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 Thomas's Freudian theory of child development is a century out of date.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.