The whole point of trying to tie literary criticism to evolutionary psychology is to try to develop a framework for studying literature that is built on the most accurate model for describing human psychology and social behavior. Scholars in the humanities often take an attitude that is dismissive of scientific knowledge. I have borrowed the Calvin Thomas's term antiphysis to describe this attitude. I interpret antiphysis as anti-physics, or anti-science. Evolutionary literary criticism takes the opposite approach.
I do not want to diminish the problems with making any serious claims to scientific knowledge. Many critics of science study and emphasize perfectly valid concerns. At the same time, I don't want to make too much of the problems with scientific knowledge, which is what the antiphysis crowd does. Some critics dismiss science entirely. Others don't dismiss it entirely but minimize its legitimate claims.
What are some claims that I consider established scientific facts? For one, genes exist. The phenotype of an organism is in fact related to its genotype. Another big one: the laws of thermodynamics hold throughout the universe. Entropy happens. Because of entropy, if present trends continue, in the long run, all action will cease.
Central to this effort to add some scientific knowledge to the discussion of literature is the question of human nature. What can we say scientifically about human nature? That question immediately pulls the ponderer into the maelstrom of politics about what we want humans to be. Robert Sapolsky entitled a chapter in his book Behave, "Hobbes or Rousseau?" as a shorthand for disagreements over human nature. This topic is fraught with sharp disagreements ...
Back to cultural evolution. Two years ago, I listened to the Audible version of the book The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution ... by Joseph Henrich (2015). I think his approach, which is descended from the ideas of Boyd and Richerson (not Richardson), offers a better foundation of how the human mind has evolved than the approach of many other evolutionary psychologists. I have not yet fully studied the book in detail, so anything I would say would be general in nature.
However, Henrich neatly shows that many of the theories that form the basis of evolutionary psychology are insufficient to explain how we humans invaded nearly every terrestrial ecosystem on the planet even before we developed modern industry, or even agriculture with its domestication of species.
Henrich demonstrates the inadequacies of many thinkers toward whom I am partial: for example, Tooby and Cosmides and their reliance on general intelligence, Steven Pinker and his theory of many mental modules, and David Sloan Wilson and his focus on prosociality through multilevel selection. Henrich further shows that Robin Dunbar's "social brain hypothesis" does not explain our success. Instead, he builds his theory on the foundation of "cultural learning."
Here is a statement in the book that summarizes its thesis: "The central argument in this book is that relatively early in our species' evolutionary history, perhaps around the origins of our genus (Homo) about 2 million years ago, we first crossed this evolutionary Rubicon, at which point cultural evolution became the primary driver of our species' genetic evolution" (57).
The point is that humans distribute the storage of information which is important to our survival across the collective brain of a culture rather than in any one individual human's brain. Because of that cultural knowledge and collective intelligence, our human nature is to prefer following the practices and customs of our social groups over following the path suggested by our personal experience and what seems to be our own immediate self-interest.
If this strong drive to embrace culture is true (and it seems that it is), then naive versions of evolutionary self-interest do not provide an adequate foundation upon which we can analyze the themes and mechanisms of literature. The process of literature is all about creating and preserving stories that the listeners/readers of that literature deeply value, which creates a shared sense of community. If putting a premium on cultural learning over genetic self-interest is how human mind's are built, then analyzing literature strictly from the framework of genetic self-interest should be woefully inadequate.
In my own thinking, I have supported the idea promoted by David Sloan Wilson that prosociality evolves through the group selection component of multilevel selection. Cultural evolution takes a different angle on the problem of prosociality. We humans depend on the collective knowledge of our cultures to survive. In order to amass the cultural knowledge necessary for cultural evolution, we have to be prosocial. The mechanisms of the group selection theories of Bowles and Gintis and E. O. Wilson can be rather red in tooth and claw (or spear and hand axe). The cultural evolution of Boyd and Richerson (and Henrich) might be less necessarily violent. Perhaps Bowles, Gintis, and Wilson lean more toward Hobbes, while Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich lean more toward Rousseau. I am not yet sure; I am still working on it.
My advice: If you want to pursue evolutionary literary criticism, study Henrich and his cultural evolution hypothesis and try to incorporate it into your framework for approaching literature. I currently think that this theory offers a more solid foundation for understanding human nature than the other, competing evolutionary explanations. That is, study Henrich if you want to interpret our works of literature using the most accurate theory regarding the nature of those organisms who are creating and treasuring the literature in question. (In the humanities, that's a big if.)
