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Ian Duncan’s Human Forms and Devin Griffiths’s Age of Analogy attempt to illuminate inter­actions between evolutionary theories and literature from the late eighteenth century up through the nineteenth century. They do not advance knowledge about this subject. Both authors treat evolution as a semi-fictional construction that owes more to literary inspiration than to the scientific method, and they reduce literature to a battleground for ideological forces. They write using dense terminology, shifting rhetoric, and flights of verbal performance that obscure their claims. In all these respects, they are representative of the field “science and literature”-and particularly of the subfield that studies evolution and literature. I analyze the history of this subfield of literary scholarship and attempt to explain how it developed into its present form. The subfield was founded in the 1980s on the basis of poststructuralist theory and has never escaped the core assumptions of that theory: our minds cannot reach outside culture; our thoughts, behaviors, and ideas about the world are primarily the result of our culture; some cultural traditions are oppressive while others are liberating; and the meaning of texts cannot be determined. Though Duncan and Griffiths represent the highest level of schol­arship on evolution and literature, I argue that they fail their fascinating subject by offering very little that is new within their own field, and nothing that is of value to other fields.

This article applies a life history model to advance the evolutionary understanding of poetry that inspired nineteenth-century Swedish National Romanticism. We show that the characters featured in two of Erik Gustaf Geijer’s poems, “The Viking” and “The Yeoman Farmer” (1811), display patterns of time perspective, mating effort, and parental invest­ment that are now recognized as central life history attributes: a fast strategy and a slow strategy, respectively. These patterns were identified by undergraduate participants (N = 427) who read excerpts of the poems that had been stripped of identifying information and mentions of romantic or sexual relationships. Participants read each poem and rated each character on validated scales of the life history dimensions of mating effort and paren­tal investment, relationship interests and attractiveness, characteristics of his developmen­tal environment, and physiological characteristics. Results are consistent with generally accepted associations in life history theory and also inform current theoretical develop­ments and debates. Geijer had an intuitive understanding of life history patterns, which he used to create recognizable characters for his Romantic depiction of Swedish history.

This book’s argument about the clash between Darwinism and human psychology assigns a special place to the arts. Literary authors not only engaged with the theoretical ideas of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and Haeckel but also mirrored and expanded the evolutionary myth-making of those thinkers. Literary authors writing in vastly different genres extrapolated the evolutionary myths into fictional worlds. Historically, literary scholars have not attended to the psychological aspect of that influence. This chapter outlines the history of previous literary scholarship on Darwinism and explains how evolutionary literary theory advances on previous criticism. Traditional humanists have catalogued Darwinian influences on fiction without aiming for explanation, and poststructuralist literary scholars have explained the influences mainly through ideology. Evolutionary literary theory returns the human mind to the equation.

Perhaps no other author has evoked the cosmic horror of evolution with the single-minded intensity of Jack London. His conflicted worldview has long puzzled scholars. Through self-education and tumultuous life experiences, he became a firm Darwinian and an ardent socialist, deeply troubled by the contradictions between human justice and the natural world. To face that contradiction, he created a mythic life narrative: he split nature and culture into separate realms locked into battle. This chapter combines biographical and historical information with a conception of basic human motives, analyzing London’s worldview as a response to the psychological challenges of Darwinism.

How far is it possible to avoid turning Darwinism into myths? The scientists and literary authors in this study did not possess fully objective minds. Modern studies of cognitive biases suggest that 160 years have not produced radical psychological transformations in the human species. Most of us have to contend with tendencies to see nature and culture as opposing forces, to form past and future into narrative structures featuring human characters, and to ascribe human meaning to the cosmos. These tendencies are reflected in modern fiction and popular science. But those tendencies do not condemn us to live entirely in our imaginations. Humans might be poised in a balancing act between difficult truths and soothing fictions, but the fictions sometimes help us see the truth.

Joseph Conrad is by far the most critically acclaimed turn-of-the-century novelist to engage with naturalistic cosmology. His moral perspective has been much debated by scholars. This chapter analyzes his self-narrative, and its expression in Heart of Darkness, as a response to the psychological pressures of Darwinism. Conrad envisioned an essentially amoral naturalistic world in conflict with moral ideals, saw the human mind divided between contradictory instincts, agonized over the relationship between human nature and political idealism, and depicted Western civilization encountering its deep past in tropical locales. His puzzling combination of irony and simple morality can be understood as a personal post-Darwinian mythology: a simultaneous recognition of human social dispositions and the amorality of nature, united by the idea of nature as spectacle.

If the late Victorian literati were allowed only one “evolutionary myth-maker,” the title would go to H. G. Wells. Wells had an immensely prolific and visible career. Though he had ambitions as a scientist, a realist novelist, a satirist, a journalist, a global political reformer, and a historian, he is now remembered mainly for his early science fiction stories. Those stories helped transform Victorian adventure genres into scientific mythology, introducing enduring tropes like the time machine. But the stories were also shaped by Wells’s self-narrative: a fundamentally Darwinian worldview, made tolerable through a mythic split between nature and mind, with himself as the savior of mind. This chapter analyzes the psychology of Wells’s evolutionary myth-making and its imaginative expression in two of his most famous novels.

