CELC: Science and Cultural Evolution

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

I had been working on the blog entry that will appear next month. It is a review of the book Criticism and Truth by Jonathan Kramnick. That book makes claims about the "craft knowledge" of literary scholars. I began thinking about the craft knowledge that is involved in the physical sciences and how the scientific method relates to Henrich's version of cultural evolution. This month, I will discuss scientific methods, plural, and cultural evolution.

There is an old joke about a farmer who consults with a physicist. The farmer is worried about how few eggs his chickens are laying. The physicist studies the problem and comes up with a solution. But, she explains, the solution only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum.

In The Secret of our Success, Henrich discusses four essential features that distinguish human social life from that of other species (186-7). One: "We live in a world governed by social rules, even if not everyone knows the rules." Two: "Many of those rules are arbitrary, or seem arbitrary ..." Three: "Others care whether we follow these rules, and react negatively to violations;" and four: "We infer that others care about whether we follow these rules" (186).

One might imagine that the scientific method transcends these essential features of human social life. If we form a hypothesis about a socially accepted understanding that is used to justify a rule about behavior, we might hope that experimental evidence might be used to change the rule without waiting for the slower process of cultural evolution. But what is the relationship between cultural evolution and scientific knowledge?

Let's use as an example a study that was published in the journal Lancet in its July 16, 2005, issue. The CDC of the United States in conjunction with Procter and Gamble and agencies from the nation of Pakistan conducted a thorough and comprehensive experiment to see if the practice of children regularly washing their hands would reduce the rate of infectious disease in a relatively poor population (see citation below). They compared washing with regular soap and anti-bacterial soap. The surprise result was that diligent washing with regular soap was just as effective as washing with anti-bacterial soap, and washing with either soap was very effective at reducing infections among children.

Now, observers have noted since the mid-nineteenth century that handwashing reduces the spread of disease (just ask Ignaz Semmelweis). This 2005 study, however, raised to the level of fact this claim: that diligent handwashing with regular soap in particular reduces the spread of infectious diseases among children as effectively as regular handwashing with anti-bacterial soap.

Numerous studies for over a century have allowed us to say that it is objectively true that you should wash your hands. You should adopt that as a cultural practice not because some other person high in the prestige hierarchy within your community said that you should wash your hands (what I sometimes call the treu aspect of truth); rather, you should do it because it reduces the chance you will get sick (what I sometimes call the wahr, or veritas, aspect of truth).

The nickel tour of some thoughts on the scientific method:

One could break the scientific method into three stages. 1) The first is one where someone forms an abstract idea about how the world works. That idea could come from systematic observations (think, Michael Faraday's studies of electromagnetic fields). Or that idea could come from a belief about the world (think, Einstein's faith that the laws of nature should be the same in all reference frames).

2) The abstract idea is then refined, perhaps by using mathematics or simplifying models (such as assuming that chickens are spherical and move in a vacuum), to produce specific predictions that might be tested by observation. For example, using the patterns in his periodic law, Dmitri Mendeleev predicted the properties of three hitherto unknown chemical elements. This prediction followed logically from his abstract theory. (His abstract theory, though, had been built in part through the patterns of observations of other, known elements.)

3) The predictions of the abstract idea are then tested by observation. If the idea is tested by physical experiments, craft knowledge is used to fashion those experiments to test the claims that follow logically from the abstract idea about how the world works. Experimental scientists have to be sharp-eyed, skilled with their hands, clever about putting equipment together, etc. The craft knowledge of the experimenter has epistemic value. If the experiment is poorly crafted, it will fail to test the truth-value of the abstract idea. Experimental results can be misleading, which is why it is important to replicate experiments.

One can wax euphoric about the epistemic value of experiments; however, one must keep in mind that what is being tested by the experiment is the theory about the nature of the observable world. Admittedly, there is a complex back-and-forth between a) the theory, b) the theory's predications, and c) the observations, and that complexity makes this brief model simplistic. A different mathematical technique might lead to different predictions. An unexpected observation may cause a change in the theory, etc.

The question is: how does the practice of science compare to the theory of cultural evolution as articulated by Henrich? Henrich posits that, in general, humans are smarter than other animals in only one primary way: we are better at cultural learning. Most of the time most humans do not set up double-blind experiments and then apply statistics to the data sets to learn things. Instead, they look to individuals in their community who are considered to be knowledgeable, or just cool, and they learn from them.

This "looking to others" then forms a prestige hierarchy, in which lower-status individuals imitate and learn from higher-status individuals. In some instances, it can lead to the spread of scientific methods, as was the case in eighteenth-century Europe when philosophes followed the example of Newton's Opticks. In other instances, it can lead to families refusing to vaccinate their children because an influencer told them not to. All manner of social trends follow from our desire to imitate and learn culturally.

Cultural institutions can be established to help channel that desire to imitate toward individuals who are worthy of imitation, perhaps because they are skilled at adding to scientific knowledge. Universities are prestige hierarchies that foster the creation and preservation of knowledge. The Nobel prize and other such honors signal who in the social order is imitation-worthy.

One benefit to examining science through the perspective of cultural evolution is that cultural evolution brings in the social and political aspects of the process. Discovering deep structures in how the universe works is a cultural value in and of itself, but it also brings practical advantages for the human community that holds it, and it does not occur in a vacuum (with spherical chickens).

