Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2009.
“Evolution may help explain copulation and even cooperation, but can it account for the creative side of human life? Can it explain art?” (69). This is the main issue concerning Brian Boyd’s mammoth book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction (2009). For those of us concerned with art and the creative process we have, as well, struggled with this issue. Undoubtedly, we have challenged our students and colleagues with circuitous discussions over the “what” of art. Boyd’s work, however, throws us a lifeline pulling us from the mire of unsolvable debate and repetitious frustration by shifting the essential question from “what” to “why”. This simple cognitive maneuver is, in my opinion, as significant to art theory and criticism as the first spark that brought fire to human kind.
As Boyd writes in the chapter entitled "Art as Adaptation," “An evolutionary account of art can clarify why the history of art runs so deep that it has been ingrained in the psyche of the species and the individual” (73). What this means is that concepts such as cooperation, competition, attention, play, status and sociality take on an evolutionary turn by making all artistic manifestations – even the most useless, and tasteless – a “crucial factor in human evolution” (110). But, before going further, let me take you back to the origin of the text which really began in the mid 19th Century. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.arbuturian.com/2010/on-the-origin-of-stories.
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