I have been tilling my humble row in the field of what I call evolutionary literary criticism, ELC, for over a decade. However, I only recently discovered a critic who challenged the basis for the school of criticism from which my practice has sprung.
In 2011, Jonathan Kramnick published an article critically digging into the foundations of what many practitioners in the field call literary Darwinism, LD. He even entitled his original article "Against Literary Darwinism." In that article, he highlights problems within the school of evolutionary psychology, which is the foundation of literary Darwinism. The problems are real, and they weaken the case for both evolutionary psychology in general and literary Darwinism in particular.
In the last couple of years, I have migrated to Henrich's theory of cultural evolution. The problems with evolutionary psychology that Kramnick focuses on are, in my mind, effectively resolved by cultural evolution. Examining these problems helps spotlight why I have shifted away from what I call evolutionary literary criticism to cultural evolutionary literary criticism, or as I abbreviate it, CELC. (Yes, I do love abbreviations.)
Reviewing Kramnick's argument has also made me realize that literary Darwinism and evolutionary literary criticism, ELC, are not the same thing, which I discussed in last month's blog post. They are certainly adjacent, but my practice does not strictly conform to the vision set out by scholars such as Joseph Carroll, in works such as Literary Darwinism (2004), and Denis Dutton, in such works as The Art Instinct (2009). (There is a spectrum of positions within the LD camp, as one might expect. Brian Boyd, apparently, is less dogmatic about the nature of the evolution of literature than Carroll, in works such as On the Origin of Stories (2009).) I must confess that I am a bit of an amateur in both senses of the word even within literary Darwinism: I have read and enjoyed the writings of Jonathan Gottschall, but I have never read the three books listed in this paragraph, the ones by Carroll, Dutton, and Boyd.
Sociobiology
Ever since I started reading in evolutionary psychology in the mid-1990s, I have bristled at the suggestion that evolutionary psychology is merely a rebranded sociobiology as envisioned by E. O. Wilson back in the 1970s. Wilson had a philosophy that I would call aggressive consilience. Consilience in general argues that all areas of knowledge should fit together. The physical sciences and the social sciences should be all of one fabric, with the physical sciences being the more fundamental.
The more aggressive (read, bad) version of this framework posits that one can start with the physical sciences and build a logical chain which will eventually construct the social sciences and humanities. Physics entails poetry, with evolutionary biology being a critical connecting link in the causal chain of reduction. The less aggressive version of this framework merely says that all these disciplines have to be consist with one another, but, because of emergent phenomena at higher levels, features of a higher discipline are not entailed by facts in a more fundamental discipline. E. O. Wilson argues for the aggressive version, and I subscribe to the less aggressive one.
Evolutionary Psychology
To me, the foundation of evolutionary psychology is that there exist some aspects of human behavior and psychology that can be effectively explained with reference to their effect on human survival and reproduction. A prime example of this is the Sexual Strategies Theory that has been most prominently fostered and promoted by David Buss. This theory argues that human males and females systematically different in their typical sexual behavior in ways that are best explained with reference to the reproductive fitness of that behavior. (Note that I did not use the terms men and women.)
The early founders of evolutionary psychology, Tooby and Cosmides, insisted that human behaviors have to correspond to mental modules, separate chunks of brain that have evolved independently of one another. Because such genetic evolution takes a long time, they insisted that the modules should be adapted to the conditions of our ancestors over the last few million years, the so-called environment of evolutionary adaptedness, EEA. Human behavior might have odd quirks because it evolved in an environment that no longer exists.
Kramnick follows the logical implications of this position of mental modules and shows how it runs into problems even before one gets to the human appreciation of literary texts. He takes from Tooby, Cosmides, and Steven Pinker the argument that, for a trait to be able to evolve, it must at least be innate. He then examines the criteria for innateness as argued by the EPers: universality (does it exist in all humans?), domain specificity (does it only apply to a given domain of input?), ontogenesis (does it appear in each typical human brain at about the same time?), poverty of stimulus (is it unlikely to come about through, say, rewards and punishments?), and speed and encapsulation (does the brain seem to handle it automatically?).
Kramnick has a strong argument that there do not seem to be as many mental modules as the hardcore evolutionary psychologists claim. On the strong end of the claims, Kramnick seems grudgingly to admit that there do seem to be brain structures hardwired for the acquisition of language, and those brain structures do seem to achieve even the stringent criteria for innateness. He will even admit that one can make the case for a hardwired cheater detector, though the case for it is weaker.
Kramnick seems to have an especially strong antipathy for theories of hardwired differences in typical sexual psychology between males and females. To me, it is ironic to doubt hardwired sexual behavior, because in order to have genetic evolution in the first place, you have to have reproduction. Of all the behaviors that might have a dedicated module, sexual behavior is the most likely. If anything has an evolved psychology, it should be sexual behavior. Whether David Buss and his colleagues can demonstrate innateness to Kramnick's satisfaction, sexual behavior, at least at the level of a statistical tendency, does seem to be hardwired.
Kramnick then trains his attention on Literary Darwinism. LDers have a hard time agreeing among themselves on what they are actually talking about. Are they talking about a genetically programmed module for aesthetic appreciation in general, including visual arts, or a module specific to fictional stories? Within the realm of "stories", do those stories include the narrative elements of religion and the pretend play of small children, or not? Jonathan Gottschall seems to think that those adjacent forms of narrative are included, while other LDers, such as Joseph Carroll, might say no.
