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1Brian Boyd
Philosophy and Literature, © 2005, 29: 1–23
Brian Boyd
LITERATURE AND EVOLUTION:
A BIO-CULTURAL APPROACH
Many now feel that the “theory” that has dominated academic
literary studies over the last thirty years or so is dead, and that it
is time for a return to texts.1 But many more outside literary studies—in
fields as diverse as anthropology, economics, law, psychology, and
religion—have recently come to recognize that the deep past that
shaped our species can help to explain our present and recent past.
Since a bio-cultural model of the human can only be richer than a
solely cultural model, and since it implies neither genetic determinism
nor limitation to the status quo, I want to argue for a bio-cultural or
evolutionary approach to literature, first in very general terms, and
then through a few aspects of a single familiar example, Hamlet.2 Such
an approach, I suggest, can offer both a more comprehensive theory of
literature and a closer investigation of literary texts.
I
Traditional views of literature tended to see it as reflecting nature,
especially human nature, all the way from Plato’s discomfort with, or
Aristotle’s admiration for, mimesis to Shakespeare’s or Stendhal’s
images of art as holding the mirror up to nature. Common-sense
traditional views of art and literature have easily shaded into transcen-
dental views, widespread because religious beliefs have been so perva-
sive and because both artists and their patrons in state or church
benefit by nurturing a sense of awe at art’s putatively divine origins and
power.
In the twentieth century, first in sociology, anthropology, and even
2Philosophy and Literature
psychology, then by the 1960s in the combination of these with
Saussurean linguistics that produced structuralism and its aftershocks,
and therefore impacted on literature, there has been a rejection of
human nature as a given and a stress on human nature as the product
only of culture and convention. “Theory,” or what the Norton Anthology
of Theory and Criticism more pointedly calls cultural critique, rightly
critiques traditional common-sense and transcendental views of art,
pointing out that the nature, human nature, or supernature that art or
literature was supposed to reflect was merely what was assumed of these
things from within a local cultural perspective.3 Roland Barthes, for
example, criticized “the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois
culture into a universal nature.”4 Modern Theory also rejects the
individual as another bourgeois or capitalist or Western notion, as when
Fredric Jameson echoed Barthes’s Death of the Author by announcing
the Death of the Subject.5 Criticism since the 1960s “has denied, on
theoretical grounds, the relevance of the single historically definable
author.”6
However, as many have lately realized, there are problematic ethical
consequences of both the denial of human nature and the denial of the
individual. After such denials, on what basis do we then claim equal
rights for all humans, and on what basis do we assign responsibility for
particular actions?7 If there is no “single historically definable author,”
does that mean that someone penning a racist screed cannot be held
accountable?
A critique of unquestioned Western assumptions about human
nature was needed, but the post-1960s critique was shortsighted: it has
not looked nearly far enough. While structuralism and its more or less
rebellious offspring were continuing the lineage of early twentieth-
century social sciences, the natural sciences were moving in the
opposite direction, towards the first comprehensive scientific attempt
to understand human nature in the context of evolution and human,
animal, and artificial cognition and behavior.
In the humanities there has of late been widespread skepticism about
science. Some postmodernists have what they deem “a sophisticated
appreciation of the futility of proof and the relativity of all knowledge
claims.” But, as Daniel Dennett comments, “this opinion, far from
being sophisticated, is the height of sheltered naïveté, made possible
only by . . . ignorance of the proven methods of scientific truth-seeking
and their power.”8 Science does not generate only true answers: ideas
proposed within it can of course be constrained by individual, cultural
3Brian Boyd
or species-wide interests or limitations. But science has found ways far
more searching and rigorous than any other form of inquiry to
eliminate false answers, so that as it continues it becomes far less bound
by such limitations than any other form of human knowledge.
There is also a widespread fear among many who have not actually
read the evolutionary literature that it implies biological determinism.
It does not. Genes do not constrain; they enable. They do not dictate
“always do this”;9 even in organisms without minds, even in single-celled
organisms, they build in a set of if-then rules sensitive to context: if
condition A, then respond with A⬘, or if A and B then (A+ B)⬘, and so
on. All the more so in creatures with even simple minds, let alone with
intelligence. Without genes, flexibility of behavior, culture and learning
would all be impossible. And by knowing what “if”-conditions produce
what “then”-outcomes, we can look for ways to institute the conditions
likeliest to lead to the outcomes we prefer.10
The aims of Theory’s critique of knowledge can actually be achieved
far more readily through a bio-cultural approach, in ways that can be
tested and advanced through the methods of science, in ways that can,
therefore, rejoin the mainstream of human knowledge. (And as Lorraine
Danson comments, “the need to deprovincialize the humanities has
never been more acute.”)11 An evolutionary view is revolutionary, in
that it rejects the taken-for-granted, the apparently (locally) true
assumptions about human nature; it adopts a larger, more comprehen-
sive vision; it makes possible genuine and valid interdisciplinarity,
through a connected, coherent, cumulative, and relentlessly self-critical
body of knowledge, and not the kind of interdisciplinarity that is just a
dilettantish smorgasbord (a dash of chaos theory or quantum physics
here or Lacanian pseudo-psychology there); and it historicizes, it
provides a genuine historical vision, that takes into account both
immediate and long-term causal factors.
A bio-cultural view offers a richer model of human nature, tested
cross-culturally from hunter-gatherers to modern industrialized societies;
tested comparatively, across species, within and beyond the primate and
the mammalian lines; tested in real historical depth, rather than shallowly,
over the millions of years that shaped the human mind and that
account for the similarities between people of very different cultures;
and tested in the neurophysiological terms that are now becoming
available through brain imaging technology.
