Why Evolutionary Biology Encompasses Literature
What is it about?
This brief essay is a "manifesto," part of a group of three invited from the editors (the other two are by Brian Boyd and Jonathan Gottschall). The idea was to marshal all the forms of evidence and logic that support the claim that all valid literary knowledge can and ultimately should be situated within the framework of evolutionary biology and evolutionary social science.
Why is it important?
I've been working on this theoretical project since the early 1990s. This manifesto is the most concise full explanation of the logic behind the project. It's conceptually dense but lucid and precise. It clearly enunciates the idea that converging lines of evidence are a central feature of scientific validity and illustrates that idea with a delineation of the disciplines in the evolutionary social sciences and humanities. It also makes a case for the axiomatic validity of an evolutionary perspective for all living things, including humans--hence also the products of human minds. Literature is one of those products.