Telling Advantages: Fiction as Adaptation

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Telling AdvantagesFiction as Adaptation

• Brian Boyd
• English Department
• University of Auckland
• b.boyd_at_auckland.ac.nz

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adaptation

• biological feature that shows design for some
  function
• ultimate function advantage in terms of
  survival and/or reproduction

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explaining fiction

• art in general
• common features despite differences
• music, dance, visual art precede story and verse
• narrative
• purportedly true report
• fiction
• events acknowledged invented

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art as adaptive?

• universal
• thousands of generations
• same major forms across cultures
• music, dance, visual art, fiction, verse
• high costs in time, energy, resources
• stirs emotions
• develops reliably in childhood without training

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Pinkers challenge

• art as byproduct (Pinker 1997, 2002, 2007)
• except for scenario-building function of
  narrative
• byproduct of design capacity and human cognitive
  preferences
• cheesecake for mind
• presses pleasure buttons by defeating locks

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byproduct, sexual selection, adaptation

• if no benefits and high costs, would have been
  eliminated
• cf. Dawkins 2004 on beaver dams
• sexual selection Geoffrey Miller 2000

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art and pattern

• cognitive play to engage human attention
  through our preference for pattern
• pattern allows rich inference
• human appetite for open-ended pattern
• strong single pattern reduces need to
• attend
• but unpredictable combinations of patterns repay
  attention and yield rich especially inferences
• art concentrates interrelated and intersecting
  patterns

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Twiggy Tree man
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play

• flexible behaviors cannot be entirely innate
• need fine-tuning, wide options,
  context-sensitivity
• especially urgent behaviors flight, fight
• those with stronger motivations to practice and
  explore in low urgency will fare better in high
  urgency
• therefore evolution of pleasure in play
• repeated and exuberant play hones skills, widens
  repertoires, sharpens sensitivities
• e.g. rat play drives genetic transcription in
  amygdala and frontal cortex

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art as play

• cognitive capacities benefit from
• finer fine-tuning
• wider repertoire
• greater context-sensitivity
• faster processing speed
• e.g. aural, visual, vocal, manual, social skills
• art as cognitive play
• supernormal stimulus
• rewards attention, repeat engagement

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attention

• art needs to earn attention
• attention to others unique in humans from birth
• protoconversation, from c. 8 months
• more like a song than a sentence
• multimedia performances
• eyes, faces, hands, feet, voice, movement
• rhythmic turn-taking, mutual imitation
• elaboration, exaggeration, repetition, surprise
• joint attention, c. 12 mos
• sharing attention ensures cognitive play does not
  lead to private worlds

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art functions

• 1 cognitive fine-tuning in key modes
• 2 social attunement
• attunement in sound and movement associated with
  close cooperation in parrots, duetting songbirds,
  dolphins, gibbons, humans
• in humans also in visual terms group styles in
  body adornment, artifacts
• in humans also in fiction empathy with
  characters, prosocial values, attunement with
  audience

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art functions

• 3 individual status
• attention correlated with status
• in spontaneous conversation, status earned by
  relevance
• art can hold attention in ways that override or
  create own relevance

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art functions

• 4 religion
• emergence of tradition
• imitate successful
• imitate most common
• new initiatives become model, fashion, tradition,
  jealously guarded norm
• religion and art
• spirits assumed to respond like humans
• supernatural world dependent on fiction, in
  invented story
• religion coopts art
• perhaps even becomes main function of art in
  traditional, small-scale societies

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art functions

• 5 creativity
• art as Darwin machine (cf. immune system, neural
  Dawinism)
• 1 blind generation of variations through neural
  randomness
• 2 selective retention of external form (vs
  dream, reverie)
• 3 self-motivating
• 4 low-cost testing mechanism in makers minds
• 5 status as incentive to refine
• 6 further, more objective testing in minds of
  others
• 7 human imitation recycles existing design
  success
• 8 traditions reduce invention costs and pose
  well-defined problems

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art functions

• 5 creativity
• art as Darwin machine (cont.)
• 9 traditions and forms reduce attention and
  comprehension costs
• 10 habituation ensures innovation (Martindale
  1990)
• art well designed for creativity but not useful
  creativity
• but even utilitarian effects
• materials, processes, products e.g. in weaving
  and potterty
• design tools drawing, model-building
• confidence in creating parts of world on own terms

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narrative

• comprehending events
• animal and infant cognition intuitive physics,
  biology, psychology
• human Theory of Mind by age 5
• beliefs as well as desires and intentions
• metarepresentation
• communicating events
• animal communication present threats and
  opportunities (vervet monkeys, honeybees)
• human extras joint attention, imitation, language

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narrative

• inventing events
• human pretend play
• c. 12 months, manipulating objects as if
  something else
• c. 24 months, pretense easy and fun
• pretend play outstrips sophistication in
  understanding events
• attention-engaging surprise more important than
  realism
• fiction as internal pretend play, without props
  and actions

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fiction as adaptation

• emerges after music, dance, visual arts
• universal, spontaneous
• we cannot suppress response
• cannot not imagine characters in verbal or visual
  fictions
• cognitive defects
• Autism (vs Williams syndrome)
• poor Theory of Mind
• poor story comprehension
• no spontaneous pretend play

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fiction functions

• 1 social cognition
• producing and processing social information
• scenario construction or recall
• 2 storyteller status
• 3 prosocial models
• audience resistance to selfish manipulation
• but audience responsiveness to prosocial
  manipulation, to shared values
• 4 perspectival shift
• to make characters on both sides come to life

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fiction functions

• 5 thinking beyond here and now
• cannot think sustainedly in abstract
• but can think well in terms of agents and actions
• 6 Theory of Mind explanation as problem, story
  as solution
• Theory of Mind awareness of false belief, of
  what we may not know
• agential (and especially unseen-agent)
  explanation
• 7 religion supernatural fictions and social
  cohesion

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varieties of fiction

• religion (myth) has commandeered much of force of
  fiction
• but non-religious or unserious fiction alongside
  religions serious fiction (Islam and Arabian
  Nights, Shakespeare, Kalibari)
• low cost, high long-term benefit parables,
  fables
• low cost, high immediate benefit jokes
• high cost, high immediate benefit popular
  fiction
• high cost, high long-term benefit serious fiction

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conclusion

• art entices minds to play hard and often so they
  can work harder
• fine-tunes key perceptual and cognitive modes
• fosters creativity
• fiction
• improves social cognition
• thinking beyond here and now

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conclusion

• need tests against alternatives (byproduct,
  sexual selection, other adaptive explanations)
• evolutionary approach to art and literature does
  not depend on art and fiction as adaptations
• but a naturalistic account of art and fiction
  needs to know!