The Just-So Storytelling Instinct
It’s a curious fact about humans around the globe—we love to tell and consume stories. Whether it be fiction, history, mythology, gossip, daydreams, news, or autobiography, stories permeate every aspect of our lives. And telling stories seems to be a distinctively human trait. I don’t know of any other species that can do it. So, we should ask the question: does the fact that we evolved into storytelling creatures mean that telling stories gives us some evolutionary advantage?
The mere fact that we like to tell stories does not necessarily mean that
it gives us any advantage -
While it’s true that these days we consume far too much refined sugars,
leading to obesity and all sorts of other health problems, this example is a
little tricky. That’s because
The lesson here is that even if a trait is maladaptive now, it might once have had an adaptive function. It might have given our ancestors an evolutionary edge, so to speak. Which makes sense, because biological evolution is a slow process, whereas changes in human lifestyle can happen quite rapidly, as we know from the last few hundred years.
So, when we think about -
we need to ask whether it evolved because it gave our ancestors an evolutionary edge, and if so, whether it's still adapative in our modern, technological world.
We also shouldn’t rule out the possibility that it’s just an evolutionary
byproduct with no particular purpose at all. But let’s at least consider
some
- Here’s one idea: From the Pleistocene to the Information Age, human life has always been full of stress and strain. These days we’re more worried about paying bills and meeting deadlines than we are about getting eaten by a tiger, so the causes of our stress may be quite different, but the fact that life can be stressful remains the same. Maybe the function of stories is to give us a way to avoid our troubles by entering imaginary worlds. Stories engage us, they distract us, and they entertain us. Getting lost in a good story is a great way to relax and escape reality.
- Here’s another idea: Storytelling evolved because it gave our ancestors an advantage when it came to sexual selection. If you can tell a good story, then you can get and hold another person’s attention, and perhaps seduce them with your words. Just as birds that sing beautifully are better able to attract mates, it could be that good storytellers are also better able to attract mates. Who doesn’t love a good storyteller?
- One last idea: Telling stories is a way to bind us together. When we share the same mythologies or histories, we reinforce our group identity, which improves our ability to pool resources and cooperate with one another. This group cohesion, facilitated by storytelling, may account for the evolutionary success of our ancestors.
The Evolution of Storytelling
But what was the prerequisite for storytelling in the evolution of our species? What needed to be in place for storytelling to become an advantage?
Humans are expert mind-readers, and you can see why. Even the simplest physical movement can have many meanings depending on the intention or goal of the mover. Say someone moves an object across a flat surface: Are they selling it, showing it, returning it, loaning it, trading it, giving it or perhaps just disposing of it? The observer can only understand what’s happening if they know the intention of the mover. But at some point in our evolution we developed shared intention, where two or more people joined together to get things done. This seems to be a uniquely human trait.
A look at the evolution of storytelling
Let’s think for a moment about our closest cousin on the tree of life: the chimpanzee. If a chimp sees a luscious piece of fruit hanging at the end of a branch overhead, but they cannot reach it no matter how hard they try, you will not see another chimp climb onto that branch and push it down so their buddy can grab the fruit. But early in human evolution, we developed the ability to notice the intentions of our fellow clansmen and then work with them to achieve a goal.
The director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
Michael Tomasello, argues that
Imagine you’re out hunting hares when you come across a stag in the forest.
Immediately you can see the advantages in capturing the stag; more meat for about the same effort. The problem is - you can’t do it alone - If you could convince a couple of members of your clan to help out, however, there would be good food for everyone. According to Tomasello, this prompted a big change in thinking.
Whoever embraced shared intentionality increased their ability to hunt, gather, raise children and raid their enemies. They survived, and they multiplied.
The timing of this monumental change has been estimated by a number of researchers. Some say it coincided with the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis around 800,000 years ago. Others believe the best indicator is when we start to see large prey being brought back to the home base in the archaeological record, around 400,000 to 200,000 years ago. Interestingly, Homo sapiens emerged on Earth around 200,000 years ago. It looks like renowned Harvard linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker was on the money when he said, ‘The spoken word is older than our species’. We can add to that by saying that storytelling is older than the spoken word.
I’m sure you have had that experience where you realise you don’t share the language of the people around you but you still need to communicate something to them. So you mime – you use gestures. When my wife Sheenagh and I were travelling across France in our 20s, we wanted to do some wine tasting but we didn’t really know what signs were advertising the activity. So as we drive down the Loire Valley, we just headed into the first vineyard that look inviting. As we drove up the gravel driveway, Sheen scrambled for our phrasebook. But when the owner approached our car, I just jumped out and mimed what we wanted. We were then given a terrific tour of the winery and tasted some of the Chinon region’s finest output. We achieved a lot that day through miming. Perhaps it wasn’t quite the life-and-death miming our ancestors would have engaged in, but it worked.
