1

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. By Brian Boyd.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. xii + 540pp.

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

for the propagation of evolutionary psychological principles to grasp our natural

inclination for narrative. Though he proclaims to be scientific and tolerant of other

approaches to art and literature, a promoter of E. O. Wilson's consilience theory, he

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

command our attention.

Though disturbed by many of the inadequacies and contradictions of Boyd's book,

I would like to sort out some of his more valid ideas about evolutionary psychology and
 2

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,
 3

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
 4

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

us to become novel, produce variations of patterns, and explore possibilities.

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

states; "narrative arises from the advantages of communication in social species. It

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,

us an additional advantage because it allows our minds to contemplate possibilities that

are not present but might be realized in the future.

To demonstrate the relevance of the individual author as the essential producer of

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
 5

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,

historical, cultural, biographical, and bibliographical. Evocriticism should not exclude

such detailed work, and in fact can offer a theoretical justification for employing it more

secure than Theory's rejections of the individual and particular" (390).

Certainly, his goals for evocriticism are admirable, but if it were not for the

innovative theoretical elaboration of Darwinian notions of evolution, Boyd's discussions

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
 6

dealing with possible readings.) According to Deresiewicz the "Theorists" have denied

the possibility of objective knowledge and insisted on focusing on cultural differences

rather than human universals. In contrast, Darwinists want to establish a new humanities

based on scientific, empirical, and quantitative principles and founded on evolutionary

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

mainstream academic publications. (The tendency among literary Darwinists to cast

themselves as an embattled minority may be self-dramatizing, not to mention self-

pitying, but that doesn't mean it's wrong, and it explains their desire to appeal over the

heads of the gatekeepers to the popular press.)."1

Though I think it is an exaggeration to say that Darwinists have been shunned by

mainstream academic publications and have been treated unjustly by academia,

Deresiewicz's article as a whole is important because he proposes that there is more to

evocriticism, especially Boyd's work, than some of the more shallow studies suggest.
 7

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

evolutionary psychological and anthropological approach to stories. Here I would like to

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

of folk and fairy tales.

Boyd downplays the significance of language for storytelling and argues that the

human species intuitively developed narrative representations through cave paintings,

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
 8

time, in sight and sound, we therefore sense beauty in 'the rule of order over randomness,

of pattern over chaos'"(87-88).

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

sensitivity, and foster new neuron connections leading to greater creativity.

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

for pattern, it is self-motivating: we carry innate incentives to engage in artistic activity"

(121). Boyd then goes on to discuss how the brain tests patterns in a self-monitoring
 9

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

(the loss of attention through the persistence or repetition of a stimulus) encourages

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,
 10

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
 11

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

acquired or modified by social learning and affects behavior."5 As modes of cultural

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
 12

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

powerful institutions that affect our Darwin machines.

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

on "Biocultures: An Emerging Paradigm," and in his paper, Davis advocated "a

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
 13

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

is a position with which Jamie Tehrani, a professor anthropology at Durham University

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 &

Chinese Whispers: A Darwinian Approach to Folktales," in which he claimed that "Little

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.
8

See Richard Gray, "Fairy Tales Have Ancient Origin," http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6142964/Fairy

Tales