Evolution, which has challenged the human imagination more than any other scientific discovery, can also be used to explain the human imagination. This chapter explains why Darwinian evolution is a particular challenge to human psychology. Unlike previous accounts of humanity’s origin, Darwin’s theory expands far beyond the time scale of human generations, demands an understanding of statistics, and lacks human moral purpose. The chapter also argues that human imaginative worlds help guide our flexible behavior. Our mythologies and artistic visions imbue human concerns with cosmic significance so that those concerns seem valuable despite their smallness on the cosmic scale. In the wake of Darwin’s theory, there was a particular need for new mythologies. Darwin’s conclusions clashed with the human imagination, but also stimulated it profoundly.

To understand how Darwinism affected the literary imagination, one needs to understand how Darwinism was processed imaginatively by the scientists, philosophers, and social reformers who disseminated it. This chapter analyzes early evolutionary thinkers like Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel. No early evolutionary thinker could transform Darwinism into untroubled mythology. But they followed universal features of myth-making: turning evolution into something more comprehensible, orderly, spectacular, and purposeful; translating natural selection into human social terms, as an evil to fight or a struggle toward good; putting humanity back at the center of nature; and devising strategies for circumventing materialism and randomness. These universal features were modulated by cultural ideas, values, and personality differences. Keen minds reached opposite conclusions about nature, shaping enduring myths.

How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the “science wars” over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women’s or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines. Keywords: human nature, culture, science, science wars, cultural construction, evolutionary social science, social science, humanities, biocultural theory

Scholars have disagreed about Joseph Conrad’s work for more than a century. He has been broadly interpreted as both a moral relativist and a moralist. This chapter uses a combination of personality psychology, evolutionary literary theory, and biographical research to explain the contrasting impressions. Conrad lived during a time when intellectuals first faced the psychological challenges of Darwinian evolution. Because of his imaginative neuroticism and extreme conscientiousness, he was particularly disturbed by the revelation that nature is amoral. But he responded with unusual fortitude. He imagined himself as a sympathetic observer of the amoral cosmos, dedicated to simple moral values that he saw as part of human nature. Both his seeming moral relativism and his seeming moralism were thus naturalistic. He neither imposed human morality on the natural world nor discarded morality from human nature. Conrad’s most famous work, Heart of Darkness, enacts his remarkable balance between human psychological needs and non-mythological reality. It is an allegory of facing amoral nature, providing mythic texture for the post-Darwinian world.

Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. From the biocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted in the biological necessities of the human life cycle: specifically human forms of birth, growth, survival, mating, parenting, and sociality. Conversely, from the biocultural perspective, human biological processes are constrained, organized, and developed by culture, which includes technology, culturally specific socioeconomic and political structures, religious and ideological beliefs, and artistic practices such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling. Establishing biocultural theory as a program that self-consciously encompasses the different particular forms of human evolutionary research could help scholars and scientists envision their own specialized areas of research as contributions to a coherent, collective research program. This article argues that a mature biocultural paradigm needs to be informed by at least 7 major research clusters: (a) gene-culture coevolution; (b) human life history theory; (c) evolutionary social psychology; (d) anthropological research on contemporary hunter-gatherers; (e) biocultural socioeconomic and political history; (f) evolutionary aesthetics; and (g) biocultural research in the humanities (religions, ideologies, the history of ideas, and the arts). This article explains the way these research clusters are integrated in biocultural theory, evaluates the level of development in each cluster, and locates current biocultural theory within the historical trajectory of the social sciences and the humanities. Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. From the biocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted in the biological necessities of the human life cycle: specifically human forms of birth, growth, survival, mating, parenting, and sociality. Conversely, from the biocultural perspective, human biological processes are constrained, organized, and developed by culture, which includes technology, culturally specific socioeconomic and political structures, religious and ideological beliefs, and artistic practices such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling. Establishing biocultural theory as a program that self-consciously encompasses the different particular forms of human evolutionary research could help scholars and scientists envision their own specialized areas of research as contributions to a coherent, collective research program. This article argues that a mature biocultural paradigm needs to be informed by at least 7 major research clusters: (a) gene-culture coevolution; (b) human life history theory; (c) evolutionary social psychology; (d) anthropological research on contemporary hunter-gatherers; (e) biocultural socioeconomic and political history; (f) evolutionary aesthetics; and (g) biocultural research in the humanities (religions, ideologies, the history of ideas, and the arts). This article explains the way these research clusters are integrated in biocultural theory, evaluates the level of development in each cluster, and locates current biocultural theory within the historical trajectory of the social sciences and the humanities.