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Joseph Carroll Mathias Clasen Emelie Jonsson Editors Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture Joseph Carroll • Mathias Clasen Emelie Jonsson Editors Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture Editors Joseph Carroll Mathias Clasen Department of English Department of English University of Missouri–St. Louis Aarhus University Saint Louis, MO, USA Aarhus C, Denmark Emelie Jonsson Department of Language and Culture University of TromsØ, TromsØ, Norway ISBN 978-3-030-46189-8 ISBN 978-3-030-46190-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46190-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 The chapters “Imagination, the Brain’s Default Mode Network, and Imaginative Verbal Artifacts” and “The Role of Aesthetic Style in Alleviating Anxiety About the Future” are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). 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This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Joseph Carroll, Mathias Clasen, and Emelie Jonsson Part I I magination: Evolution, Mechanisms, and Functions Imagination, the Brain’s Default Mode Network, and Imaginative Verbal Artifacts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Joseph Carroll The Evolution of Imagination and Fiction Through Generativity and Narrative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Valerie van Mulukom Imagination, Symbolic Cognition, and Human Evolution: The Early Arts Facilitated Group Survival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Dahlia W. Zaidel Part II M yth and Religion Mimesis and Myth: Evolutionary Roots of Psychological Self-Understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Dan P. McAdams and Henry R. Cowan Imagining the Gods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 E. Thomas Lawson Part III Aesthetic Theory Key Stimuli and Power Objects: Aesthetics and Our Innate Sensibilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Henrik Høgh-Olesen The Role of Aesthetic Style in Alleviating Anxiety About the Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 James Carney v vi Contents Part IV Music Music and the Evolution of Embodied Cognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Stephen Asma Part V Visual and Plastic Arts The Influence of Image Salience on the Artistic Renditions of Cave Lions in the Early Upper Paleolithic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Richard G. Coss Evolutionary Constraints on Creativity in the Visual and Plastic Arts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Aaron Kozbelt Part VI Video Games and Films “Unbreakable, Incorruptible, Unyielding”: Doom as an Agency Simulator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen Cliodynamics and Dramatic Performances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Bruce McConachie Part VII Oral Narratives and Literature Descent with Imagination: Oral Traditions as Evolutionary Lineages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 Jamshid J. Tehrani I’m with You Till the End of the Line: The Romanticization of Male Bonds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Catherine Salmon and Rebecca L. Burch Literary Representations of Parental Investment: Fitness Quandaries and Strategic Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Judith P. Saunders Why the World Is a Better Place with Stephen King in It: An Evolutionary Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Mathias Clasen Heart of Darkness: Joseph Conrad’s Confrontation with Amoral Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343 Emelie Jonsson Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 About the Editors ∎ Joseph Carroll is Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the English department at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Since the early 1990s, he has been working to integrate evolutionary research and literary study. He has developed an evolutionary theory of literature, produced interpretive essays on literary works ranging from plays of Shakespeare to modern novels, written essays in intellectual history, and conducted empirical research on protagonists and antagonists in Victorian fiction. Mathias Clasen is associate professor in literature and media in the English department, Aarhus University, and associate editor of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. His research focuses on horror entertainment from an evolutionary perspective. His book Why Horror Seduces was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. Emelie Jonsson is assistant professor of English literature at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her research centers on the friction between human psychology and naturalistic cosmology. She has published evolutionary interpretive arguments on E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, T. H. Huxley, and Edward Bulwer Lytton, as well as collaborated on quantitative projects concerning intellectual history, biocultural theory, and poetic archetypes reflecting mating strategies. She is an associate editor of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture. vii Contributors Stephen Asma is Professor of Philosophy and Founding Fellow of the Research Group in Mind, Science and Culture at Columbia College Chicago. Asma is the author of ten books, including The Evolution of Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2017), On Monsters: an Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (Oxford, 2009), and The Emotional Mind (Harvard University Press, 2019). He writes regu- larly for the New York Times and Aeon, and he has played guitar onstage with many musical artists, including Bo Diddley and Buddy Guy. Rebecca L. Burch is an associate professor of psychology at SUNY Oswego. Her main research interests are the evolution of sexual behavior, sexual signaling, domestic violence, and cultural differences and similarities in a variety of human behaviors, including sex, parenting, play, gender, and development. James Carney is Wellcome Fellow in the medical humanities at Brunel University London. His current research centers on how machine learning and artificial intel- ligence can be used to predict the impact of cultural objects on audiences suffering from depression or anxiety. He has published on a wide variety of topics across the humanities and quantitative social sciences and maintains a particular interest in blending interpretive, experimental, and