Expanding the collective brain has social and economic implications. Prestige hierarchies of knowledge, scientific or otherwise, have to work with dominance hierarchies of political and military power. The financial resources which are used to support the scientific enterprise come from economic systems that depend on the social behavior of the entire community. Cultural evolution puts this dynamic between scientific knowledge and cultural jockeying into a broader context of cultural learning and prestige hierarchies.

As for our example with handwashing and disease, I haven't seen any reports that anyone at Procter and Gamble ever publically regretted their involvement in the study, but I can imagine that they had been hoping that their patented anti-bacterial soap would have been more effective than regular soap for controlling infections. There is an economic aspect to human cultural communities. P. and G. had a financial stake in the outcome.

The Theory of Cultural Evolution itself makes truth claims. It comes from a tradition that, if not scientific itself, is certainly a philosophical viewpoint that is science-adjacent. Accepting that humans evolved through an interplay of cultural and genetic factors implies accepting the values of the disciplines from which the theory arose.

Bibliography

Luby, S. P., Agboatwalla, M., Feikin, D. R., Painter, J., Billhimer, W., Altaf, A., & Hoekstra, R. M. (2005). Effect of handwashing on child health: a randomised controlled trial. The Lancet, 366(9481), 225-233.

James Poskett and Peter Dear, Book Reviews. Collected Reviews Off-line

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include other topics. This entry discusses the history of science. But first, a note about my collection of book reviews.

Back around 2010, the nonprofit library corporation OCLC had as a feature of their WorldCat service the ability to attach a book review to the record of a book in their combined catalog WorldCat. At the time, I liked to write Amazon reviews, but I didn't like giving Jeff Bezos my intellectual property, and there are many books, such as Ph. D. dissertations, which are not in Amazon. Goodreads is also owned by Amazon, and, like Amazon, Goodreads does not contain the entire universe of books.

Over the next ten years, I posted about 250 book reviews on WorldCat. Some of them were brief, but some were as complex as a scholarly review. They centered on my own personal interests: writings about John Kennedy Toole, books on the history and philosophy of science, especially evolution, and other topics. I even started writing reviews of novels from the perspective of evolutionary literary criticism.

All that came crashing down when OCLC eliminated the book review function in 2022. Fortunately, I had saved the reviews, so they were not lost. I created a webpage in HTML and posted it on a personal web space that was provided to me by my university. By the summer of 2025, I had posted 172 book reviews on the page. I also placed a counter on the page run by the company Statcounter.com. One thing I discovered from a couple years worth of data was that very few people were reading my book reviews ( ... and I mean, very few).

The publication of the reviews again came crashing down when my university eliminated personal websites for faculty at the end of 2025. Because no one was viewing them anyway, I do not feel a great rush to repost them. I do eventually want to have them on the web, but eventually.

Since I was a child, I have had an interest in the nature and history of science. I am especially drawn toward its philosophical roots. In my college years in the 1980s, I was drawn to issues surrounding biological evolution. The philosopical details of evolution keep one's attention in part because a large fraction of the American public rejects that science for religious reasons. In this sense, the disagreements over the philosophical foundations of biological evolution have high stakes.

With my lost review collection in mind, I offer below a double book review. I review Horizons by James Poskett and The World As We Know It by Peter Dear. Both were published within the last five years, and they are a study in contrasts.

Horizons: A Global History of Science

Poskett's book Horizons gives the reader a quick tour of the history of science, emphasizing the contributions made by persons who were not from the sphere of European culture. Considering that many accounts of the history of science focus almost exclusively on European culture, Poskett's efforts have the salutary effect of widening the frame.

The book begins after the European discovery of the western Hemisphere. Poskett argues that the discovery of the New World showed Europeans that the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world were not all-knowing. Poskett explains that the Aztecs had a sophisticated culture which featured a thorough study of the animal and plant species of Mexico. When the Spaniards wrote back home about the natural history of Mexico, they consulted both native texts and native scholars.

The second chapter discusses astronomy. Poskett shows that Islamic scientists educated the European thinkers in this subject during the medieval era. He devotes sections to astronomical activities in China, India, and Africa. This history is important, because it is certainly the case that the knowledge collected by researchers in many parts of the world, not just members of European cultures, was important in supplying evidence and ideas to help guide the theories that have shaped our current understanding of the laws governing observable phenomena in our world, including our understanding of our planet and the cosmos. (Notice how carefully I have worded that long sentence.)

Poskett is committed to saying positive things about many different cultures. For some cultures, the task is easy. The Arabs gave western culture al-Gebra and al-Chemie (to say nothing of distilled al-Cohol). The Chinese gave western culture, among many other things, technologies such as paper and the printing press (to say nothing of gunpowder). For other cultures, though, Poskett seems to strain to identify things that could be construed as contributing to the scientific enterprise. Not every non-European culture contributed equally to what we now consider to be scientific knowledge, and some cultures that did contribute are unknown because of the inadequacies of the historical record.

Part two of the book covers the period of the ascendance of European science. Poskett emphasizes the connection between Enlightenment thinking and the vast financial profits that were derived from the building of European empires. The first chapter of this section is entitled "Newton's Slaves." (Isaac Newton didn't personally own slaves, but he did have some of his money invested in a British corporation that did profit from the slave trade, so he did participate directly in the overall economics of empire.) Poskett does not let the reader forget the human cost of the ascendancy of European science.

