Mr. Darcy Meets Mr. Darwin; There Are No Survivors

Nick Gillespie | November 9, 2005

Two recent stories--one in the Boston Globe and one in the NY Times--explore a possibly burgeoning school of lit crit that draws its inspiration from evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and the like.

Move over Edmund Wilson, you fat, bloated, Lenin-lovin', tax-hatin' wife beater (and semi-son of Red Bank, NJ, home also to Count Basie and a failed nightclub owned by Clarence Clemons)! There's a new Wilson in American letters--E.O. Wilson, and he's got more inclusive fitness in one pinky than Bunny did in his whole body.

The stories are here and here. Both deal with a new anthology dedicated to bio-criticism and both are interesting. And both pooh-pooh the prospects of the bio-crit school they report on. As literary grand poobah Frederick Crews tells the Globe: ''My hunch is that the vein of evolutionary ore to be mined in literary study will prove to be rather thin.'' And he's a booster of sorts of this stuff. With that sort of attitude, it's a wonder man hisself has survived the age of pedal-powered, timber-sided automobiles. Go figure.

And if you're interested in this sort of thing, let me point out that Reason was on this beat years ago, climbing out of the water like some sort of precocious half-frog, half-snake with a tale titled "Darwin and Dickens: A new breed of literary crtitics is using evolution to explain literature--and to challenge intellectual orthodoxy."

And while Crews may be right about the long-term prospects of this stuff, there's no doubt that Joe Carroll's Evolution and Literary Theory, Bob Storey's Mimesis and the Human Animal, and anything by Ellen Dissanayake (to name a few works by early practitioners) are damn scintillating works of literary and cultural criticism.

When someone can tell me how Darwin can explain Herman Melville's Clarel, reported to be the longest poem in the English language by the one person who read past the first 100 lines and not uncoincidentally the most boring, then I'll become a true believer. Though to be fair, this goddamned pram will make a monkey out of Intelligent Design lunkheads too.

Comments

|11.9.05 @ 9:09PM|#

I have no real comment, but I'm pumped. Maybe it was the timber-sided automobile.
I bet they burn real good.
Nick has incited my mangy Surrender Monkey ass!

|11.9.05 @ 9:40PM|#

Off topic, but somewhat tangentially so:

The Society for Neuroscience is holding it's annual conference in DC this year. If 25,000 neurogeeks aren't enough to tempt you there, how about the Dalai Lama. His invitation to talk at the conference on the the subject of the physiology of meditation has given fits to both China apologists and hardcore atheists alike (note: not mutually exclusive groups). And of course, PETA is gearing up for some lame ass protests. Things kick off Saturday night and run all day Sunday thru Wednesday at the DC convention center and other satellite locales.

Evolutionary psychology, stem cell research, behavior modification, much of it done on the public's dime. What's not to love?

www.sfn.org

|11.9.05 @ 10:07PM|#

*Off Topic*
"Amendment Banning Gay Marriage Passes Senate Subcommittee"
Access to the article is on http://www.cspanschoolbus.org/

Direct link to the article: http://www.kansas.com//mld/kansas/news/state/13125336.htm

Does anybody have any predictions on the outcome?

|11.9.05 @ 10:33PM|#

ON topic, the contemporary reviews of Clarel on the linked page are hilarious. One wonders whether it might not be simpler to bypass the creation of long, dreary literary works and simply write the criticisms without troubling the author or wasting the reviewer's time, as the reviews are often far more entertaining. "Dear New York Times Book Review, I was going to write this literary novel but I expect no one would read it; so I dropped the project and instead wrote a (perhaps unnecessarily harsh) criticism of said unwritten novel, which I offer to you for publication..."

|11.9.05 @ 10:59PM|#

criticism of said unwritten novel

Heh, actually not far from tricks Borges would play.

The Wine Commonsewer|11.9.05 @ 11:14PM|#

"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true."--Robert Wilensky

I rest my case.

|11.10.05 @ 8:52AM|#

Hells yeah Red Bank. Jersey represent. Snoogans.

|11.10.05 @ 8:53AM|#

"A new breed of literary crtitics is using evolution to explain literature--and to challenge intellectual orthodoxy."

