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Reverse-Engineering Narrative: Evidence of Special Design Michelle Scalise Sugiyama We must assume that storytelling is as old as mankind, at least as old as spoken language. Joyce Carol Oates The greater the number of generations in which a cultural behavior has been replicated, the greater is the probability of evidence of design. Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer Introduction Life as a hunter-gatherer is difficult, arduous, and dangerous. Given these conditions , why would our Upper Pleistocene ancestors bother to take the time to tell stories? For we can be pretty sure that they did. Anatomical evidence, as well as the very complexity and universality of the language faculty itself, suggest that language—a necessary condition for storytelling—is highly likely to have developed by the time Homo sapiens began spreading out of Africa 100,000 years ago.1 Additionally, we know that humans were producing two- and three-dimensional representations of their environment (paintings on cave and cliff walls; carvings in stone, bone, and antler) by 32,000 B.P. and perhaps earlier.2 Finally, archaeological evidence suggests that humans in southern Africa were using pigment symbolically (to paint their bodies and, possibly, to make marks on rocks and organic surfaces) between 120,000 and 100,000 years ago.3 By the Middle Paleolithic, then, the potential for storytelling was well in place. The antiquity of narrative is significant. It means that storytelling is a sufficiently ancient phenomenon to have evolved through the process of natural selection and that storytelling might serve an adaptive function—that is, it might have evolved in response to a problem that recurrently impinged upon human survival or reproduction throughout recent (i.e., Upper Pleistocene) human evolution. It is also possible that storytelling is a by-product—and unintended consequence—of 177 adaptations that evolved to perform other functions. Both hypotheses have been examined4 but not sufficiently to decisively rule out one or the other. Of course, we can never “prove” that narrative (or any organismic feature) is an adaptation; all we can do is ask whether or not it meets the criteria of complex adaptation— species-typicality, developmental reliability, a degree of complexity unlikely to have arisen by chance, and special design.5 This essay addresses the latter criterion : Is narrative well-engineered to perform a fitness-promoting task? In addressing this question, it is important to situate storytelling in its evolutionary context. