Literary Darwinism

Well, of course, I’m not a specialist in literature, but I like to think of myself as cultured. There is compelling evidence to show that all literature serves the needs of natural selection. I’m afraid my chromosomes preclude me from appreciating the novel properly, but that outstanding writer Ian McEwan says: ‘Cognitive psychologists with their innatist views tell us that women work with a finer mesh of emotional understanding than men. The novel—by that view the most feminine of forms—answers to their biologically ordained skills.’ Thus, an appreciation of that sort of emotional writing we find in the novel is an expression of women’s reproductive role. And a fine thing too—without that we wouldn’t be here! Evolution is a wonderful process. Ian McEwan says again: ‘If one reads accounts of . . . troops of bonobo . . . one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English 19th-century novel.’ So we see how our primate past is inescapable, even where the arts are concerned.

You see, Clary, evolution compels you to write in a way that reveals your nurturing instinct and identify yourself with the more benign aspects of organic nature itself. A male would have written a radically different poem—perhaps, indeed, about space travel as Joseph suggests. The male is driven by an outward-directed urge towards exploration in the way that the male primate goes out to forage for food and acquire new territory. I think Joseph definitely has a point in wanting to celebrate scientific achievement. It would have a certain social utility. Though why the need to be in poetic form, I’m not sure. There must be some physiological satisfaction in the rhythmic aspects of poetry that has a conditioning effect, encouraging the reinforcement of the evolutionary message.