ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 1, January 2015
enough the ends of both disciplines seem to be the same: to establish a better society,
a more tolerant and compassionate culture, and to strive for dignity of all members of
our species. I would offer this definition of dignity: Dignity is the moment when homo
sapiens becomes human being. It is that synapse and that jump, and it must be bridged
by an accord between the natural sciences and cultural theories. The same holds in
literary studies. The attitude in literary studies that sees science as simply another
‘discourse’ follows the “Passes-For Fallacy: what has passed for, i.e., what has been
accepted by science as, known fact or objective evidence or honest inquiry, etc., has
sometimes turned out to be no such thing; therefore the notions of known fact, objective evidence, honest inquiry, etc., are ideological humbug” (Haack, 2007: 27-28).
Literary Darwinism (hereafter LD), however, has made strides in the past 20 years to
bring the arts and sciences closer together.
Speaking from the LD side about the necessity of evolution as part of the interpretational repertoire, Brian Boyd says, “Unless we revert to myths of divine creation, evolution must be part of any complete account of the human, including human art…If
evolution can help explain art – human behavior at its freest and most creative – any
fears that it implies determinism or denies culture should be dispelled once and for all.
No one was ever ‘genetically determined’ to write or to read something as unprecedented as Ulysses” (2004: 147). LD attempts to explain literary events and phenomena
in relation to general evolutionary patterns such as adaptation, survival and reproduction, among other concerns and areas of focus. There is no need here to wade into the
fray between LD and the prevailing moods of post-structuralistxiv theories except to
agree with David Sloan Wilson when he says that “Social constructivists are first and
foremost trying to imagine and implement a better world. What they imagine may
strike some as naively optimistic or wrongheaded, but it is perfectly sensible, even in
biological terms – equality, respect, basic necessities for all, the end of repression, and
so on” (2005: 22). If the goal of literary studies is to provide grounds for interpreting
literary texts, then it remains as Jeremy Fernando notes that “(i)n other words, interpretation is nothing more, and infinitely nothing less, than the promise of the possibility of interpretation” (2013: 195). If the goal, as Fernando rightly labels it here, is possibility, an expanding outward toward multiplicity, then the inclusion of an evolutionary function of literary interpretation can only widen possibility and bring a better
concord between the natural sciences and the humanities in their interpretational
scope.
Interpretation involves, among other things, pattern recognition, and homo sapiens are
capable of pattern recognition like no other animal, as Boyd notes. We are the most
adept species at identifying pattern from the chaos of the environment (2009: 88-89),
and it causes pleasure. It is a pleasure to try and predict what a character in a book or
movie will do, what rhyme might be coming in a poem, or what variations a rhythm or
melody in a song might take. Boyd says, “Only humans have the curiosity to seek out
pattern in the open-ended way that once led our ancestors to see constellations in the
skies, then to infer first the revolution of the Earth from the motions of the stars and
planets, then the expansion of the universe, then possibilities beyond our patch of the
multiverse” (2009: 89). If pattern could be loosely defined as a kind of regularity of
rhythm, a kind of symmetry, then even human infants demonstrate an innate attraction
to complex patterns and stimuli. Indeed, human infants tend to show more attraction
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