Carroll, Joseph
2006
The human revolution and the adaptive function of literature

33
EP = Evolutionary Psychology
EACA = Evolutionary Anthropology and Cognitive Archaeology

34
“These relative spans are important because they establish which set of environments and conditions defined the adaptive problems the mind was shaped to cope with: Pleistocene conditions, rather than modern conditions.”

35
“The EP model of human evolution is a model not of change but of stasis.”

39
“the originating force in the revolution is some crucial development in the capacity for language.”
“In the EP model, all the adaptive structures that had developed in the course of hominid evolution stabilized during the Pleistocene, and they stabilized in adaptive adjustment to a specific ecology, that of hunter-gatherers. The hunting and gathering way of life provided the regularities against which natural selection shaped the human motivational and cognitive system. In the EACA model, in contrast, human evolution did not stabilize in a structure of adaptations genetically molded to the hunter-gatherer way of life.”
“Hominids in the direct lineage of modern humans accumulated an ever-expanding repertory of adaptations designed to provide them with the capacity for flexible response to unstable ecological and demographic conditions, and that capacity for flexible response culminated in the Human Revolution.”
“The Human Revolution produced an exponential increase in the human capacity to manipulate its own ecology, including its social organization, and that revolutionary alteration in human power rendered the total human environment still more unstable, more variable and complex, more rapidly changing, than it had ever been before. The pace of change fuelled by technology keeps increasing, but so far, human motivational and cognitive structures have kept pace marvelously well with those changes.”

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“The arts, including the oral antecedents of literature, would serve a vital adaptive function—that of organizing human motives and thus ultimately regulating behavior.”

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“”There was not enough time for human heredity to cope with the vastness of new contingent possibilities revealed by high intelligence. . . . The arts filled the gap.“”
“”With fiction unleashing our reactions to potential lives and realities, we feel more richly and adaptively about what we have not actually experienced.“”

43
“The experience of reading—or the auditory equivalent in the oral antecedents to literature—has some parallel with the experience of dreaming and also with the experience of “virtual reality” simulators. It is an experience of subjective absorption within an imaginary world, a world in which motives, situations, persons, and events operate dramatically, in narrative sequence. Unlike dreams, most literary works have a strong component of conscious conceptual order—a “thematic” order. But like dreams, and unlike other forms of conscious conceptual order—science, philosophy, scholarship—literature taps directly into the elemental response systems activated by emotion. Works of literature thus form a point of intersection between the most emotional, subjective parts of the mind and the most abstract and cerebral. This feature of literature is not incidental to its adaptive function. Literature provides imaginative structures within which people can integrate the ancient, conserved elements of their nature—elements conserved from pre-mammalian systems of approach/avoidance, mammalian affectional systems, and systems of primate sociality—with the conceptual, thematic structures through which they make abstract, theoretical sense of the world in which they live.”

43f
“Given that literature is a human universal, more particular evidence can be derived, in almost limitless quantity and diversity, from every culture on earth, for the way literature enters into the total motivational life of individuals, shaping and directing their belief systems and their behavior.”

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“literature has a profound impact on the emotions and ideas of its consumers.”
“The distinguishing characteristic of literature is that it creates an imaginative order in which simulated experience can take place. None of the secondary purposes [like to make money, to impress people, and perhaps sometimes even to attract sexual partners] has any particular affinity with that characteristic, and as a result none accounts for the profound psychological and cultural effects of literature. In seeking to identify adaptive benefits for literature as a universal and reliably developing human behavior, we should not let secondary purposes draw our attention away from the distinguishing characteristics that can help us to identify the primary adaptive functions of the behavior.”

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“Writers are people, and people construct imaginative scenarios in order to satisfy their own psychological needs. The most general such need is the need to articulate and affirm the writer’s own characteristic stances or ways of coping with the world—his or her own beliefs, values, and attitudes. The total set of these beliefs, values, and attitudes constitutes a “point of view,” a certain perspective on the world. In this broad sense, there is a distinct point of view implicit in all literary art. Characters in a literary representation, like people in real life, need to affirm their own distinct points of view, but the author mediates among all represented points of view and encompasses them within a single, comprehensive interpretation. The ultimate shaping force behind any imaginative construct is thus the individual identity of the writer. It is for this reason, as Henry James declares, that “the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.“” The pieces of an entarch may vary in style, point of view, etc, but the entarch has to unify them into a whole.
“All individual identities are shaped partly by innate characteristics—the elements of human nature that vary within the range of individual differences—and partly by the conditions of experience.”

45f
“Collective and public conditions include climate and physical ecology, the forms of social organization, the modes of production, and collective imaginative structures such as religions, political ideologies, moral doctrines, philosophical ideas, and literary traditions. The total set of such collective imaginative structures is a chief part of what we commonly call “culture.””

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“every literary text constitutes a distinct arrangement of the symbolic meanings available within a given cultural order, including its literary traditions.” An entarch has to be based in a culture if it want to appeal to people from this culture.
“all individual writers introduce some element of individual uniqueness or creativity into the symbolic order of their own cultures.” Especially the first entarchs will introduce VERY new elements.