Stories and Why We Need Them: Evolution and Fictional Narrative

On the Origin of Stories:

Evolution, Cognition and Fiction

By Brian Boyd, Harvard University Press, 540pp.

Reviewed: 24 October 2009

Why do we bother with stories? Why do humans invest so much energy in making, sharing and consuming narratives that we know are not factual, when we could put that energy into competing to accumulate, consume and defend ever more possessions?

In evolutionary terms, pleasure is not the reason for anything, but rather the reward for something that contributes to our success as individuals or as a species.

Brian Boyd, Distinguished Professor of English at Auckland University, is fed up with “the recently dominant paradigm that calls itself Theory or Critique” which, he believes, has displaced holistic study of human culture with shallow, circular, and presumptuous ideologies.

Boyd approaches literature, and art in general, from the “biocultural” perspective that sees the individual psyche not as a zero-sum balance between Nature and Nurture, but as a dynamic product of both. Our evolved and evolving common humanity (with individual genetic variations) refracted, in each person, through the cultures of specific times, places and life experience.

He expects some to scoff that this approach is reductive or mechanistic, because it implies denial of the sublime, the divine, or the grandly political. Boyd contends that to see culture in the full context of its evolutionary function is in fact to open the study of art and literature to its widest, most inclusive scope.

When baby humans (and other creatures) play with toys, they demonstrate the ability to engage mentally, physically and emotionally with fiction. Play constitutes rehearsal for life in ways that contribute to evolutionary success.

Pre-verbal art, such as cave paintings, must have had strategic value. Once human language evolved to the point where it could transmit ideas about past and future, narrative became possible.  We have learned to use fiction to practice tactical deceits, and also to exchange stories that train our brains for ultrasocial life. Group identity, ideology and religion are reinforced by such stories.

The unpredictability of the diverse human environment gives evolutionary advantage to individuals who can learn to cope with threats and opportunities before having to encounter them in the real world.

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