Kramnick is effective at pointing out the lack of rigor among the LDers. What frustrates me about Kramnick's conclusion is that he seems to reject the role of selection pressure in driving human behavior because the LDers and the EPers don't reach the level of rigor that would satisfy him. To me and many other people, the consistency of behavior with reproductive fitness is there, even if you cannot formulate clear definitions for modules that are both innate and evolved.
Cultural Evolution versus Evolutionary Psychology
For Henrich's theory of cultural evolution, the primary and critical mental module that has evolved genetically—the one module to rule them all—is the inborn tendency among humans of being able to learn culturally from other humans. Chapter two of Henrich's The Secret of our Success (pp. 8-21) is devoted to a showdown of mental measurements between chimps and humans, such as working memory and strategic game-theory calculation. The only area of mental agility in which humans far exceed chimps is in our ability to learn from each other and to actively teach.
Indeed, Henrich himself effectively critiques the theory of massively modular minds and finds it wanting. His argument is that, once you have the ability to store information across a community of humans in a set of cultural practices, evolution can move beyond genetics. Humans are a product of genetic-cultural co-evolution. The one area that Henrich would probably concede has been fixed as a genetically defined module other than cultural learning is the facility for language. But again, language allows an order of magnitude more cultural learning than exists without it.
The aspect of Henrich's theory Kramnick probably would not like, though, is that Henrich does not toss out natural selection and evolution. If there is a selective advantage to a set of behaviors, for example, then they will evolve. They just will not necessarily be fixed in all their specificity in some genetically determined circuit of brain tissue. The mantra could be: Keep the evolution, ditch the modules. Kramnick, on the other hand, guessing from his writings, would rather ditch both the modules and the evolution.
Sexuality
One major area of evolutionary psychology, and a part that has a strong influence on literary Darwinism, is the area of gender and sexuality, and it seems to be the area that upsets Kramnick the most. He warns readers away from this EP topic with adjectives like "controversial" and "notorious." This is the field most fully developed by David Buss and colleagues and is called Sexual Strategies Theory, SST.
The basic idea behind Sexual Strategies Theory is that females and males should have different strategies for sexual behavior because biological reproduction requires each sex to have profoundly different energy and time inputs. Males don't have to invest much biological energy and time into reproducing. One ejaculation will do the job. Female mammals, on the other hand, have to gestate the fetus and nurse it until it can be independent. The idea was pioneered by thinkers such as Robert Trivers and Donald Symons.
Sexual Strategies Theory is one of the areas of EP that has the firmest foundation in evidence. Buss and colleagues have conducted many cross-cultural studies showing that males and females do have different shared sexual behaviors (on average) that can be effectively explained by genetic hardwiring.
Indeed, when the scholarly journal Sex Roles was organizing a special issue to debunk Sexual Strategies Theory, Buss managed to argue with the editors that the evidence in its favor was strong, and that special issue was turned into a forum where SST was given equal footing and an equal voice to its critics. That special issue was published in 2011, the same year as the publication of Kramnick's critique of literary Darwinism. Even in 2026, a gender researcher writing about sexual behavior acknowledged that she no longer dismisses biological differences of sex, she just feels that the biological tendencies are exaggerated by social rules about gender (Saguy). That observation would be consistent with Henrich's cultural evolution. There is some genetic inheritance, but it is reinforced and strengthened by cultural mores.
The Sexual Strategies Theory upsets some intellectuals because it threatens the foundation of modern progressive cultural politics that celebrates sexual liberation and gender fluidity. Buss's theory is a bit like the part of the Monty Python movie "The Life of Brian" where a male character wants to be a woman. He specifically says, "I want to have babies," in other words, reproduce sexually as a female. Another character sarcastically asks, "Where are you going to put the fetus? Are you going to keep it in a box?"
Crucially, SST doesn't even need to hypothesize about some distant environment of evolutionary adaptedness. The observed behaviors are not relics from the cavemen, because the differential cost of reproduction is still ever-present. Kramnick tries to isolate these sexual theories of evolutionary psychology as less than other theories, such as Pinker's theory about the language instinct, because the sexual theories don't need to hypothesize about an ancient environment. The irony is that this lack of need for an EEA makes them stronger, not weaker.
Bibliography
Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories. Harvard UP, 2009.
Buss, D. M., and Schmitt, D. P. (1993). "Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating." Psychological Review, 100, 204–232. Online at: https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2015/09/SexualStrategiesTheory.pdf
Carroll, Joseph. Literary Darwinism. Routledge, 2004.
Dutton, Denis. The Art Instinct. Oxford UP, 2009.
Henrich, Joseph. The Secret of our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, .... Princeton UP, 2015.
Kramnick, Jonathan. "Against Literary Darwinism." Critical Inquiry 37.2 (2011): 315-347. Online at: https://english.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/kramnick_critical_inquiry.pdf
Saguy, Abigail C. "Gender Studies Needs to Change." Chronicle of Higher Education. 17 June 2026. Online at: https://www.chronicle.com/article/gender-studies-needs-to-change
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