My problem is that, while Poskett is focused on the colonial economy that helped finance European science, he doesn't delve into what it was about the theories or methods of modern science made them so revolutionary. There have been many empires throughout human history that have oppressed and exploited conquered populations but which failed to produce advances in our scientific understanding of the universe. (The Spanish Empire that was contemporary to the British and French Empires of the modern era comes immediately to mind.)

What made the European Enlightenment different? We know that Newton made some money in ways that are today considered unethical, but we don't learn from Poskett why so many eighteenth century philosophes were desperate to imitate his intellectual accomplishments.

The World As We Know It

Peter Dear's book is focused on how the European intellectual discipline of natural philosophy was transformed into modern science. He digs into exactly what it was about Newton's approach that was revolutionary and caused would-be scientists across Europe for the next hundred and fifty years to follow his example. Lavoisier wanted to be the Newton of chemistry. Buffon saw himself as Newtonian. Cuvier wanted to be the Newton of anatomy.

With regard to Newton, Dear points out that there are two major parts of his legacy. First, the Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was an enormous achievement, building a branch of mathematics and using it to explain universal gravitation and the movement of both the planets and terrestrial objects. It showed how a handful of mathematical laws could accurately explain a wide range of phenomena, everything from the path of a comet to the plop of a turd in the toilet.

For this system of mechanics and gravitation, Newton did not begin with experimental methods; instead, he began with a first principle, that God had created universal laws of motion and gravity that were obeyed by all objects equally. He used observational data from Kepler (who got it from Brahe) as well as from sources outside the sphere of European culture (as Poskett explains). But the overall framework is a theoretical principle—that all objects with mass attract each other with gravitational force.

However, in Newton's own day, his second legacy was just as important as his laws of motion and gravity. His book Opticks showed how to conduct effective empirical experiments. It ended with a series of speculations about other areas of potential investigation, such as chemistry. His many followers in the eighteenth century were inspired as much by the experimental model and speculations from his second book as by the universal laws of motion from his first book.

To jump to the end of Dear's book, Dear shows the parallels in the thinking of Newton and Einstein with regard to gravity. Einstein did not take the steps of the traditional scientific method: first looking at experimental data, then forming a hypothesis, and finally testing it. He began with a strong conviction in a philosophical principle, that there is an ultimate simplicity to the universe. His theories were not driven by evidence; instead, they came from first principles and the thought experiments that followed from those principles.

Just as Newton believed that God had established laws for motion and gravity that are universal, Einstein believed that the laws of physics had to be invariant. When it was confirmed that light would bend in a gravitational field—a prediction of general relativity—someone asked Einstein what he would have thought if the observations had not confirmed the prediction. Einstein said that, if that had happened, he would have felt sorry for God, because the universe would have been less beautiful. As Dear writes, "the elegance, simplicity, and economy of the foundations of a theory acted for Einstein as the hallmarks of its truth."

To Poskett's credit, it is certainly true that knowledge gathered for all parts of the world informed the scientific revolution of the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. And the military and economic hegemony of European culture helped maintain support for that culture's privileging of scientific investigation. Dear's book, by focusing on the fine-grained philosophical debates, passes over that economic foundation.

Poskett's book, however, seems to overlook the critical role of the new theoretical and philosophical approaches that led to profound breakthroughs in many areas of knowledge nearly all at once. That new theoretical approach took place almost exclusively in the sphere of European culture.

These two books view science from very different angles. Both books are valuable in their own right, and each supplies an important part of the story missing from the other. Together they add to a more complete picture of the history of science.

Bibliography

Dear, Peter. The World as We Know It: From Natural Philosophy to Modern Science. Princeton UP, 2025.

Poskett, James. Horizons: A Global History of Science. Viking/Mariner Books, 2022.

CELC: Theory of Humor #30: Cultural Evolution and Humor

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

For years in this blog, I have explored the nature and origins of mirthful humor (especially from 2017 to 2020). In February of 2018, I articulated what I consider to be my own theory of humor as I merged two of the major schools within this discipline. (Note: I may call this my own theory of humor, but it is very similar to many other theories of humor. I haven't created something new so much as put my own spin on ideas that have been around for centuries, if not millennia. For a discussion of how similar many of those theories are, read this blog entry from October of 2018.)

In April of 2020, I showed how this theory could fit into a branch of evolutionary psychology. (Others may challenge my claim that I am using evolutionary psychology, as I use ideas that fall outside the strict definition of evolutionary psychology originating with Tooby and Cosmides.)

Since the summer of 2025, I have been trying to migrate the foundation of my approach to literary criticism to cultural evolution as articulated by Joseph Henrich. This effort raises the question: how does a foundation of cultural evolution change my theory of humor? Toward the end of this blog post, I will give an example.

At the beginning of my inquiry into humor, in a blog entry from July of 2015, I discussed the personality traits of the hero of a physical comedy. I had taken that list of traits from a documentary starring Rowan Atkinson. (Unfortunately, that video has been taken down from YouTube, probably because it has many clips of classic physical comedy from film.) In July of 2016, I issued a bit of a correction. Not all physical comedy conforms to the list of traits from that documentary, though Atkinson's list is still quite good in many instances. For the example I give below, I will review that Atkinson list of personality traits and discuss how they might fit into a theory of cultural evolution.