Miming eventually led to spoken language, which probably coincided with the spread of humans from what is now the African continent across the rest of the world. Our ability to speak gave us the group-mindedness that helped us build larger communities and institutions. As we started to domesticate plants and animals 10,000 years ago, our population surged, enabling people to specialise because there was plenty of food to go around. And this ability to specialise gave us time to invent one of the great tools of human civilisation: writing.
It has only been in the last 6000 years or so that we have translated the sounds we make into a complete writing system. But writing now dominates corporate life. Yet, at our core, our innate communication skills are miming and oral storytelling.
Our Fiction Addiction: Why humans need stories; From fireside folk tales to Netflix dramas, narratives are essential to every society – and evolutionary theorists are now trying to figure out why.
...scholars specialising in ‘literary Darwinism’, who are asking what exactly makes a good story, and the evolutionary reasons that certain narratives – from Homer’s Odyssey to Harry Potter – have such popular appeal...
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180503-our-fiction-addiction-why-humans-need-stories
Odds are, you’ve never heard the story of the wild pig and the seacow — but if you’d heard it, you’d be unlikely to forget it. The wild pig and seacow were best friends who enjoyed racing each other for sport. One day, however, the seacow hurt his legs and could run no more. So the wild pig carried him down to the sea, where they could race forever, side by side, one in the water, one on the land.
You can learn a lot from a tale like that — about friendship, cooperation, empathy and an aversion to inequality. And if you were a child in the Agta community — a hunter-gatherer population in The Philippines’ Isabela Province — you’d have grown up on the story, and on many others that teach similar lessons. The Agta are hardly the only peoples who practice storytelling; the custom has been ubiquitous in all cultures over all eras in all parts of the world. Now, a new study in Nature Communications, helps explain why: storytelling is a powerful means of fostering social cooperation and teaching social norms, and it pays valuable dividends to the storytellers themselves, improving their chances of being chosen as social partners, receiving community support and even having healthy offspring.
...storytelling may function as a mechanism to disseminate knowledge by broadcasting social norms to coordinate social behaviour and promote cooperation.
The type of knowledge in question is “meta-knowledge” – information about other people’s knowledge. This is, in fact, required for any society to function. For instance, it is not enough for people to know that they should drive on a certain side of the road, they also need to know that others possess that same knowledge. Stories may therefore act to ensure that all members of the group know, and consequently abide by, the “rules of the game” in a given society.
Moralising gods and organised religion may perform a similar function in post-agricultural populations by organising behaviour and promoting cooperation. However, these are often absent in hunter-gatherer societies, despite these groups being highly cooperative. We therefore proposed that hunter-gatherer storytelling may perform a comparable function to moralising gods in such societies.
...I review the literature on fire play in western children, finding that attraction to and interest in fire is widespread, experimentation with fire often begins in early childhood, and fire play typically peaks in late childhood or early adolescence.
The latter aspect stands in contrast to results from a survey of ethnographers which reveals that, in societies in which fire is routinely used as a tool, children typically master control of fire by middle childhood, at which point interest in fire is already declining. This suggests that fire learning is retarded in western children, arguably due to patterns of fire use in modern societies that are atypical when viewed from a broader cross-cultural perspective...
A Burning Desire: Steps Toward an Evolutionary Psychology of Fire Learning - Daniel M. T. Fessler
http://www.danielmtfessler.com/
http://www.danielmtfessler.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Fessler-2006-Burning-Desire.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(psychology)
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Literary Darwinists use concepts from evolutionary biology and the evolutionary human sciences to formulate principles of literary theory and interpret literary texts. They investigate interactions between human nature and the forms of cultural imagination, including literature and its oral antecedents. By "human nature", they mean a pan-human, genetically transmitted set of dispositions: motives, emotions, features of personality, and forms of cognition. Because the Darwinists concentrate on relations between genetically transmitted dispositions and specific cultural configurations, they often describe their work as "biocultural critique".
Many literary Darwinists aim not just at creating another "approach" or "movement" in literary theory; they aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted. They want to establish a new alignment among the disciplines and ultimately to encompass all other possible approaches to literary study.