computational methodologies. Richard G. Coss is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. He has published more than 120 academic pieces examining the interactive roles of natural selection and environmental experiences shaping the neurobiology and behavior of 22 different species in the lab and field, including children and adults. His long-term interest is identifying specific aspects of visual aesthetics shaped by natural selection that might account for cross-cultural continu- ity in artistic expression. Henry R. Cowan is a graduate student in Clinical Psychology at Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL. He works in personality and clinical psychology to understand how self-referential processing, self-concept, and narrative identity ix x Contributors impact well-being and psychopathology. He is the author of diverse research articles and a frequent presenter at academic conferences. Henrik Høgh-Olesen is Professor of Social and Personality Psychology, Department of Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published 13 academic books, most recently The Aesthetic Animal (Oxford University Press, 2019), and more than 120 articles. He has published fiction and drama. His fields of interest are ethology, comparative psychology, behavioral and evolutionary psychology, cognitive archaeology, and pre-historic art, and he has studied the behavior of humans, apes, and monkeys in naturalistic and experimental settings. Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen is a graduate student in the Department of English at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research is mainly concerned with the heroes and villains of popular culture. He applies a cognitive perspective to these charac- ters to investigate their psychological functions and appeal. For more information, including contact information, detailed research interests, and a full list of publica- tions, see http://au.dk/en/jkc@cc. Aaron Kozbelt is a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research focuses on creativity and cognition in the arts. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and is a co-editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2nd ed.). He serves on several editorial boards and has received several national and international awards for his research. E. Thomas Lawson is Honorary Professor of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University Belfast and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University. He is the author of African Religions: Traditions in Transformation and co-author (with Robert N. McCauley) of Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture and Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms and Executive Editor of the Journal of Cognition and Culture. He has also written on the psychology of creative writing especially in science fiction. Dan P. McAdams is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Psychology and Professor of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL. A personality and lifespan developmental psychologist, McAdams examines concepts of self and identity in contemporary American society, especially in the midlife years, with an emphasis on the stories people construct to make sense of their lives. He is the author most recently of The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (2006/2013) and The Art and Science of Personality Development (2015). Contributors xi Bruce McConachie is professor emeritus in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. A past President of the American Society for Theatre Research, his recent books include Evolution, Cognition, and Performance (Cambridge, 2015), Theatre Histories: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (with three co- authors, Routledge, 2016), and The Routledge Companion to Theatre, Performance, and Cognitive Science (co-edited with Rick Kemp, 2018). Catherine Salmon is a professor of psychology at the University of Redlands in California. She is the co-author of Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fiction, Evolution and Female Sexuality as well as The Secret Power of Middle Children. She has written chapters in numerous books, including the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, The Literary Animal, and Darwin’s Bridge. Her research interests include birth order and family dynamics, eating disorders and reproductive suppression, and sexuality and popular culture. She is also the editor of the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Judith P. Saunders is a professor of English at Marist College in New York State. She has published evolutionary analyses of fiction, poetry, and autobiography in the British and American literary traditions. She is the author of Reading Edith Wharton Through a Darwinian Lens: Evolutionary Biological Issues in Her Fiction (2009) and American Classics: Evolutionary Perspectives (2018). Jamshid J. Tehrani is an associate professor at the Department of Anthropology, Durham University (UK), and a founding member of the Durham Cultural Evolution Research Centre (DCERC). He was formerly a research fellow at the AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity (CECD) at University College London, where he trained for his PhD. His research examines how culture evolves as it gets transmitted from person to person and from generation to generation, with a special focus on popular narratives, such as traditional folktales, urban legends, and modern-d ay conspiracy theories. Valerie van Mulukom is a Research Fellow at Coventry University, United Kingdom. Valerie completed her PhD in the cognitive neuroscience of imagination at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, after which she held postdoctoral posi- tions at Aarhus University and the University of Oxford, where she did research on memory and the cognitive science of religion. Currently, she combines her back- grounds to do research on the cognitive science and evolution of imagination, memory, and belief at Coventry University. Dahlia W. Zaidel conducts research at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her subjects include the brain’s underpinning of behavior in neuropsychology, hemispheric specialization, face and beauty, and art. The elusiveness of art’s neural basis has driven her current research and writing. She combines findings from neu- rology, neuropsychology, archaeology, anthropology, biology, and evolution.