Academics have calculated the strategic value of altruism and betrayal. They have held game theory tournaments at conference locations around the world. It is intriguing to consider how far they might have pursued their strategies at the buffet breakfast. Their tournaments have indicated that in one-off encounters it always pays to defect. However, in repeat encounters, the altruist with a capacity for resentment fares best. The tit for tat strategy won the first tournament: cooperate on the first move, then copy the other player’s last move. In subsequent tournaments, even strategies designed to counter tit for tat have failed, though variations on it won under some conditions: Contrite Tit for Tat, Generous Tit for Tat, Suspicious Tit for Tat and, quite possibly, Go Ahead of Me in the Queue Because I Can’t Stand Your Brats’ Whingeing Tit for Tat.

Brian Boyd quotes D.S. Wilson: ‘as we carefully develop these models … a profile of traits emerges that many would regard as uniquely human – niceness, retaliation, forgiveness, contrition, generosity, commitment … and self-destructive revenge … based entirely on survival of the fittest.’ These traits develop without scripture: vampire bats share surplus blood with other sharers but not with bats who do not share, and chimpanzees keep a tally of what they owe and show indignation when another chimpanzee defaults on grooming debts. It is poignant to consider how much of human experience is found in the study of guppies, which ‘behave according to their own dispositions at the start of relationships … become less altruistic in response to selfish partners … [and] try to associate with altruistic partners regardless of their own degree of altruism’.

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction is a major undertaking. It comprises two books. Book I, in three parts, covers evolution, art and fiction, with reference to evolutionary theory, biology, neuroscience, cultural theory, game theory and the history of art. Book II, ‘From Zeus to Seuss’, provides examples of how evolutionary thinking could shape literary criticism, with detailed studies of the Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who, making reference to literary devices, patterns of response, and Darwin machines. If the reader thinks of Casaubon, for the most part this is lively work, which balances detail and range.

In Book I, Boyd, who is Nabokov’s biographer, sets out to prove that fiction is essential. He stages his argument carefully. In the first part, he describes how evolution has shaped human intelligence and cooperation. In the second, he argues that art not only reflects but also inculcates useful thought patterns and behaviours: shared attention, social values and creativity. In the third, he describes how fiction relates to human memory and creative thought. Using evolutionary parlance, Boyd argues that fiction is an adaptation, a ‘trait modified by natural selection that enhances fitness, the capacity to survive and produce viable offspring’. In this way, he seeks to justify fiction the way Sidnie Manton justified a feature of the diplodos Polyxenus, showing ‘that a character formerly described as an “ornament” (and what could sound more useless?) is almost literally the pivot of the animal’s life’.  This prompts the real question: does art help to inculcate cooperation, empathy and future thinking, as Boyd claims, or does it simply satisfy our minds’ capacity for such things?

Steven Pinker raises the strongest argument against Boyd’s claims for art, describing art as a by-product: a result of useful mental traits, and not the cause of them. He conceives of art as ‘a useless technology for pressing our pleasure buttons’, and music as ‘a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest through the ear’. These phrases suggest that Pinker has a bias against pleasure, not altogether surprising in someone who likes the word by-product. It is oddly satisfying, then, that Pinker’s dismissal of music echoes Bachelard’s justification of poetry. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard reminds us that pleasure may be a measure of value as meaningful as use: ‘Is there any reason, either, why these “extreme” images, which we should be unable to form ourselves, but which readers can receive sincerely from poets, should not be virtual “drugs” – if we must keep to this notion – that procure the seeds of daydreams for us?’

Boyd points out that Pinker only explains the consumption of art, not the creation of it. Evolutionary biologists consider not only whether a trait endures but also whether it has a cost; in which case, given the rigours of selection, it probably confers a benefit. Boyd also notes that humans throughout history have devoted time and effort to creating art. To illustrate this, he introduces perhaps the most memorable example of art in this book: a Palaeolithic spear-thrower found at Mas d’Azil in France, which shows the carving of an ibex turning its head to watch two birds, in Boyd’s memorable phrase, ‘already perching on the turd she is extruding’.