Adaptive function of literature and the arts[edit]
The most hotly debated issue in evolutionary literary study concerns the adaptive functions of literature and other arts—whether there are any adaptive functions, and if so, what they might be. Proposed functions include transmitting information, including about kin relations, and by providing the audience with a model and rehearsal for how to behave in similar situations that may arise in the future.
Steven Pinker (How the Mind Works, 1997) suggests that aesthetic responsiveness is merely a side effect of cognitive powers that evolved to fulfill more practical functions, but Pinker also suggests that narratives can provide information for adaptively relevant problems.
Geoffrey Miller (The Mating Mind, 2000) argues that artistic productions in the ancestral environment served as forms of sexual display in order to demonstrate fitness and attract mates, similarly to the function of the peacock's tail.
Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories, 2009) argues that the arts are forms of cognitive "play" that enhance pattern recognition. In company with Ellen Dissanayake (Art and Intimacy, 2000), Boyd also argues that the arts provide means of creating shared social identity and help create and maintain human bonding.
Dissanayake, Joseph Carroll (Literary Darwinism 2004), and Denis Dutton (The Art Instinct, 2009) all argue that the arts help organize the human mind by giving emotionally and aesthetically modulated models of reality. By participating in the simulated life of other people one gains a greater understanding of the motivations of oneself and other people. The idea that the arts function as means of psychological organization subsumes the ideas that the arts provide adaptively relevant information, enable us to consider alternative behavioral scenarios, enhance pattern recognition, and serve as means for creating shared social identity.
And of course, the arts can be used for sexual display. In that respect, the arts are like most other human products—clothing, jewelry, shelter, means of transportation, etc. The hypothesis that the arts help organize the mind is not incompatible with the hypothesis of sexual display, but it subordinates sexual display to a more primary adaptive function.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwinian_literary_studies
At this point we reach a fork in theory’s road. There are two issues to be distinguished. First, there is the adaptive usefulness of fiction, its functional benefits, from Pleistocene campfire stories to modern novels and movies. Second, there is the pleasure — and perhaps related felt satisfactions that are not well described as immediate pleasure — which the experience of fiction evokes. On the first topic, the functional uses of fiction, Carroll, Pinker, and other evolutionary aestheticians agree. There is an enormous potential survival value for a species in being able to hypothesize non-obtaining states of affairs — imagining, contrary to known facts, what it would be for the neighboring tribe to attack the camp when the men are out hunting, or what it would be to travel in an area where water is scarce. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides talk about the advantages of “decoupled” imaginative acts, Michelle Sugiyama writes of fictions as a kind of imaginative preparation for dealing with real-world problems, and Pinker himself uses a games analogy in How the Mind Works (1997): “Life is like chess, and plots [in fiction] are like those books of famous chess games that serious players study so they will be prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits.” In life as in chess, “there are too many possible sequences of moves and countermoves for all of them to be played out in one’s mind.” Familiarity with fictional plots obviates the need always in to learn things in first-hand life experience; it can aid in the development of mental flexibility and adaptability to new social problems and expanded physical environments.
On the other, Pinker and Carroll starkly diverge on how to regard the pleasure produced by fiction. Pinker treats the intense pleasures of art, including fiction, essentially as by-products. The arts are a means by which we identify “pleasure-giving patterns” in the brain. For him, the arts “purify” these patterns, “concentrate them,” allowing the brain to “stimulate itself without the messiness of electrodes or drugs . . . [to] give itself intense artificial doses of the sights and sounds and smells that ordinarily are given off by healthful environments.” Pinker explains this process with a culinary analogy: “We enjoy strawberry cheesecake, but not because we evolved a taste for it. We evolved circuits that gave us trickles of enjoyment from the sweet taste of ripe fruit, the creamy mouth feel of fats and oils from nuts and meat, and the coolness of fresh water. Cheesecake packs a sensual wallop unlike anything in the natural world because it is a brew of megadoses of agreeable stimuli which we concocted for the express purpose of pressing our pleasure buttons. Pornography is another pleasure technology.” For Pinker, the arts are yet another. On this account, the arts seek out and find the pleasure centers associated with meeting adaptive challenges — ones which increased fitness in the Pleistocene — and stimulate those centers without going through the risks and toil of actually undertaking the challenging activities. In the creation and experience of art, our minds rise to “a biologically pointless challenge: figuring out how to get at the pleasure circuits of the brain and deliver little jolts of enjoyment without the inconvenience of wringing bona fide fitness increments from the harsh world.” The arts are pleasure short-cuts, variously likened by Pinker to puzzles and games, alcohol and drugs, and sweet, rich desserts — things that also give us little jolts of enjoyment.
