Telling Advantages: Fiction as Adaptation

1. Telling Advantages:Fiction as Adaptation Brian Boyd English Department University of Auckland b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz

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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Pinker’s 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

6. 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

7. 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

9. Twiggy Tree man

10. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. varieties of fiction • religion (myth) has commandeered much of force of fiction • but non-religious or unserious fiction alongside religion’s 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

25. 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

26. 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!