Vision can serve as a shorthand example to explain why what seems
to be the common-sense view of human nature fails, but why the
4Philosophy and Literature
rejection of that view in terms of cultural constructivism also fails. In
everyday experience the mind seems transparent, something we can
understand just by looking into ourselves; it seems all of a piece,
seamless, putting us into direct touch with reality, when in fact it has
many built-in subroutines that we are not aware of because they deliver
results to us so fast and automatically. In vision, for instance, we look
out and just naturally see a world of space and objects and our place in
it; our eyes seem to offer immediate access to the world.
But the constructivist critiques that, saying: “What we see is what we,
through cultural experience, have learnt to see.”12 Since some peoples
have only two words for color (the equivalent of light and dark or white
and black), and since most cultures did not develop either Alberti’s
linear perspective or Leonardo’s synthetic perspective, color and per-
spective, for instance, are seen as arbitrary and conventional.13 In the
mid-twentieth century, tribesmen who had not previously been exposed
to Western culture were widely said to be unable to recognize photo-
graphs because of the conventional elements in them, a typically
insulting and offensive consequence of the denial of human nature.14
In fact even pigeons can read photographs, and can rapidly recognize
human individuals from photographs.
Whatever their language, people in fact see the same way, agree on
the same colors as central to particular hues, and so on.15 But vision
does not transfer all the space, shape, surface, and color that is out
there into the mind in any immediate or transparent way, nor is human
vision finer, as humans had often smugly assumed, than many other
kinds. It was supposed for a long time that we were unique in having
color vision; in fact we cannot see ultraviolet light as bees do, infrared
light as pit vipers do, colors at night as some moths do, polarized light
as many birds, insects, and even plants can; we have trichromatic vision,
which is better than the dichromatic of many species, but pigeons have
tetrachromatic vision. But although human vision misses out on much
potential visual information, it effortlessly does far more than we are
aware of, unconsciously integrating some fifty different brain areas to
make complex, real-time sense of visual input. There are specialized
cells that respond to edges, or to speed of movement, or to direction of
movement, or to animate but not inanimate movement; even cells that
respond not just only to human faces but only to faces at a particular
angle, or to a particular face that they then give an automatic emotional
weighting to through the amygdala. We have different day and night
5Brian Boyd
visual systems, different where and what visual systems, different uncon-
scious early-warning visual systems and conscious visual systems.
Just as in so many other aspects of the human mind and human
nature, like our social cognition and social emotions, we are quite
wrong to suppose that we know what we see, think or are, either through
immediate introspection or through the mediation of local culture.
Nature has built far more into vision and into the mind in general than
we can know without science, and it has done so in ways that are the
same in normal human minds of whatever ethnic or cultural origin.
II
It is possible to accept that humans evolved ultimately from single-
celled organisms and recently from hominids that share a common
recent ancestry with chimpanzees, and yet to think, what bearing does
that have on us now, when we are so modified by culture? Over the last
century many have argued that culture separates humans from biology.
But over the last twenty years culture has been discovered in many
animal species: behavior that is transmitted non-genetically, and that is
subject to learning, to divergent local traditions, to innovation and even to
fashion. And it is always the biology of these species that makes their
culture possible.16 Yet many will wonder: even if we accept evolution as
a distant background, how can it affect what we deal with here in the
foreground, how can it affect our reading, interpreting, evaluating,
commenting on particular works? Let me address this concern.
First, of course, this is not the only thing that literary studies should
involve; they should also include an understanding of literature as a
whole, of literature in relation to other arts and other human behavior;
an understanding of its origins. An evolutionary approach can offer a
literary theory that is both theoretical and empirical, that proposes
hypotheses against the full range of what we know of human and other
behavior, and tests them.
Second, a bio-cultural approach can provide a comprehensive ex-
planatory model that does not judge literature by the standards only of
recent, Western, high, literature. Instead it looks at the impulse to story,
image and verbal pattern throughout cultures and epochs and classes.
Third, a bio-cultural approach to literature can be richly multileveled:
(i) It begins with the universal, across the species, and with the
human in context of other species.
6Philosophy and Literature
(ii) But like all biology, it does not ignore the local, the particular
“ecological” conditions: in the human case, the material and cultural
conditions of a particular time and place, the historical context. (A
superb recent demonstration of the power of combining the univer-
sal—including cross-species comparisons—and the culturally local is
Jon Gottschall’s “An Evolutionary Perspective on Homer’s Invisible
Daughters.”)17
(iii) Nor does it ignore the individual, as much of Theory, since the
announcement of the “death of the author,” tries or professes to do,
using the rhetorical strategy of referring not to authors but to texts or
circulations of social energy or systems of cultural production.18 In fact
even if they have nominally challenged the idea of the single historically
defined author, most critics have continued to discuss single historically
definable authors in articles they would be indignant not to have
attributed to their own single historically defined selves. We find
individuality too important in ourselves, in others, and in authors, to
live without it; we are not slime molds or termites. Individuality is not a
late Western invention, but a biological fact; and without individual
variation, evolution would never have begun. Jane Goodall once
reported a respected fellow scientist telling her that even if she was
discovering individuality in chimpanzees, it might be better to sweep
such knowledge under the carpet.19 But why? She certainly was not
imposing individuality on chimpanzees because of her own Western
assumptions; in fact it was Japanese primatologists who first (apart from
the chimpanzees themselves, of course) treated and heeded chimpan-
zees as individuals. The individuality of authors is no more a product of
the West, the Enlightenment or the bourgeoisie than is the individuality
of apes, and has no more reason to be hushed up.
(iv) Beyond the level of the individual, there is an even more precise
level of explanation. Biology studies behavior at the species level, within
local ecologies, and in terms of individual variations, but it also
considers animals as responding strategically and flexibly to particular
situations. Authors or artists can be considered in the same way: as
responding strategically and flexibly to the problem situations they
place themselves in as they undertake to compose particular artistic
works.
Fourth, an evolutionary approach can explain the human behavior that
is represented in literature in a way that is deeper than the writers
themselves were usually aware of, deeper than either a common-sense
view of human nature or local, culture-bound systems of explanation.
7Brian Boyd
Through theory, observation and experiment, through developmental,
multicultural and cross-species comparisons of naturally-observed or
experimentally-controlled behavior or abstract computer simulations,
and through clinical and cognitive neuropsychology, evolution has
explained in many ways the tensions between cooperation and compe-
tition in human and all individualized social life, or key concerns like
mate choice or parent-child conflict, or the emotions that accompany
social life, like gratitude, shame, and indignation.20 And a bio-cultural
approach can ensure that explanations do not occur at the wrong level,
that attitudes to, for instance, race or sex at a particular time and place
are explained not simply by local culture (not that that will not be part
of the explanation) but also in terms of factors that are common
elsewhere, in humans or other animals, in similar behavioral or
ecological circumstances.21
Fifth, a bio-cultural approach to literature can provide tools for
analyzing the composition of and the response to individual works.
Evolutionary biology uses sophisticated cost-benefit analysis to explain
observed behavior. We can see an author as a problem-solver with
individual capacities and preferences making strategic choices within a
particular situation, by shaping different kinds of appeals to the
cognitive preferences and expectations of an audience—preferences
and expectations shaped both at a species-wide and a local level—and
balancing the costs against the benefits of authorial effort in composi-
tion and audience effort in comprehension and response.
Sixth, an evolutionary approach can also explain why interpretation is
open-ended, but not endlessly so; why meaning is underspecified, and
yet for the most part readily accessible, because of the common
background we share both at the species level—the common kinds of
inference we make in different cognitive domains—and at various local
levels.22
Seventh, a bio-cultural approach can also explain literary and artistic
evaluation, its partial convergence and partial variability, in terms of the
large number of cognitive preferences and expectations we have,
species-wide, locally-tuned, and individually variable; the trade-offs of
the cognitive costs and benefits of one preference against another; and
the consequences of the strategic choices authors have to make in
aiming for different kinds of attention and response and therefore
different kinds of audience.
I cannot address all these aspects of an evolutionary approach to
literature in any detail within a single essay, but let me touch on a few.
8Philosophy and Literature
An evolutionary analysis allows us to ask why a certain aspect of life is
the way it is. Why for instance do we engage in literature and other arts?
Why and how are our minds shaped so as to produce, attend to,
comprehend and feel moved by art? And how does high literature
relate to popular literature, folk literature, pre-literate storytelling and
verse, and casual conversation?
III
Let me offer a rough definition of art in general: Art is the attempt to
engage attention by transforming objects and/or actions to appeal to species-wide
cognitive preferences for the sake of the response this evokes. The more the appeal
is purely to such preferences and responses, and the more it operates within some
tradition of appealing to (and hence elaborating and refining) them, and the
more successful is the attempt to engage attention and arouse response, the more
centrally it will be art.
To explain art we have to attend to attention. Art dies without
attention, and shared attention plays a special role in human lives from
infancy onwards. All organisms must attend to the opportunities and
threats that matter to them, as far as their minds and senses allow. But
something peculiar happened to attention in humans.23
In chimpanzees and bonobos, the color contrast in the eye between
sclera and iris is greater than in other apes and monkeys, and in
humans, the contrast still greater, a sign that the ability to monitor the
direction of others’ attention has mattered more to humans than even
to our nearest relatives. Monkey babies lack the stimulus tools to
capture and hold their mothers’ attention. Chimpanzee mothers rarely
gaze at their babies or communicate with them, though they will
respond when babies initiate play by biting, and will tickle and laugh in
tender reply. But human mothers and infants attend to one another
from the first. Infants’ eyes after birth can focus only about eight inches
away, roughly the distance between the mother’s breast and her face,
and unlike infants in other species they maintain eye contact while
suckling. Human newborns preferentially attend to faces, and under
laboratory conditions have been shown to be capable of imitating other
humans, but not animated models, within an hour of birth.
So it continues. For the first six months, infants have a love affair with
human faces, voices, and touch. By about eight months, parent-infant
“protoconversations” set the scene for the special nature of human
sociality and for art: multimedia performances using eyes and faces,
9Brian Boyd
hands and feet, voice and movement, in rhythmic finely-attuned turn-
taking and mutual imitation, involving elaboration, exaggeration, rep-
etition and surprise, with each partner anticipating the other’s response
so as to coordinate their emotions in patterned sequence. And so on,
through a unique series of developments.
Beyond infancy, human attention has many unique features. It leads
to language, and the capacity to pinpoint attention even to the extent
of directing others to something absent and perhaps unreal, impos-
sible, or unprecedented. Out of the early features of human attention,
especially the capacity for shared attention, we develop a full theory of
mind, a capacity that by the fifth year allows children to appreciate what
others can infer from their situation, and blooms into an ability to
understand multiple-order intentionality, to conceive what A thinks of
B’s thoughts of C’s thoughts of D’s, and so allows for the rich
comprehension of social situations and the rich production and
comprehension of story.24
All intelligent animals can focus on the immediate present, expecta-
tions of the immediate future, and perhaps some recollections of their
personal past. But we alone, because of our special capacity to share
and sharpen attention, can focus our minds together on particular
events of the past, as experienced or witnessed by ourselves or others,
living or dead, on possibilities and impossibilities, on events hypotheti-
cal, counterfactual, and fictional. Most animals cannot afford not to
attend to their immediate environment and cannot easily reason
beyond it. But the human capacity to think beyond the immediate
allows us an extraordinary power to test ideas and to turn them through
the vast space of possibility.
Evolution could not build into even an intelligent animal either an
organ of truth, to soak up easily from the bedrock of fact what science
has to probe and dig for so painstakingly, or an organ of useful design,
to generate ever-better technologies. It has no foresight, it can select
only on the basis of current variation, and it can construct cognition
only using input from each species’ immediate environment. But by
slowly expanding the human capacity for sharing attention, and by
making it pleasurable for us to explore possibilities not limited to the
here and now, evolution has gradually lured us into finding ways to
search more and more widely for truth and design.
To sum up: In humans social attention, which had been developing
in importance in the primate line, especially among the apes, became
still more important: earlier, more intense, more interactive, more
10 Philosophy and Literature
flexible, more precise, more powerful. Because shared attention had
come to matter so much, especially as infants were born less fully
developed and remained longer in childhood, the ability to share and
shape the attention of others by appeals to common cognitive prefer-
ences led to the development of art: to behaviors that focus not on the
immediate needs of the here and now, but on directing attention and
engaging emotion for its own sake, even toward distant realities and
new possibilities.
Art therefore has an immediate individual function, since keeping up
with attention is essential to us (the threat of cutting off attention as a
punishment is a human universal, and the risks of social exclusion
severe) and since commanding attention is an advantage (it correlates
closely with status). It also has a social function, in increasing social
attunement and social cohesion. And it has a further individual and
social function, in creativity, which leads to the triumphs of tribal art
and beyond.
This rough sketch of a foundation for an evolutionary account of art
would need a lot more detail added before we could build the literature
wing: especially detail about our cognitive systems for understanding
events, for meta-representation, for analogy, for appreciating pattern,
about the automatic engagement of the emotions all the way through
the process of comprehension and about the focusing of attention by
playing off against expectations.25
IV
That was the first role I suggested for a bio-cultural approach to
literature: that it could provide the basis for a comprehensive theory of
art and literature. Now to jump to the fifth: the power of an evolutionary
approach to explain aspects of human nature represented in literature.
Let us consider just one aspect of human nature: race. Again and
again in modern literary studies, ideas of race are traced to particular
historical origins, not entirely coincidentally the period the critic in
question happens to focus on. But in evolutionary studies the explana-
tion digs deeper. There has been much work done on multi-level
selection, that is, natural selection occurring at the level of the gene, or
the cell, or the organ, or the individual organism, the family, the group,
the species, the species and its symbionts, or the whole ecosystem.26
Cooperation at one level can develop because it allows those entities
(whether cells or organs or individuals) that cooperate well to supplant
11Brian Boyd
other entities that either do not cooperate at all or not so well; their
superior capacity for cooperation allows them to out-compete and
ultimately oust those who do not cooperate so well. Within-group
cooperation, in other words, evolves through competition against out-
groups; “in-group amity” is at the expense of “out-group enmity.”27 In
many social species from ants to hyenas, dolphins and chimpanzees,
recognition of out-groups, of others from the same species who belong
to different groups, operates by sight, scent or sound, and it can trigger
fierce antagonism and conflict. In the human case for instance differ-
ences between languages and dialects and accents can clearly mark
group boundaries.
But John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, two founders of evolutionary
psychology, wondered why humans should notice race so much, because
after all during the time the human psyche was evolving in Africa, race
would have been useless as an identifier, since most proto-humans
would never meet anyone of a different race. “Noticing people’s sex
and age, on the other hand, would make good sense: these were
reliable if approximate predictors of behavior. So evolutionary pres-
sures may well have built into the human mind an instinct”—modified
by local culture, of course—“to notice sex and age, but not race.” But
why should race also keep appearing as a natural classifier?
Perhaps, Tooby and Cosmides reasoned, “race is merely a proxy for
something else.” In the Pleistocene, “one vital thing to know about a
stranger is ‘whose side is he on?’ Human society, like ape society, is
riddled with factions—from tribes and bands to temporary coalitions of
friends. Perhaps race is a proxy for membership in coalitions,” and
people “pay so much attention to race in some countries because they
instinctively identify people of other races as being members of other
tribes or coalitions.”
Tooby and Cosmides set up an experiment. Subjects were shown a
series of pictures each associated with a sentence putatively spoken by
the person in the picture. At the end, they saw all 8 pictures and all 8
sentences, and had to match each statement to the right picture. It was
the mistakes that mattered, since these indicated how the subjects had
mentally classified people. As expected, age, sex, and race were strong
clues: the subjects would misattribute a statement made by one old
person to another old person, or a statement by one black person to
another black person. Then the experiment introduced another pos-
sible classifier: coalition membership. This was revealed purely through
the statements made by the people depicted, who were taking two sides
12 Philosophy and Literature
of an argument. Quickly the subjects began to confuse two members of
the same side more often than two members of different sides.
Revealingly, this largely replaced the tendency to make mistakes by race,
though it had virtually no effect on the tendency to make mistakes by
sex. As Matt Ridley comments in reporting this: “Within four minutes,
the evolutionary psychologists had done what social science had failed
to do in decades: make people ignore race. The way to do it is to give
them another, stronger clue to coalition membership. Sports fans are
well aware of the phenomenon: white fans cheer a black player on
‘their’ team as he beats a white player on the opposing team.” Ridley
adds: “This study has immense implications for social policy. It suggests
that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, that racism can be
easily defeated if coalition clues cut across race, and that there is
nothing intractable about racist attitudes. It also suggests that the more
people of different races seem to act or be treated as members of a rival
coalition, the more racist instincts they risk evoking.” He concludes
with the moral that, “the more we understand both our genes and our
instincts, the less intractable they seem.”28
By offering a deeper explanation of racism, in terms of the constant
tension in all social life between cooperation and competition, and the
fluid coalitions in human social life, the cuing of race as a conspicuous,
quick and crude marker of an apparent coalition boundary, and the
emotional and motivational inferences we draw from assigning indi-
viduals to one side or another of such boundaries, an evolutionary
perspective makes it possible to explain racism in any historical context
without limiting the explanation to the culture of that period alone.
The same applies to gender, to class, to power, and so on. Explanations
of such phenomena that are limited entirely to the circumstances of a
particular culture fail if they do not take into account similar patterns
in other cultures and even other species.
V
I have said a little about a theory of art and literature from an
evolutionary point of view, and a little about human nature as the main
subject matter of literature. Obviously, these are the merest hints. Now I
want to hint again at just some of the ways a bio-cultural approach
might deal with a particular literary work, in this case, Hamlet. There are
many levels at which it could do so—in terms of tragedy as a genre, for
instance.29 Survival is a key concern in evolutionary thinking, and it is
13Brian Boyd
no accident that a genre that puts the hero at severe risk of surviving for
less than the natural course of life should be central to literature and
should powerfully command our attention.
The emotional systems of the human mind are more strongly
weighted towards the negative than the positive. Of the seven basic
human emotions shared cross-culturally, five (fear, anger, disgust,
contempt, sadness) are negative and one positive (happiness) and one
momentarily neutral (surprise): it is more urgent for us to avert danger,
to avoid a negative, than for us to pursue or persist in a positive.30 It is
therefore hardly surprising that tragedy has long been considered the
most intense of dramatic genres.
The success of revenge tragedy as a subset of all tragedy (and revenge
or retribution still drives much Hollywood storytelling) can be ex-
plained in terms of the necessity and intensity of retributive feelings in
social animals if they are not to be exploited by others. For human
social cooperation to develop, the detection and punishment of cheat-
ers was necessary.31 In pre-state societies, punishment for transgressions
of the rules of cooperation had to be carried out on a personal basis,
and alertness to cheating and an instinct for revenge have therefore
been built into the human psyche.32 There has been much work in
evolutionary psychology both on the necessity and mechanisms of the
emotions driving revenge, on the cross-cultural presence of revenge, on
the culturally different thresholds of revenge, and the tension between
the impulse to revenge and the cultural constraints on revenge,
especially in state societies.33 The revenge instinct, after all, can lock
people into cycles of retribution (as it does in some tribal and even,
still, in some modern societies), cycles that could be broken only
through principles of non-retribution and practices of submission to
the rule of impersonal law.
Revenge plays enjoyed a vogue on the Elizabethan stage because of
the tension between old habits of personal revenge and the imposition
of a system of state justice just beginning to transcend the personal
whim of the ruler. (The revenge play also offered a natural dramatic
tension and closure, from the offense that starts the play, through the
desire for personal vengeance that drives it, to the final execution of
revenge that both offers satisfaction of the revenge instinct and
recognition of the self-defeating social cost of violence and counter-
violence.) But the tension in Hamlet between the urge for personal
revenge, for a retribution that Claudius will otherwise escape, and the
recognition of the social need for a more impersonal justice, is one
14 Philosophy and Literature
deeply rooted in all our social emotions and helps to explain some of
the intensity and universality of the play’s appeal.
An evolutionary approach need not ignore the fine-grained detail of
literary works.34 Biology can be sensitive not only to the species-wide but
also to local conditions, individual differences, and particular strategic
choices. I have suggested that catching and holding the attention of
others of our kind matters uniquely in our especially social species, so
much so that it has allowed art and literature to develop. Within
diversified societies with specialization of labor, that has meant profes-
sional artists and writers striving to catch and hold the attention of
others so well that these others are willing to pay. A bio-cultural
approach can examine how individual artists within such a cultural
ecology create art works in order to secure attention and intensify
response.
Evolutionary biology requires careful cost-benefit analyses. If Shake-
speare as a professional writer aims to catch attention, how does he do
it? Of course he does not invent everything from scratch. He works
within the successful established tradition of securing attention that
dramatic storytelling provides, and even within successful sub-tradi-
tions. He catches attention against a background of expectations in his
audience: expectations of the theater, of genre (tragedy), of sub-genre
(revenge tragedy), of this particular story (a version of the Hamlet story
had been performed on the London stage a decade earlier). By
conforming to generic expectations, while switching within each season
roughly from a comedy to a tragedy, Shakespeare minimizes his own
effort at reinventing and promises his audience a degree of the
pleasurably expected with a degree of novelty.
He economizes on time and creative energy by working from a
source, in this case the now-lost Ur-Hamlet play and its sources in
François de Belleforest or ultimately Saxo Grammaticus, or both.35 In
biology it is standard to consider the search costs of behaviors like
foraging or mating against the benefits. The many innovations of a play
like Hamlet involve a trade-off between the received elements of the
story, which involve minimal search time, and the novelties, which
should serve to catch attention better, and therefore bring increased
benefit, but which will cost more in imaginative search time.
Although Shakespeare calls up a ghost, as do Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy
and the lost Ur-Hamlet, he does so in a very different way at least from
Kyd. Now the ghost itself is a device that catches attention by violating
our usual ontological expectations. There is a sophisticated evolution-
15Brian Boyd
ary literature on religion that shows people recall best the stories with
minimal violations of ontological categories—not stories without onto-
logical violations, which are merely ordinary; and not with multiple
ontological violations, which are too counter-intuitive to be under-
stood.36 Sharp but still comprehensible crossing of normal ontological
boundaries catches maximum attention and ensures maximum memo-
rability, and explains the kinds of supernatural creatures in stories from
mythology to Superman or Buffy the Vampire-Slayer.
But in Kyd the Ghost of Andrea opens the play with a long narrative
exposition. Shakespeare begins quite differently: he evokes a particular
scene and a particular mood, not by unfolding information immedi-
ately to the audience but by allowing them to infer a situation and to
respond emotionally to its mood of uncertainty and apprehension. He
also builds up tension and suspense through the Ghost’s ominous
silence, and then through our emotional engagement with Hamlet, so
that by the time the Ghost discloses what happened to him it also
matters emotionally to us.
Because of language, our minds are able to communicate a great
deal of information about what we have not directly perceived. But
since the very first steps in the evolution of mind, organisms have been
shaped to extract information not indirectly from elsewhere but directly
from their immediate environment, and to respond emotionally to
what they infer.37 Shakespeare with “Who’s there?” and the changing of
the guards in the middle of the night makes the most of the mind’s
deep preparedness to respond to a particular environment, to infer
evidence from incomplete information (and derive satisfaction from
doing so), and to respond emotionally as we infer. It took even
Shakespeare time to invent a dramatic method so attuned to the way
human minds have been shaped, but the search was worth it: the play
grips and engages from the start.
We could go on in this way looking at the costs and benefits of the
changes Shakespeare has made to his sources and to dramatic conven-
tion in order to secure attention, or at the elements of human nature
that are depicted or appealed to in his version of the story. Looking at
aspects of human nature as we move through the play, we will notice in
the next scene, for instance, the stark contrast between Hamlet and the
other courtiers, in dress and demeanor. This reflects something with
long evolutionary roots: the ability to compare one member of one’s
species with another has been demonstrated, and shown to have major
behavioral implications, in creatures as neurologically primitive as
16 Philosophy and Literature
guppies, and in much subtler ways in the interactions of chimpanzees
with one another.38 Humans too compare and contrast one individual
against another, almost effortlessly, on slight cues. Character contrast
therefore serves to focus attention and channel response in narrative,
and Shakespeare makes the most of it with great economy in the
contrast between Hamlet’s sooty garb and clipped ironic asides and the
court’s festive attire and fulsome ceremonial formality.
Or looking at the changes Shakespeare has made to his sources, we
could note for instance that everyone at court tries to read Hamlet’s
motives and that Hamlet is engaged in a life-and-death struggle to
conceal them behind the mask of madness. The most widely accepted
of evolutionary explanations of higher intelligence has been the social
intelligence hypothesis. This explains the cognitive arms race, in
cetaceans (dolphins and whales) and primates, between the attempt to
read others’ motives and to conceal one’s own, leading to both more
sophisticated concealment and deception and more sophisticated
mechanisms for penetrating the concealment or deception of others.39
The traditional story of Hamlet was such a success because it made of
this intense process of social monitoring and counter-deception an
immediate life-and-death issue.
But Shakespeare takes this situation to new levels by making Hamlet
not only a riddle to others in the story, but also a riddle to himself and
to us. He is no longer simply a clever trickster but a mystery. Part of the
reason is that as biologists note there are three basic ways to avoid
having one’s moves predicted by a hostile “mind-reader”: concealment,
active deception, and unpredictability (biologists call the last the
Protean strategy).40 In Hamlet’s case, the unpredictability seems partly
involuntary, the current volatility of his mind, but also at least partly
deliberate, as when he toys with strategic precision with Polonius and
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Unlike the Hamlets of the source story, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an
enigma, despite the other characters’ deeper focus on his mind and
motives and despite his own unprecedentedly intense focus on himself.
At the same time, Hamlet himself now needs to read the motives of
those around him, especially Claudius but also Gertrude, Ophelia and
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in a way that the original Hamlet did
not need to. The vast psychological literature on the social intelligence
hypothesis and on theory of mind, our capacity to infer others’
thoughts and to act on what we understand of them, is directly relevant
17Brian Boyd
to the play and to our sense that we are exposed to a new level of the
representation of intelligence in its hero.
One of the findings of the literature on theory of mind is that
understanding of other minds marches in surprisingly close step with
understanding one’s own.41 Self-consciousness and consciousness of
others develop at the same time and in conjunction. It is no accident
that Shakespeare’s Hamlet ratchets up our sense of human intelligence
by his intense scrutiny of his own mind as well as his strategic resistance
to being read by others and his intense probing of Claudius’s mind.
One of the high costs inextricable from the undoubted benefits of
reflexive self-consciousness, a cost that biologists and anthropologists
have often considered, is the capacity to contemplate one’s absence
from the world after one’s own death.42 Again, it is no accident that
Hamlet has the richest self-awareness of any character in literature and
the most troubled sense of mortality.
Part of the advantage of a bio-cultural approach to literature is that it
makes it much less likely that we will reach for explanations at the
wrong level. Hamlet has touched people all around the world, and
despite the claims of those who argue that Shakespeare’s prominence
results from his having become a tool of British imperialist domina-
tion—which hardly explains his popularity in Germany, Russia, or
Japan—it makes much more sense to explain the play’s power in the
way it taps so powerfully into central facts of evolved human nature.
Because of the recent reluctance to accept a human nature, because of
an insistence on distinct epistemes, because of the attempt to historicize
in a narrow way, the close scrutiny of Hamlet has been seen, by way of
Foucault’s stress on surveillance and the panopticon, as a reflection of
the Elizabethan state surveillance mechanism.43 That fails in locally
historic terms, since the attempt to probe Hamlet’s mind was already a
feature of, and part of the power of, the original twelfth-century story;
it fails in terms of the details of the play itself, since Shakespeare makes
Polonius individually, comically and self-promotingly fussy and intru-
sive, determined to prove his own importance by explaining the
prince’s behavior through his relations with his own daughter, and
therefore anything but proof of a state surveillance system; and above
all it fails to locate the universal power of the story in a way that an
evolutionary explanation can uniquely highlight.