My Definition of Humor: Mirthful humor has two components: first, an incongruity that is triggered when two scripts or "mental spaces" in the brain clash with one another, and second, a social / emotional component. The social component often features disparagement or a lowering of social status, and the emotions are often inconguous emotions. Those two components usually occur within a playful context. Some humor focuses on the first component—incongruity—while other humor focuses on the second component—social adjustment.

I have adapted this theory of humor to be compatible with evolutionary psychology, but a version of evolutionary psychology that includes David Sloan Wilson's multilevel selection theory. I argue that humor often functions to adjust social status within a group of people, an adjustment which can be either gentle or aggressive. Non-violently adjusting social status helps a social group function smoothly. Having a well-functioning social group is important for group selection within multilevel selection theory. Within the framework of evolutionary literary criticism, humor can reinforce pro-group behavior and discourage anti-group behavior.

Cultural Evolution: How does this theory change under Henrich's cultural evolution? In The Secret of our Success, Henrich discusses four essential features that distinguish human social life from that of other species (186-7). One: "We live in a world governed by social rules, even if not everyone knows the rules." Two: "Many of those rules are arbitrary, or seem arbitrary ..." Three: "Others care whether we follow these rules, and react negatively to violations;" and four: "We infer that others care about whether we follow these rules" (186).

As Henrich continues, "From the gene's-eye view, survival and reproduction would have increasingly depended on the abilities of one's bearer (the individual) to acquire and navigate a social landscape governed by culturally transmitted local rules ..." (186).

How do social groups police violations of those norms according to Henrich? Typically in small-scale societies, "the sanctioning of norm violators begins with gossip and public criticism, often through joking ... and then intensifies to damage marital prospects and reduce access to trading ..." (188). As I have argued, when humor is used to sanction someone, it is typically a non-violent mechanism. What happens if the norm-violator does not get back into line? "If violators are still not brought into line, matters may escalate to ostracism or physical violence ... and occasionally ... group executions" (188). The background for this theory is found in the works of Boyd, Richerson, Bowles, and Boehm. Please consult Henrich's Secret for references.

The Example: Atkinson's theory of the slapstick protagonist

Below are the elements of Atkinson's theory of the personality traits of the hero in a physical comedy. I list the element and then explain how it fits into the framework of cultural evolutionary literary criticism (CELC).

1. Atkinson: The slapstick hero is alienated from his society. CELC: He finds himself in a low position on the social status hierarchy or outside it and has already been, to a degree, ostracized.
2. Atkinson: He is childish. (Childish here means that he is naively selfish.) CELC: This indicates that he refuses to adopt social norms which might include cooperative behavior toward others or is incapable of understanding them. One could say that he takes actions that might, if allowed, advance individual reproductive advantage, even when the social norms forbid those actions.
3. Atkinson: He has to fight with ordinary objects. CELC: He has not adopted the cultural practices that allow him to participate in the group's collective knowledge about their local environment, such as using tools properly.
4. Atkinson: His body can be humorous itself. CELC: His physical body may prevent him from conforming to social expectations. This relates to a form of prestige that is based on appearance or physical ability. He cannot achieve high-status within the dominance and prestige hierarchies of the group because of his diverging appearance or abilities.
5. Atkinson: He is uncivilized and cannot or will not conform to social rules. CELC: This point directly addresses his inability or unwillingness to embrace cultural learning. This point arguably includes several of the other traits, such as childishness.
6. Atkinson: He is a threat to respectable people. CELC: Respectability relates to conforming to social norms and staying within a prestige hierarchy. Again, because he refuses to conform to social norms, the slapstick hero is a threat to those for whom social norms are the basis for the group's status hierarchy.
7. Atkinson: He mocks authority and politeness. CELC: This is a sub-point of being a threat to respectable people and not conforming to social rules, but here his refusal to conform is intentional and active. He may already feel ostracized from the status hierarchy and actively reject it because he has himself been rejected.
8. Atkinson: He spreads confusion. CELC: Violating social norms causes the social order based on prestige and cultural learning to be thrown into disarray.
9. Atkinson: The final trait. He always survives his travails. CELC: Many violators of social norms who violate those norms to gain dominance or for genetic advantage threaten the basis for the social order. Those violators can be killed in retaliation. However, the slapstick hero is often like a child who is too immature to understand why social norms should be followed. He is not a fundamental threat to the social order, but the social order may have to restrain him. He might be expelled as a scapegoat, but he does not need to be killed to punish his refusal to follow social norms.

CELC: Role of Language in Human Nature

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

A variety of thinkers have held that human language is the medium of all thought within the human brain and is an essential precondition to us becoming reasoning beings. For example, this claim can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In a very different school of thought, the literary theorist Kenneth Burke also held that we think in language.

In the present day, some contemporary branches of Critical Theory hold that language is the crucial trait that allows humans to escape from biology and construct their world socially. One formulation of this idea is, "The world must be made to mean." For example, the book Ten Lessons in Theory is an introductory textbook to Critical Theory. In that book's introduction, Calvin Thomas writes, "The phrase 'textual anthropogenesis,' then, involves what's called linguistic determinism, or what I'll call semiotic materialism, the argument, also to my mind permanently revolutionary, that any human reality, and any individual or collective 'subject' thereof, any and all persons, must be made out of language as a specifically 'anti-natural'--unreal or 'anti-real'--form of productive labor." (xxiv).

