutions and the culture
industries in different ethnic groups, societies, religions, and nations. In this respect,
stories can hinder as well as help social cognition and adaptation, and the agency of
individuals and the attraction and reception of their art works may not contribute
effectively to a better and more pleasurable adaption for most people. Indeed, certain
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stories have evolved and seem to have taken on a power of their own, but to explain how
all this has occurred, it might be more effective to turn to evolutionary psychology that
considers the epidemiological aspects of story along with critical theory and its critique
of culture than to evocriticism that ignores the politics of social relations and the
Here it is important to note briefly that there is already a good deal of work
neglected by Boyd that has been undertaken to explain the origins and dissemination of
tales as well the evolution of culture and the nature of cultural replication. I have
mentioned Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd's book, and I would also recommend some
of the essays and books by Luigi Luca Cavalli Sforza, Dan Sperber, Nicolas Claidière,
Nick Enfield, Stephen Levinson, Christophe Heintz, and Michael Tomasello,6 to name
only a few of the scholars working actively in this productive field. In addition there are
important centers and institutes that are sponsoring research in Darwinism, evolutionary
psychology/anthropology, and culture: the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity
at University College London; the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris, sponsored by the École
Normale Supérieure, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and the London
School of Economics, which maintain a website called the International Cognition and
Culture Institute; and the Project Biocultures directed by Lennard Davis at the University
of Illinois in Chicago.
At the 2007 Modern Language Association meeting, there was a special session
biocultural approach to literature" and claimed "an ineluctable relation between science
and culture. Biology, for example, is as intrinsic to the embodied state of readers and
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writers as history and culture are intrinsic to the professional bodies of knowledge known
as science and biology. To think of science without including a historical and cultural
analysis would be like thinking of the literary text without the surrounding weave of
active or dormant knowledges. . . the biological without the cultural, or the cultural
without the biological, is doomed to be reductionist at best and inaccurate at worst."7 This
and an associate at the Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, would agree, and at
the recent British Science Festival, he presented a paper with the title "Fairy Tales &
Red Riding Hood" may be 2,600 years old. "Over time," he said, "these folk tales have
been subtly changed and have evolved just like a biological organism. Because many of
them were not written down until much later, they have been misremembered or
reinvented through hundreds of generations. By looking at how these folk tales have
spread and changed it tells us something about human psychology and what sort of things
we find memorable."8
Perhaps, if Brian Boyd had done more research on folk and fairy tales and had
explored much more of the projects connected to evolutionary psychology, biology, and
culture, he might have been less paranoid and grounded his theses about the origins of
stories in more credible and concrete historical evidence that can be found in cultural
materials. As it is, his book is still worth attention and provides theory for thought.
Jack Zipes
University of Minnesota
1
William Deresiewicz, "Adaptation," The Nation (June 8, 2009): 27.
2
For more about patterns and their significance, see Stephen Shennan, ed., Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009).
3
See Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, 3 vols., Ff Communications
No. 284 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2004).
4
See Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre (New York: Routledge, 2006) and Relentless
Progress: The Reconfiguration of Children's Literature, Fairy Tales, and Storytelling (New York: Routledge, 2009).
5
Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Nature (Chicago: University of
Chicago press, 2005): 5-6.
6
For a small selection of works by these scholars, see Luigi Cavalli Sforza, L'evoluzione della cultura (Turin: Codice, 2004);
Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (London: Blackwell, 1996); Dan Sperber and Nicolas Claidière,
"Why Modeling Cultural Evolution Is Still Such a Challenge," Biological Theory 1 (2006): 20-22; Nick Enfield and
Stephen Levinson, eds., Roots of Sociality (London: Berg, 2006); Christophe Heintz, "Institutions as Mechanisms of
Cultural Evolution : Prospects of the Epidemiological Approach," Biological Theory 2: 3 (2007): 244-249; Michael
Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1999). These works are
just the tip of the iceberg. See their websites for further information.
7
Lennard Davis, "From Culture to Biocultures," PMLA 124.3 (May 2009): 949. All the other papers presented in the 2007
session are also published in this issue of the PMLA: 947-56.
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