Another key finding of the new sciences of the mind is the intricate
relationship between emotion and what we have traditionally seen as
18 Philosophy and Literature
the rational aspect of cognition. Summing up much recent work on the
neuroscience of the emotions, Antonio Damasio
suggests that consciousness evolved to allow creatures capable of flexible
behavior to decide among alternative courses of action on the basis of
past experience and projected scenarios of possible future moves.
Decision-making depends on the emotional charges attached to our
recollections and our projections, which act as weightings, as ‘biasing
device[s],’44 in the tug-of-war between competing inclinations. As clinical
studies of brain-damaged patients indicate, decision-making without
emotion is therefore impossible. There is no such thing as purely rational
choice: reason and the emotions are not separate faculties but are
inextricably interdependent, and the mind not remotely as transparent
to itself as it likes to think.45
Hamlet, with the intense emotional upheaval caused by his father’s
death, his suspicion of foul play, his resentment at his mother’s hasty
remarriage, his commitment to revenge, his scruples about enacting it,
his disgust and suspicion and revulsion, and his veering from plans to
indecision to impulsiveness, anticipates these recent discoveries. His
emotions make him multiply reasons and plans for action until other
emotions offer counter-reasons and counter-plans; he envisages with
horror his father’s “leprous” death or his mother’s “rank and enseamed”
life, and flies off in this direction or that, until another vision of horrors
ahead holds him back. Never before have so many reasons and so many
emotions been so richly entwined in one literary character.
There is much more that an evolutionary approach to Hamlet could
say. Of course much of it overlaps with a common-sense approach to
the play, but it would hardly be to the advantage of an evolutionary
approach if it flatly contradicted what has made the play so popular
since its first performance. But such an approach does allow a multi-
leveled, multi-focused explanation of both the production and the
reception side of the play. A propos of the reception side: many will
think here of Laura Bohannan’s 1966 article “Shakespeare in the
Bush.” Doing fieldwork among the Tiv of Nigeria, Bohannan was
reading Hamlet when the Tiv asked her why she was staring at a “paper”
day after day. She told them she was reading a story, they pressed her to
tell, and she obliged; but their response was not at all what she
expected. The Tiv do not believe in ghosts, so assumed that the Ghost
of Hamlet’s father must be an omen sent by a witch; by their standards,
Claudius did the right thing to marry and protect his dead brother’s
19Brian Boyd
wife; and so on. From the strikingly different and unexpected responses
of the Tiv to what Bohannan had thought would be a story of universal
impact, she deduced that there were deeper differences between
peoples than she had thought.
But the conclusions that different peoples are somehow deeply
“other” because they respond so differently to the same story does not
follow. The Tiv had no difficulty whatever in following the story, and
were engaged by it even at the points where their responses differed.
Like the original audience or a modern Western audience, the Tiv had
no difficulty in imagining the existence of a supernatural being and
responding with urgency to its presence or in believing that there were
appropriate kinds of conduct after the bereavement of a sister-in-law.46
But because they had different values as input, they simply reached
different conclusions as output. In fact had they had different values as
input, and yet reached the same inferences as output as a Western
audience reached given its values, then the cognitive mechanisms would
have had to be substantially different. Bohannan’s conclusions are
simply another demonstration of the fact that (as Dan Sperber notes)
“anthropologists routinely conduct research that can only be done
because in crucial ways the differences between [them] and the peoples
[they] study are not in fact very great; yet because everybody likes to hear
that ‘they’ are different from ‘us,’ anthropologists dwell on the
differences.”47
I have tried to suggest, though I had time for no more than hints,
that a bio-cultural approach to literature can make possible the first
really comprehensive and critical literary theory, while it also allows
multileveled, multifocused, fine-grained analyses of literary works, that
nevertheless connect with large-scale aspects of human minds and
behavior to explain the power of literature in general and the particu-
lar depth and power of especially successful works and writers.
Students and teachers of literature may wish once more to get close
to texts, but they also want to know more about human nature. And
surely they want to do so in a way that neither ignores writers nor limits
itself to what writers show of human nature, and that neither ignores
the expansion of knowledge that science makes possible nor diminishes
any of the unique power of art.
University of Auckland
20 Philosophy and Literature
1. See for instance Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), the special issue reporting the 2003
symposium on the future of the journal and of theory.
2. Among many critiques of the suppositions that an evolutionary approach to the
human implies determinism or impedes social change, see for instance Peter Singer, A
Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1999), Janet Radcliffe Richards, Human Nature after Darwin: A Philosophical Introduction
(London: Routledge, 2000) and Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary
Psychology of Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Among discussions of
evolution and literature, see Joseph Carroll, Evolution and Literary Theory (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1995); Robert Storey, Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the
Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1996); Evolution and Literature Special Issue, Philosophy and Literature 25:2 (2001);
Jonathan Gottschall, “The Tree of Knowledge and Darwinian Literary Study,” Philosophy
and Literature 27 (2003): 255–68; Joseph Carroll, Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human
Nature and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jonathan Gottschall and D. S. Wilson,
eds., The Literary Animal (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005).
3. Vincent B. Leitch et al., eds., Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (New York:
Norton, 2001), p. xxxiii.
4. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, 1957; 2nd ed., 1970, trans. Annette Lavers (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 9.
5. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London:
Verso, 1991), p. 15.
6. A. R. Braunmuller, in Ann Thompson, Thomas L. Berger, A. R. Braunmuller and
Philip Edwards, Which Shakespeare? A User’s Guide to Editions (Milton Keynes: Open
University Press, 1992), p. 78.