Steven Pinker, as a neuroscientist and advocate for evolutionary psychology, holds that language is not the stuff of thought. Pinker argues that the mind thinks in its own internal thought-language called mentalese. Pinker started out in the field of neurolinguistics, so he is in an excellent position to make that case. To him, verbal language is a mechanism by which we can package information, originally formulated in mentalese, and share it with other individuals within our language community. It is a communications protocol, not the machine language of the brain's central processor. (To give my own example of non-linguistic thinking, a good chess player can sit down to a game and think hard for hours without using any language at all. A sculptor can do the same while wielding the chisel.)

The cultural evolution of Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich says that cultural learning is the essential precondition for what makes us human, not language per se. Language evolved in a cultural context in which we were already learning from one another.

Henrich argues that the skill for crafting physical tools may have come before verbal language. Sophisticated tool-making requires recursive mental procedures which parallel the recursive mental procedures of language. Therefore, tool-making could have been the cognitive path evolution took to build the genetically programmed neural structures that became the preadaptation for human language (Secret, pp. 250-255).

Language presents a tricky problem for evolution. If a single individual in a proto-human species were to begin to develop language, with whom could she speak? What selective advantage would accrue to this lone proto-speaker? It is difficult to see how language as a stand-alone instinct with specialized brain wetware can evolve. It would be like the sound of one hand clapping.

On the contrary, a social group that has a gifted tool-maker can benefit even if that individual's mental abilities are unique. Everyone else can still use those superior tools, even if they don't have the brains to make them. Brain structures that facilitate a complex Chomskyan grammar might have evolved because of the selective advantage that was conferred on early human communities with singular individuals who could produce superior tools. Only then did the selective advantage for cultural learning take those brain structures and adapt them to create this powerful communication system we call verbal language. Language, once evolved, then turbo-charged cultural learning.

For those theorists who have argued that language is a necessary precondition for humans evolving the capacity to cooperate with one another, Henrich argues that it is the other way around. "For complex communicative repertoires to evolve in the first place, this cooperative dilemma has to have already been at least partially solved. Therefore, language can't be the big solution to human cooperation" (257).

Whether the theory of language-through-toolmaking is confirmed by later research, this scenario at least offers at path by which it could have occurred. In Chomsky's original formulation of his universal grammar, the language instinct popped into existence as a fully formed spandrel, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Pinker's neurolinguistic work shows that the Chomskyan grammar which is universal among humans has some of the "Panda's thumb" imperfections that indicate that it has evolved, but Pinker did not explain how the human brain was able to boot-strap our sophisticated language-related traits from brains that lacked human language. Tool-making-first theories solve the paradox.

Post-script: As for recent research into the evolution of language-enabling structures in the brain and throat, scientists have compared the DNA of Homo sapiens (us) with the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans. They have found that the most rapid evolution within the human genome since the split with those other species has targeted the vocal tract and other language-related structures (as well as genes that have flattened the face and eliminated the chimp-like muzzle). See for example: Gokhman, David, et al. "Differential DNA methylation of vocal and facial anatomy genes in modern humans." Nature Communications 11.1 (2020): 1189.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Pinker, Steven. The Language Instinct. William Morrow, 1994.

Thomas, Calvin. Ten Lessons in Theory: A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing. 2nd Edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

CELC: Cultural Evolution and Biological Evolution

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include evolutionary literary criticism. I have recently begun to work on incorporating cultural evolution (from Joseph Henrich, who follows the work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson). To read the blog post that began this inquiry, see my post from July of 2025 entitled Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism.

One might reasonably ask: how does this theory of cultural evolution differ from the sorts of culture-first theories of human nature that might be found in the philosophical tradition of Critical Theory? It turns out that there is a big difference.

Using as a guide to critical theory the book Ten Lessons in Theory by Calvin Thomas (2/e), one can see that a foundation of that school is that humans are fundamentally different than other animals.¹ We humans have achieved a plane of existence in which we can define ourselves. Thomas uses the term antiphysis to signal this discontinuity. Language has allowed humans to cease to be bound by biology.

Thomas's version of Critical Theory--or just "Theory" as he calls it--seems to have some relationship to Henrich's cultural evolution. After all, Thomas calls the human condition, in contrast to mere animal nature, a "'sociogenic' and/or 'biocultural' existence" (22-23 of the preface). Thomas sees his antiphysis arising from Marx's historical materialism, and Marx was a reader of Darwin.

Nevertheless, antiphysis is a stance that culture is nearly completely divorced from biology. Thomas looks to Lacan as an authority, for example. Thomas's Freudian theory of child development is a century out of date. He argues that our use of language means that we have the ability to define ourselves ("the world must be made to mean") in a way that escapes scientific attempts to describe us. For Critical Theory, the philosophical "reification" which is a necessary precondition for describing the world in a scientific way is itself an evil to be exorcised. In particular, for Critical Theory, we have transcended the influence of natural selection.

By contrast, Henrich argues in Secret of our Success that cultural evolution has taken over from genetic evolution among humans, but that biological evolution still operates. In particular, he writes, "Cultural evolution is a type of biological evolution; it's just not a type of genetic evolution" (263). Again, "cultural differences are biological differences but not genetic differences" (263). He makes these statements after explaining that the skill of reading and comprehending a written language "actually rewires our brains to create a cognitive specialization" (262). Finally, culture may have taken over from genetics, but natural selection is still shaping the process.

