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Spandrel
Are stories just pastimes, or have they been important in human evolution? Are they frills, or are they like eyes and hands, useful adaptations that have contributed to the survival of our species? Literary Darwinism is a new movement in which it is argued that stories are adaptations.
Here is the argument. Liking for stories and an ability to understand them seem to be human universals. Therefore stories may have been adaptations that have been important in our evolution. Is this true? It's an interesting question, because the ability to create and understand stories may not have been selected for itself. It may be a by-product of some other language-based trait that really has been useful. So stories would, then, just be frills. They would not be adaptations but what evolutionary theorists call spandrels. The term is an architectural one; it means a space between arches. Arches themselves are useful to bear the load of a roof and to make openings in a wall. The spaces that occur in a row of arches--spandrels--are not themselves useful. They occur because of the shape of the useful arches. The idea of stories as spandrels corresponds with what psychologists used to think about fiction: that compared with the careful methods of psychology, it isn't serious.
Among the literary Darwinists who argue for the adaptation view--the idea that stories exist because they have had functions for our survival in evolution--is Brian Boyd, who proposed in his book The origin of stories (reviewed in this blog on 19 August 2010, click here) that stories and our urge to engage in them arose originally from the human propensity for play, which is another adaptation, and which has led to a fascination with pattern. For instance, Boyd says, dolphins can be seen playing with patterns of bubbles they make in the water. Stories, he continues, are patterns of experience. The recognition of patterns has been useful in our evolution, and continues to be useful, because it enables us to understand, and to practice the creation of, regularities in our world, particularly our social world.
Previously in this blog (click here) I have mentioned my theory that stories are simulations, models of the social world. This theory is that, just as spending time in a flight-simulator is useful if you are learning to fly a plane, so stories are useful for empathizing with other people in the social world and understanding what they are thinking and feeling. This is an ability that psychologists call theory-of-mind, or mentalizing, or mind-reading. I give a fuller version of the simulation theory, and evidence for it, in my recent book, Such stuff as dreams: The psychology of fiction; which you can read a bit more about in the blog www.onfiction.ca run by our research group (click here).
If the theory is true, and if our evidence holds, the idea that stories are simulations within which we can come to understand more about others would indeed be a useful adaptation in our hyper-social species. We couldn't be as social as we are without having theories of other minds.
Brian Boyd (2009). On the origin of stories. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Keith Oatley (2011). Such stuff as dreams: The psychology of fiction. Oxford: Wiley.