Should this new breed really be called critics? Aren't they just mining literature or using it as a new data base?

|11.10.05 @ 10:55AM|#

What's intriguing about evolutionary theory is how little, rather than how much, human and "literary" behavior it explains. Applying evolutionary theory to Hamlet raises any number of questions. Why is Hamlet, who's 30 when the play begins, still single and childless? He could have had 15 kids if he'd applied himself. Why don't Polonius and Laertes force Ophelia to marry and start pumping out the babies, instead of lecturing her on "chastity"? Why did Claudius murder "old Hamlet" and plot to murder the young one? By his actions he's eliminating his own gene pool. And why is Hamlet fascinated by suicide? Where's the evolutionary payoff in that? Darwinist literary theory is lazy cherry-picking--easier to read than other forms of lit crit, but no more profound.

|11.10.05 @ 9:59PM|#

Alan,

First of all, evolutionary theory predicts what behaviors are most fit and will become more common. When an individual has a fit behavior, evolution explains it nicely. However, every human has a few unfit behaviors, because his genes are a random mix. There are plenty of less fit genes that haven't been weeded out yet, because the weeding process takes so long. So, when you look at one individual's behavior, sometimes he does something stupid because he is stupid. That said, I'll try to answer your questions.

Why is Hamlet still childless? Delayed reproduction allows a human to focus on acquiring resources and social status so in the long run he can have more children and grandchildren, once he starts reproducing. Delayed childbearing is correlated with more wealth, and more wealth is correlated with having more surviving grandkids. This theory sounds good, but I'm only 90% convinced of it. I would like to see someone actually count the grandkids of people who use the two strategies. Hamlet could put all his effort into becoming king. He can bid his time, because he doesn't have to worry about menopause. Then when he is king, he can inseminate dozens of women, because doesn't have to wait 9 months after conception to conceive again.

Why do Polonius and Laertes lecture Ophelia on chastity? Female humans tend to be more sexually reserved for three reasons. They put a bigger investment in each child, so they need to make sure every mating is with the best possible male. They also risk contracting STD's and parasites with every intercourse and risk death with every birth. Finally, before the industrial revolution, a child would most likely die if it didn't get support from two parents. Conceiving a child without commitment from the father (ie marriage) would be pointless and even risky.

Why did Claudius murder old Hamlet. Inclusive fitness is the number of copies on your genes that you perpetuate. The more copies that are out there, the more fit your genes, and the more your genes will spread. Claudius shared 1/2 of his genes with his brother and 1/4 of his genes with his nephew. That means killing them lost him 3/4 of a copy. He will share 1/2 of his genes with each of his children. If killing Hamlet Sr. and Jr. allows him to be king, he can use that new title to help him sire more kids. If he has an extra 2 kids because of his title, he will gain 1 copy. That means his strategy gives him a net gain of 1/4 copies.

Why is Hamlet fascinated by suicide? There are lots of reasons people commit suicide, some of them are just plain maladaptive. In Hamlet's case, the byproduct hypothesis fits. A single genetic change can cause multiple physical or behavioral changes. Some of them are beneficial, some are deleterious, and some are neutral. The net effect of these changes will determine the fitness of the genetic change. When one change is very beneficial, neutral and deleterious side effects can tag along, because the net effect is still good. Hamlet was obsessed with getting justice. This is a beneficial trait, because it keeps others from attacking him in the future. The suicidal thoughts resulted from his frustration over not getting justice. They are a deleterious side effect. He didn't actually commit suicide, so they weren't that harmful.

Hamlet's obsession did lead to his death. He could have just left the country and sired a couple of kids instead of dying with 0 offspring. Again, sometimes and individual just has a less fit trait.

Of course, this is arm-chair biology, just some guy applying theories without testing them with real data. It is a good starting point and suggests what data we should look at, but take it with a large grain of salt.

|11.10.05 @ 11:32PM|#

I just read both articles. Alan, I've got to agree that Darwinist literary theory is no more profound than other literary criticisms. It has some value, in that it explains characters' actions by examining the universal human condition, a perspective that is lost on critics who obsess over race, gender, ect. However, it can't prove anything about the universal human condition, because the characters' actions are still fiction. They are what an author thinks people do, not necessarily what real people are doing.