It is pleasant to consider an exhibition with this Paleolithic spear-thrower alongside Damien Hirst’s A Thousand Years. But is it art? as the newspapers like to ask. Cultural theorists argue that Boyd’s examples of art misappropriate what are in fact religious pursuits. It is almost possible to conceive of some belief system that had a Palaeolithic carver thinking this was a smart way to kill more ibex (making the catchcry ‘Life is shit’ a sort of Heraclitan fragment of lost philosophy). Against this, in one chapter Boyd considers religion as a social force shaped and promoted by our interest in fiction: our mind’s tendency to ‘over-attribute agency’ and seek invisible causes.

Boyd’s argument that art is an adaptation depends not only on how art shapes society but also on how it shapes the mind. His account of recent discoveries in neuroscience and child psychology constitutes one of the substantial pleasures of this book. It is fascinating to consider how art relates to our bodies.

‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba / that he should weep for her?’ These days, Horatio could answer Hamlet with a quick overview of mirror neurons. When we see someone doing or feeling something, the mirror neurons in our minds work a sort of involuntary imitation: ‘when we (and apes) look at others, we find both them and ourselves.’ Perhaps this explains why some people regard watching sport as a form of exercise: the part of their mind that works when they exercise also works when they watch.

Mirror neurons develop before we start using language. Intriguingly, however, these mirror neurons also fire up when we read. We reconstruct stories in our minds and bodies: our perceptions, feelings and actions work together. For instance, when we see a cup handle, we make a grasping movement. When we hear a word, we activate the part of our mind that involves saying it. When we think about tools, the motor areas of our brains gear up; when we think about animals, visual areas of our brains come to life. Does this mean that reading a novel about a bridge-builder feels more active than reading about a novel concerning animals?

Boyd argues that elements of fiction, such as character and motive, naturally derive from the way we interpret what we perceive. At less than a year, children understand the goal of someone’s action, though they do not yet understand another’s desire; by the age of two, they understand another’s desire, but they do not yet understand another’s beliefs. From about five, children start to keep a running tally of what other people know and also what they could not know. Until they develop this ‘theory of mind’, Boyd argues, children usually ‘fail to anticipate when a character in a story will be surprised’.

Theory of mind is what allows us to understand ‘X’s reactions to Y’s reactions to Z’s thoughts about A’. It is a major part of what makes us different from chimpanzees; it depends on the prefrontal cortex, ‘the brain region most disproportionately enlarged in humans’. Theory of mind, rather than language, may have driven the human brain’s expansion; it explains why we like dramatic irony in stories, and also lies. Iago is all theory of mind.

Apparently, it is useful that we forget. We do not recall our past so much as recreate it. This allows us to imagine the future, drawing on that part of our mind that remembers the past. Episodic memory does not depend on language: toddlers can describe events that took place before they learnt to speak. In fact, crows and chimpanzees can plan their future. In episodic memory, what we remember is not words, and not the sequence of telling, but our inferences about goals and causes. Boyd points out:

Lately it has become almost a truism to speak of the self or of experiences as fundamentally narrative … we have little reason to think that this is true … Event comprehension lies at the core of understanding experience, but we do not represent all of our experience – even all the day’s experience – in narrative form, even to ourselves.

Perhaps poetry, with its mix of image and event, matches how memory works more closely than fiction.

As this suggests, our memory has an intriguing relationship to narrative. Apparently, when we read, what we remember is a protagonist’s goals. We look for these, ‘taking what psychologists call either an observer (outside) or field (inside) position, as we can in our memories and dreams’. Once the protagonist has achieved that goal, we start forgetting it. We find it hard to understand sequence without inferring goals and causes. In one 1944 experiment, students were asked to watch a black-and-white film showing three shapes moving on a screen: two triangles and a circle moving near a rectangle with a corner opened out. When asked to describe what they had seen, the students spoke of individuals in conflict: usually, two men competing for a woman who found one of them too aggressive.