A more hard-line, genes-only evolutionary psychology diminishes the role of culture in building the human being. However, Henrich's cultural evolution does not abandon completely the behavioral constraints that flow from the genes. "We evolved genetically to have (somewhat) programmable preferences, and modifying our preferences via cultural learning is part of how we adapt to different environments" (266). The word "somewhat" indicates that genes do still have an influence on preferences.

Footnote 1: It is my sincere hope that Thomas' Ten Lessons in Theory is fairly representative of Critical Theory in general, because I have studied it (the second edition), and I don't want to have to slog through another book about Critical Theory related to literary criticism.

Post-Script

In looking back over my history with evolutionary literary criticism and Henrich's cultural evolution, I see that the transition has been more gradual than I realized. I had listened to an audiobook of Secret of our Success in the summer of 2023. I have found evidence that it influenced my thinking about ELC before January 1, 2025. That might help explain why I subsequently declared that a transition from ELC to CELC was not that dramatic of a shift. What happened in the meantime was that I actually studied Henrich in detail and realized that I had to rewrite my entire theory.

Bibliography

Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.

Leighton, H. Vernon. "Henrich's Secret of our Success, Cultural Evolution as a new foundation for evolutionary literary criticism." John Kennedy Toole Research. Posted July 1, 2025. URL: https://leighton-toole-research.blogspot.com/2025/07/

Thomas, Calvin. Ten Lessons in Theory: A New Introduction to Theoretical Writing. 2nd Edition. Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

Ignatius as Romantic Aesthete, Idea #33, and More Toole Resources Moving to OpenRiver

On December 31, 2025, (yesterday) the university where I work, Winona State University, shut down the server that I have been using to publish many of my John Kennedy Toole resources and other resources. I will be exploring means to migrate my content to other servers.

Therefore, I have converted the rest of my JKT resources to PDF documents and am making all of them available in one of two places. The first place is OpenRiver, the institutional repository for Winona State University. A list of my resources on OpenRiver can be found at: https://openriver.winona.edu/do/search/?q=author%3A%22H.%20Vernon%20Leighton%22. The second place is my ResearchGate account, located at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Vernon-Leighton or click here: Vernon Leighton, ResearchGate.

My university has allowed me to create some webpages on a WordPress site, so my directory for various John Kennedy Toole resources is now at: John Kennedy Toole Research at educate dot winona dot edu. It has links to: 1) a PDF version of my Ideas for Papers or Term Papers on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the Occasional Series; 2) a PDF version of my Critical Annotated Bibliography of Obscure Scholarship on John Kennedy Toole and A Confederacy of Dunces; 3) a PDF version of my lecture, The Dialectic of American Humanism: the Lecture Script; and 4) a PDF version of my John Kennedy Toole's Papers: A cautionary tale of scholarly research, lecture script. I have decided that I will no longer be adding entries to either "Ideas for Papers" or the "Obscure Scholarship," so they will be fixed PDFs.

Versions of Evidence of Influences and ResearchGate

My "Evidence of Influences" paper was my first big study of Toole's novel. I had had several versions of that study. The version which I produced to accompany my big peer-review article, "Dialectic of American Humanism" (2012) was version 2.0. I did produce three years later a version 2.1, but no one has cited it, and I have not updated it since. I will let 2.1 vanish (unless you can find it on a way-back machine). Version 2.0 is the canonical text, and it was already on ResearchGate. A "Green" open access version of the peer-review article "Dialectic of American Humanism" is also already available on ResearchGate. You can find links to those resources on my John Kennedy Toole Research page on educate.winona.edu

As a perk to you for going to the OpenRiver site, I am adding one new entry to the "Ideas for Papers," which I have also included as part of this blog entry.

Idea for Paper about JKT and Confederacy, #33: Ignatius as Romantic Aesthete

Most of my ideas for papers on John Kennedy Toole, such as comparing Ignatius to Kosmo Kramer, are rather modest. This is not one of those modest ideas. This is a Big Idea. I had been saving it for myself. I believe that it genuinely warrants a peer-reviewed paper. Were I to devote further effort to writing one more scholarly paper on Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, this would probably be it.

Within the Toole Papers at Tulane, one will find that Ken Toole studied the 19th century English Romantics extensively. For example, in the Fall of 1956, Toole's Tulane transcript indicates that he took "English 651: English Romantic Poets, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats."

When Kenneth McIntyre wrote a book chapter for Theology and Geometry (2020), edited by Leslie Marsh, about the possible influence on Toole of the Kierkegaardian concept of the aesthete, I wrote to him. I let him know that there was no mention of Kierkegaard in Toole's surviving papers, but his studies of Romanticism are extensive, especially Keats. If Toole was thinking about an aesthete, it was probably not a Kierkegaardian aesthete but an aesthete in the mold of Keats or one from the Walter Pater school. Such an aesthete might be related to the sensitive types in Proust and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, discussed in Idea #14 above.

This theory that Ignatius is a Romantic aesthete meshes nicely with theme of Neoplatonism. The Romantics were big on Platonism and Neoplatonism. I would recommend to a scholar starting on this topic the book The Platonism of Shelley by Notopoulos (1952), which was contemporary to Toole's intellectual education. This Neoplatonism also nicely connects to Evelyn Waugh.

