Download Complete The Early Evolutionary Imagination: Literature and Human Nature 1st Edition Emelie Jonsson PDF for All Chapters
Download Complete The Early Evolutionary Imagination: Literature and Human Nature 1st Edition Emelie Jonsson PDF for All Chapters
Download Complete The Early Evolutionary Imagination: Literature and Human Nature 1st Edition Emelie Jonsson PDF for All Chapters
com
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-early-evolutionary-
imagination-literature-and-human-nature-1st-edition-emelie-
jonsson/
OR CLICK BUTTON
DOWNLOAD NOW
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-ethics-of-killing-life-death-and-
human-nature-1st-edition-christian-erk/
ebookmass.com
https://ebookmass.com/product/human-success-evolutionary-origins-and-
ethical-implications-hugh-desmond/
ebookmass.com
Human Nature and the Causes of War 1st ed. 2018 Edition
John David Orme
https://ebookmass.com/product/human-nature-and-the-causes-of-war-1st-
ed-2018-edition-john-david-orme/
ebookmass.com
The Spaces Between Us: A Story of Neuroscience, Evolution,
and Human Nature Michael S.A. Graziano
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-spaces-between-us-a-story-of-
neuroscience-evolution-and-human-nature-michael-s-a-graziano/
ebookmass.com
https://ebookmass.com/product/social-psychology-and-human-nature-
brief-4th-edition-baumeister/
ebookmass.com
https://ebookmass.com/product/haunted-nature-entanglements-of-the-
human-and-the-nonhuman-sladja-blazan/
ebookmass.com
The Early
Evolutionary
Imagination
Literature and Human Nature
Emelie Jonsson
Cognitive Studies in Literature and Performance
Series Editors
Bruce McConachie, Department of Theatre Arts, University of
Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Blakey Vermeule, Department of English, Stanford University, Stanford,
CA, USA
This series offers cognitive approaches to understanding perception,
emotions, imagination, meaning-making, and the many other activities
that constitute both the production and reception of literary texts and
embodied performances.
The Early
Evolutionary
Imagination
Literature and Human Nature
Emelie Jonsson
UiT The Arctic University of Norway
Tromsø, Norway
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For the ones who raised me with art and nature,
and for the one who unified my universe.
Acknowledgments
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ix
Contents
xi
xii CONTENTS
Index 293
CHAPTER 1
humans come from? What makes us special, how do we fit into nature,
and where are we going? In answer to these questions, world religions
and tribal mythologies assure us that we have been chosen by supernatural
forces for some purpose, that our history was shaped by grandiose events,
that our concerns have universal significance, and that the world works
according to human moral laws that mete out ultimate punishments and
rewards. These are all answers from within our subjective human universe.
Darwin, for the first time, began to provide scientific answers that gave
us glimpses of ourselves from the outside. His view of our place in nature
clashed with the views of mythology and religion—and, as I will argue,
with the human imagination itself.
Before Darwin, human self-definition had been largely guided by
human desires. Philosophers and naturalists either thought within the
established religious stories or created new stories without much to check
the biases of their own human minds. Though there had been hints of
species change and common descent in human thought from ancient
Greek and Chinese philosophy up through Darwin’s near-contemporaries
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, and Robert Chambers, those
hints had never taken the shape of naturalistic explanation detached from
a cosmic purpose of perfection or transcendence (Appleman 1970, 3–45).
As Huxley said, those looking for original answers to the great human
questions faced “difficulties and dangers” (2009 [1863], 57). The estab-
lished answers had the double benefit of being habitual and of being
inherently comfortable for the human mind. For the Victorians, Darwin’s
theory was a fairly late, decisive blow in the ongoing struggle between
naturalistic and Christian cosmology. But the discomfort it produced ran
deep. The Darwinian account of life clashes with mythology generally,
because as the theory itself would come to show, it runs counter to the
way our minds work.
In our time, Darwin’s theory has guided a synthesis of biology, anthro-
pology, and psychology that aims to explain our species the way we would
explain any other species. To the best of our current understanding, our
minds have been shaped for survival and reproduction in our particular
niche. We tend to focus on the human life cycle and the threats and
rewards that most commonly attend it. We pay attention to life events
like births, growing up, finding a place in the sustenance system, romantic
bonding, parenting, and death. We worry about survival, enjoy learning
and imitation, get caught up in games of trust and deception, feel at home
in communities, thrill and rage in conflict with other communities, punish
1 USING EVOLUTION TO EXPLAIN THE EVOLUTIONARY IMAGINATION 3
bullies and cheaters, strive for status, feel the deep satisfaction of construc-
tive effort, and take pleasure in various kinds of love and imaginative life.
Though we share many of these features with other animals, they come
together into a specifically human profile. That human profile is imprinted
on our minds. We can imagine alternative paths of life and different time
periods—even magical universes, fictional technology, or empires in outer
space populated by unknown sentient species. But all such imaginative
visions take their shape from the basic categories of our human life cycle.
Like all imaginative stories, our cosmic origin stories build the universe
around human life trajectories and social relationships.
The human profile means that Darwinian evolution fits inside our
imagination like a grain of sand under an eyelid. In Darwin’s origin story,
we are one of millions of species that have evolved on Earth, and most
species have gone extinct. Our concerns are not universally relevant, only
adaptations to our particular niche. Our history was shaped by innumer-
able small chance events. Our future may be extinction or changes so
extreme that we become unrecognizable as a species. The universe works
according to amoral natural laws. These answers to the great human ques-
tions are the reverse of the answers given by mythologies and artistic
visions—given, that is, by the human imagination. Despite Darwin’s occa-
sional flights of rhetoric, his human origin story came without heroic
characters, anthropomorphized weather, rituals and symbols, meaningful
adventures, agonistic structures arranged around human concerns, and
more or less directly recommended courses of life. In its most detailed
form it was abstract, counterintuitive, and difficult to grasp. Thus, it posed
a problem different from all other cosmological shifts, like that from
pagan religions to Christianity. Rather than being faced with a full imag-
inative story created by other human minds, the Victorians were faced
with data gradually uncovered by human minds.
Darwin’s conclusions were distressing, but they were also evocative
precisely because they began to tell a story like no other. Darwinian
evolutionary theory revealed facts about the natural world that still cause
wonder, and principles that are still hard to keep in focus without beau-
tification. It brought to light a delicate balance between the struggle
for existence and the reality of cooperation, the details of which still
puzzle biologists. It forced us to think statistically, seeing species neither
as essential types nor as arbitrary categories of the human mind, but as
groups of subtly different individuals united by gradations of similarity
and interaction. It re-painted our family tree in a way that stretched the
4 E. JONSSON
Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.
ebookmass.com