Boyd’s account of how our minds and bodies work when we read reminds us of how strange an undertaking reading is. The book starts with a quote from Pale Fire:

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people … We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of ages …

However, Boyd’s insights into the mechanism of reading may well hold more interest for writers than for literary critics. They suggest how to create effects, but they hardly explain why and how a writer achieves a particular style, and why a work endures, for art works by its own evolutionary laws.

For a start, books can return from their kind of death. Consider the resurrection of Donne and Marvell: poets ignored for hundreds of years. In evolutionary terms, this would be something like reviving the Tasmanian tiger. These miracles can happen in art because writers feed on books as the ichneumon wasp feeds on its caterpillar host, keeping it alive so long as it needs its sustenance. In this way, art can revitalise and transform past traditions. 

Boyd’s own examples of literary criticism form the weakest part of this otherwise richly interesting and varied book. Trying to justify the lasting value of The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who, he explains how they appeal to ‘cognitive universals’. However, his search for what is universal encourages him to overlook what is rare and particular, and he often writes as though a reader could see through style to character and morality: ‘[Homer] repudiates and exorcises free-riders, exalts punishers, and rebukes nonpunishers.’ Later, ‘the very nature of fiction makes it likely that storytellers earn least audience resistance and most admiration – the highest status – if they appeal to values shared by the audience’. And this from an expert on Nabokov!

Boyd is arguing that books need strong characters, plots and counterplots, social information, and values that provoke our ‘moral emotions’, because readers have an inbuilt interest in such things. But surely the style and combination of these makes all the difference. Boyd advises, ‘Strategizing bards should aim to reduce compositional costs while earning the maximum rewards of attention’ – a sentence which, incidentally, implies that non-fiction can be as painful to read as it likes.

Boyd overlooks the idea that for most committed writers, style itself is a defining value; a thing of substance. What Boyd misses here is the pleasure of creating art: surely more of a motivation for any artist than the desire for status. Boyd’s own interest in ‘status’ and ‘dominance’ leads to some serious problems of logic. Try this:

Males have more reproductive variance than females: few females do not become mothers, and none can have very large numbers of offspring; unsuccessful males may father no children, and the most successful can father many. Males therefore have on average a stronger drive than females to earn status, since it can gain them better access to females, and hence have more reason to engage in extreme behaviour to secure status. Males therefore are overrepresented at both extremes, success or genius, and failure, crime, mental illness, or drug dependency. Despite Murasaki, Jane Austen, and J.K. Rowling, males outnumber females as classic and even popular storytellers.

This is indexed as ‘storytelling … male-female differences in’.

Anger exhausts itself in incredulity. By now most readers, with the apparent exception of Boyd and his editors at Harvard University Press, will have read Virginia Woolf. Boyd focuses on the art of fiction, and fiction, of course, began as a female form. If, as Boyd argues, ‘evocriticism’ (his term for an evolutionary approach to literary criticism) distinguishes itself by focusing on how some story holds a reader’s attention, surely it matters that the Odyssey is a poem, which most of Homer’s readers probably considered a version of history? This is just one example of the kind of anachronism, or error, that Boyd’s search for ‘cognitive universals’ encourages. His call for an evolutionary approach to literary criticism justifies itself in argument, not example.

If Boyd shows a troubling lack of interest in the female of the human species, his book nevertheless offers a pleasant sense of affinity with other species. His examples give enormous interest to this book. Mantis shrimps recognise other individuals. Sheep remember the faces of up to ten humans and fifty sheep for at least two years. Chimpanzees dob on each other. Dolphins compete in blowing bubble rings. Rats respond to others of their kind whom they see in distress. As Darwin remarked: ‘It is a truly wonderful fact – the wonder of which we are apt to overlook from familiarity – that all animals and all plants throughout all time and space should be related to each other.’