The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology has penetrated many disciplines, and space limitations unfortunately precluded inclusion of all of them. Asthese words are written , there are rapidly emerging new hybrid disciplines, such as evolutionary In the final analysis, all human behavior-including economic behavior, legal behavior, artistic behavior , and organizational behavior-is a product of evolved psychological mechanisms. I predict that in the not too distant future, all of these diverse and seemingly unrelated fields will be based on a new evolutionary foundation. D ARwINIAN LITERARY STUDY has emerged only in the past 15 years or so, and its practitioners still constitute a relatively small community on the margins of the academic literary establishment. That establishment is oriented to postmodern beliefs and thus repudiates the ideas both of human nature and of objective scientific knowledge. Darwinian literary critics embrace the notion of consilience, affirm the cogency of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and assimilate the findings of Darwinian social science. They would agree with E. O. Wilson (1998) that the world constitutes a unified causal order and that knowledge itself forms an integrated field that encompasses the physical sciences, the social sciences , and the humanities. They affirm that human mental and cultural activity is constrained by the principles that regulate all biological activity, life has evolved through an adaptive process by means of natural selection, and all complex functional structure in living things has been produced by adaptation. They argue that the adapted mind produces literature and that literature reflects the structure and character of the adapted mind. To distinguish this kind of literary study from other schools that are in some way associated with "evolutionary" thinking, I refer to it as adaptationist or Darwinian literary study. Adaptationist literary study makes use of a variety of concepts common in other approaches to literary study-eoncepts such as point of view, realism and symbolism, character/setting/plot, thematic structure, tone, and formal organization. Adaptationist critics locate all of these concepts in relation to a structured account of human nature, and they derive that account from Darwinian social science. The Human Nature and Literary Meaning: A Model section outlines the concept of human nature that is now emerging from Darwinian social science and integrates the standard concepts of literary analysis with that model. ilef8P@, entering-intQ that expQsitiQn; I prQvide SQIHe baekgrQ1:ina ana eOfltext fOI adapta tiol'1ist literary sh:l:dy, outliniflg the Blain histolical HtO\r.ements in liletalY lhem, .over the past 150 …