This theory also fits well with Ignatius's self-image as a genius. The Cult of the Genius was strong among the Romantics. Because Ignatius is a parody of a genius, A Confederacy of Dunces may be seen as mocking the pretensions of the Romantic aesthete.

Thesis: Explore the parallel themes within the tradition of English Romanticism and within A Confederacy of Dunces. Discuss aestheticism, Neoplatonism, and the role of the Genius.

Artificial Intelligence: What is Truth, What is Education?

This series of blog posts began as a set of observations about literary research on the novel A Confederacy of Dunces (Confederacy), by John Kennedy Toole, but I have extended it to include topics such as AI. This entry discusses a facet of that discipline.

First, I would like to acknowledge that a number of people offered advice on this topic, and they generally know more than I do about philosophy and education. I would name them, but then I would want to have their approval, and I take ultimate responsibility for this text.

On October 22, 2025, I was a co-presenter of a talk at Winona State University to the informal AI Discussion Group along with Professor Malgarzata Plecka. I billed the talk as "The Reverse Turing Test." The basic thesis of the talk was not groundbreaking in the least: if you are trying to discern whether an academic text was generated by AI rather than written by a person, then one strategy is to check the footnotes and references. AI systems will sometimes fabricate references to articles that don't really exist. If a submitted paper has fabricated references, a reviewer can reject it not because it was generated by AI, but because it is a flawed paper. It was probably generated by AI, but that is almost beside the point.

As part of that talk, I digressed onto the philosophical issues pertaining to the situation. Namely, I touched on philosophical theories of Truth. In last month's entry for this blog, I compared "truth as factual accuracy" with "truth as loyalty." A friend of mine who is more familiar with these issues pointed me toward a philosophical position called "The Correspondence Theory of Truth." Does a given statement correspond to a state of affairs in the world?

I sent this paragraph to a philosophy professor:

Some schools of thought deprecate the belief that there is an external, objective, observable world at all, much less one that can be measured. I am reminded of the joke about the drunk at the bar during the philosophy conference who said, "Solipsism works for me, but that’s just one man’s opinion."

That professor pointed out that there are a variety of philosophical schools that don't fall into this dichotomy of "correspondence theory of truth" or solipsism. There are deflationist theories and pragmatist theories which still believe in the external world. Further, one can deny the existence of the external world without being a solipsist, such as in Bishop Berkeley's philosophy of idealism.

Circling back to factual accuracy, though, even if you don't buy a theory similar to the correspondence theory in general, it is neverthesless the case that a research library is part of a scholarly correspondence theory of truth. Even for scholars who cast a jaundiced eye toward the value of telling the truth, they do largely adhere to a different commitment to factual accuracy: within their own scholarly texts, they try to accurately quote and reference other writings.

For example, I have read a book by Melvin Pollner called Mundane Reason. Pollner develops a theory of ethnomethodology, which he then uses to question the existence of the objective, determinate world. Truth is socially constructed, and a community will develop a unitary world of social truth.

Even if I am a scholar who is a follower of Pollner or Bishop Berkeley, I will still adhere to a correspondence theory of truth in my production of my own scholarly texts. If I claim a quotation from one of their texts or a text that discusses them, I will make a citation that will correspond to the location of that statement in the objective, observable universe of texts managed by libraries.

These musings are relevant to a discussion of AI LLMs, because LLMs generally string statements together without worrying whether they are factually accurate statements about the universe of scholarly texts. ChatGPT will often just make crap up. Some commentators politely refer to made up quotes and references as hallucinations. Others rely on Harry Frankfurt’s definition and refer to the act of making up stuff, including references, as bullshitting. Some library researchers have created a metric for testing LLM systems called the Reference Hallucination Score. See citations below.

The scenario that we presented on October 22nd was this: a researcher has claimed to have authored a paper that was submitted to an academic journal. The editors of the journal have a policy of not allowing texts that are generated by AI. The basic justification for detecting AI-generated texts is that they should be identified and rejected. Why should they be rejected, though?

Obviously, if a student is assigned to write a paper without the assistance of AI, and the professor can show that the paper was generated by AI, that is a violation of the assignment. But if the paper is a genuinely brilliant and well-executed paper, perhaps an academic journal should consider publishing it, even if it is generated by an AI LLM. Of course, if the references in the paper are fabricated, then the paper is by definition flawed, regardless of who or what generated it.

During the discussion after the presentation, a professor argued that he uses AI LLMs so extensively that a text under his name is almost always a fusion of his own words and those of the AI LLM, and that he himself might not know which of the two crafted any one passage. The basic motive for detecting AI-generated texts is that human-generated texts are preferred. The basic point of the other professor's claim of blending is that the AI-generated text is superior to the human-generated text and should be utilized. Those two positions are not necessarily opposed to one another.

The core of the problem is whether the human claiming authorship is actually the author of the work. Here I offer a modified definition of author, namely: the human is the author if that human is an authority on the content in the work, and the human takes responsibility for what it says. An AI LLM might have assisted with the wording, or even some of the ideas, but the human should have both a command of the content and editorial control of the final text. After all, human ghost writers have been around for millennia; this is not a new concept.

