ABSTRACT
Obviously, literary creation and comprehension do not require an awareness of evolution: Homer and Kalidasa composed classic stories, and Aristotle and Abhinavagupta classic criticism, millennia before Darwin. Philosophy recognizes that we always act on theories, whether rudimentary and implicit or elaborate and explicit, and that we should test them if we can rather than leave them unacknowledged and untested. Evolution by natural selection has three criteria: the variation of phenotypes (bodies and behaviors), the differential fitness of the variant forms, and the heritability of the variations. This chapter suggests three facets of evolutionary theory of particular power and relevance for literature: continuity as well as change; problem-solving; and costs and benefits, especially in terms of attention. Philosophy, like literary theory, including evolutionary literary theory, usually asks general questions. Evolution of course takes a particular interest in species-typical traits, and evolutionary anthropology finds indeed that literature is a human universal: all human groups have fiction and poetry.
