Darwinian evolution is an imaginative problem that has been passed down
to us unsolved. It is our most powerful explanation of humanity's place
in nature, but it is also more cognitively demanding and less
emotionally satisfying than any myth. From the publication of the
Origin of Species in 1859, evolution has pushed our capacity for
storytelling into overdrive, sparking fairy tales, adventure stories,
political allegories, utopias, dystopias, social realist novels, and
existential meditations. Though this influence on literature has been
widely studied, it has not been explained psychologically. This book
argues for the adaptive function of storytelling, integrates traditional
humanist scholarship with current knowledge about the evolved and
adapted human mind, and calls for literary scholars to reframe their
interpretation of the first authors who responded to Darwin.