If a paper has fabricated references, then it is likely that the purported human author left the generation of the text entirely up to the AI system. The human might not understand what the paper says or what it contains. For a paper that is entirely composed by an AI system, the human is not the author of the paper under this definition.

If, on the other hand, the human is fully in control of the subject matter and is using the AI system as a tool to improve the final product, then that case probably falls on the acceptable end of the spectrum. That assertion of authorship, though, would involve actual work by the human.

For instance, if the AI system offers up references, the human would be responsible for actually tracking down those texts (and in the process verifying their existence), reading them, and establishing that they are relevant to the argument. This problem of AI-fabricated references is related to the long-standing problem that arises when human authors borrow citations from earlier human-written texts without verifying them. If the earlier paper has a mistake in the reference, that mistake will be perpetuated by later authors who fail to verify the reference and read the cited work.

You can even couch this discussion within a larger context of education: To me, the point of the university is 1) to educate students, 2) to expand the realm of knowledge through research and scholarship and creative works, and 3) to preserve that realm of knowledge and share it with the broader community.

Educating students can be thought of as the process of building neural networks. However, they are the biological networks made of actual neurons and located between the ears of the students, not neural networks located in massive data centers (which in the industry are sometimes called "multi-layer perceptrons"). If the students (or faculty members) rely solely on an artificial neural network, they are often not building the biologically-based neural network in their own brains, and we are failing to educate them.

A complicating aspect of today’s world is that AI is ubiquitous. One of the things our students—and our faculty—will have to learn is how to delve into AI systems to leverage their own knowledge while still retaining intellectual control and responsibility. ( "Delve" and "leverage" are two words commonly used by AI LLMs when writing prose—as are m-dashes.) That authorship requires work, and AI systems make it easy to skip the work and masquerade as the author. Worse, employers may require workers to give up their authorship to increase productivity (that is, increase the quantity of product, not its quality).

NOTE: None of the above text was generated by an AI LLM. It is all the product of the wetware inside my skull, plus the broader collective knowledge held by the community of people with whom I consulted and written texts which are part of my culture (and the product of cultural evolution).

Afterword, December 12, 2025

I shared the above blog entry with my friend Will Dowling, who is retired now from, first, teaching computer science, and then, working in the computer industry. He now teaches an occasional AI course as an adjunct at Temple University. He was the person who suggested that I look into the correspondence theory of truth.

One question he asked when he read my phrase "fabricated references" was: "how would you know whether incorrect references are fabricated, or due to innocent error?" My answer: "You cannot know for certain that a citation was fabricated, but there is a difference between a typo and a citation where none of the details relate to an actual citation. In the paper that Professor Plecka brought to me and my colleagues, NONE of the citations existed in the observable universe of scholarly texts. One citation had for its title a phrase from a quote that the supposed author had made in another, existing article. The AI system probably found that quote and used it when cobbling together its references. Humans can fabricate references, too, but it would be time consuming to do so, and it would be faster to go into a library database and download a number of real citations on the relevant topic."

To my claim that "if there are fabricated references, then the supposed author probably left the writing of the paper entirely to an AI system," Will writes: "I don't buy this. Say I write an article, by myself, no help from AI. It has 10 cited references. I need to fluff up the references section before submission. I go to Claude, and now I have 40 references." My response: Good point.

Will also took issue with my statement: "The basic motive for detecting AI-generated texts is that human-generated texts are preferred." He noted that studies have shown that the average person prefers a text written by an LLM to a text written by a human. That may be true--he cited an article that really exists to back up the point (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.13939v3)--but what I meant was that editors of journals and readers who want to learn from other humans might prefer a text that was generated by a human.

Will took issue with my "jaundiced eye" statement. Just because someone does not subscribe to the correspondence theory of truth does not mean that the person does not value telling the truth. My reply: Fair enough. Melvin Pollner might not dislike truth-telling, he just defines truth in a particular way that includes "the politics of experience."

Will didn't agree with my definition of an author. He writes, "Who gets to judge whether you are an authority of the content in the work? This moves what should be unambiguous, author or not?, to the realm of judgment call. I prefer the common (JAMA; The Lancet; Nature; PLOS ONE; etc.) requirement that contributing co-authors must enumerate their contributions including categories such as conceptualization, writing (original draft) and writing (review and editing)."

My response: I agree with Will's basic point. But in libraries, there are instances where a corporation is an author, such as a congressional committee being the author of the text of a hearing. My definition would allow one to argue that an editor at a publishing house is equally the author of a book that the house edited. But in literary studies, there are already debates about the degree to which authorship is shared among a group of people in the text production process, so this is not a new problem. I guess I would retreat back to the point that the author is the entity which takes full responsibility for the text. Whether that person or legal entity knows what is in the text or is an authority on the content, that is a judgment call.

Thanks Will. Your critique is very much welcome and has helped me improve my thinking on this topic.

Bibliography

Aljamaan, Fadi, et al. (2024). "Reference Hallucination Score for Medical Artificial Intelligence Chatbots: Development and Usability Study." JMIR Medical Informatics 12 (1): e54345. doi: 10.2196/54345

Hicks, Michael Townsen, James Humphries, and Joe Slater. (2024). "ChatGPT is Bullshit." Ethics and Information Technology 26: 30. doi: 10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5

Pollner, Melvin. (1987). Mundane Reason. Cambridge UP.