7. Although Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin call universality “a
hegemonic European critical tool” (The Empire Strikes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-
Colonial Literatures [New York: Routledge, 1989], p. 149), Ngu\gı\ wa Thiong’o declares
himself “an unrepentant universalist” (Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms
[London: James Curry, 1993], p. xvii) and Kwame Anthony Appiah observes that
“antiuniversalists . . . use the term universalism as if it meant pseudouniversalism, and the
fact is that their complain is not with universalism at all. What they truly object to—and
who would not?—is Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism” (In My Father’s House:
Africa in the Philosophy of Culture [New York: Oxford University Press, 1992], p. 58). For a
discussion of universals in human nature, see Donald E. Brown, Human Universals
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), and in literature, Patrick Colm Hogan,
The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
8. Daniel Dennett, “Postmodernism and Truth,” World Congress of Philosophy
Conference, August 13, 1998, http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.
9. See Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (New
York: Harper Collins, 2003).
10. Cf. Singer and Radcliffe Richards.
21Brian Boyd
11. Lorraine Danson, “Whither Critical Inquiry?” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 361–64.
12. R. M. Keesing, Cultural Anthropology: A Contemporary Perspective (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Wilson, 1981), cited in Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, “The Biological Founda-
tion of Aesthetics,” in Ingo Rentschler, Barbara Herzberger and David Epstein, eds.,
Beauty and the Brain: Biological Aspects of Aesthetics (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1988), p. 62.
13. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985), pp. 104–10 for a lucid critique of the notion that visual perspective reflects
the ideology of the unified subject.
14. Cf. Ernst Gombrich, The Image and The Eye (London: Phaidon, 1982), p. 282: “In
fact the widespread view has recently been challenged that the conventional elements in
photographs bar naïve subjects such as unsophisticated tribesmen from reading them.”
15. There are minor individual differences, such as color blindness in 8% of the
population and, recent research suggests, a fraction of women who may have partially
tetrachromatic vision (Richard Hollingham, “In the Realm of Your Senses,” New Scientist,
31 Jan 2004, pp. 40–43).
16. See John Tyler Bonner, The Evolution of Culture in Animals (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980) and Frans de Waal The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections
of a Primatologist (New York, Basic Books, 2001).
17. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 4:2 (2003): 36–55.
18. Critiqued in Richard Levin, “The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide,” PMLA 105
(1990): 491–504, and in Séan Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and
Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1992; rev. ed., 1998).
19. Jane Goodall, Through a Window (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990).
20. Cooperation and competition: Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (Lon-
don: Penguin, 1990); mate choice: Robert Trivers, “Parental Investment and Sexual
Selection” (1972) in his Natural Selection and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002); parent-child conflict: Trivers, “Parent-Offspring Conflict” (1974), in
Trivers 2002; social emotions: Robert Frank, Passions within Reason: The Strategic Role of the
Emotions (New York: Norton, 1988).
21. Lee Cronk, That Complex Whole: Culture and the Evolution of Human Behavior
(Boulder: Westview, 1999).
22. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford,
Basil Blackwell, 1988); Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual
Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Pascal Boyer,
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books,
2001).
23. This argument is developed more fully in my “Evolutionary Theories of Art,” in
Gottschall and Wilson (forthcoming).
24. Theory of Mind: Simon Baron-Cohen, “Theory of Mind and Autism: A Fifteen-year
Review,” Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience,
22 Philosophy and Literature
ed. S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and D. Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), pp. 3–20. Multiple-order intentionality: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
(London: Penguin, 1993).
25. Events: Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), ed.
Dan Sperber, David Premack, and Ann James Premack; metarepresentation: Josef
Perner, Understanding the Representational Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); analogy:
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); emotions:
Richard Gerrig, Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
26. Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of
Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
27. Richard Alexander, in Randolph Nesse and George Williams, Evolution and
Healing: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 138.
28. Ridley 2003, pp. 265–66.
29. See Storey 1996.
30. Seven basic emotions: Paul Ekman, “Afterword,” in Charles Darwin, The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Harper Collins, 1996). Weighting to
negative: Antonio Damasio, Looking For Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
(Orlando: Harcourt, 2003), p. 60.
31. Axelrod 1990.
32. Cheating: Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Cognitive Adaptations for Social
Exchange,” in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, ed.
J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.
163–228; revenge: Frank 1988.
33. Universality of revenge: Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (Hawthorne,
N.Y.: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988): “In societies from every corner of the world, we can read
of vows to avenge a slain father or brother, and of rituals that sanctify those vows” (pp.
225–56); local differences: Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human
Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), pp. 327–29.
34. I offer a more detailed demonstration of this, looking at Viola’s willow-cabin
speech in Twelfth Night, in “Reduction or Expansion? Evolution Meets Literature”
(forthcoming).
35. For reproductions and discussions of the sources, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative
and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, VII; The Major Tragedies (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1973).
36. Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
37. See John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward
an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction and the Arts,” Substance (2001): 6–27; 24.
38. Lee Dugatkin and M. Alfieri, “Guppies and the Tit-for-Tat Strategy: Preference
Based on Past Interaction,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 28 (1991): 243–46.
23Brian Boyd
39. Andrew White and Richard Byrne, Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and
Evaluations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
40. White and Byrne 1997, p. 313.
41. Sue Taylor Parker, et al., eds., Self-Awareness in Animals and Humans (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994).
42. Boyer 2002.
43. Michael Neill, “Hamlet: A Modern Perspective,” in William Shakespeare, The
Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (New York:
Washington Square Press, 1992), pp. 311–12.
44. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’s Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New
York: Putnam, 1994), p. 174.
45. Brian Boyd, “Literature and Discovery,” Philosophy and Literature 23 (1999): 313–33;
327.
46. Laura Bohannan, “Shakespeare in the Bush,” Natural History, Aug–Sept. 1966;
Storey 1996; Michelle Sugiyama, “Cultural Relativism in the Bush: Towards a Theory of
Narrative Universals,” Human Nature (2003).
47. Cited in Brown 1991, p. 5.
