Human Evolution as Narrative

Have hero myths and folktales influenced our interpretations of the evolutionary past? Scientists are generally aware of the influence of theory on observation. Seldom do they recognize, however, that many scientific theories are essentially narratives. The growth of a plant, the progress of a disease, the formation of a beach, the evolution of an organism – any set of events that can be arranged in a sequence and related can also be narrated. This is true even of a scientific experiment. Indeed, many laboratory reports, with their sections labeled " methods, " "results," and " conclusions, " bear at least a superficial resemblance to a typical narrative, that is, an organized sequence of events with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Whether or not scientists follow such a narrative structure in their work, they do not often recognize the extent to which they use narrative in their thinking and in communicating their ideas. Consequently, they may be unaware of the narrative presuppositions which inform their science. Students of literature, on the other hand, are so conscious of narrative that some have argued it is storytelling which makes us human. As the poet Matthew Arnold declared in his famous debate with Thomas Henry Huxley, even man's remote ancestor, "the hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits ...carried hidden in his nature something destined to develop into a necessity for humane letters" (Huxley 1963, p. 2). E. M. Forster, the novelist and essayist, located the origin of narrative in the Paleolithic: "Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull. The primitive audience was an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the campfire, fatigued with contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only kept awake by suspense. What would happen next?" (Forster 1954, p. 26). Depicting Neanderthals as gaping shock-heads may appear gauche scientifically, and yet in tracing storytelling to the very roots of human history Forster anticipates one of the latest trends in scholarship in the humanities. So popular is this recent focus on narrative – not only in literary criticism but also in linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, and history – that the French have coined a term for it: "la narratologie." The central claim of narratology is simply that human beings love to tell stories. "Our need for chronological and causal connection defines and limits all …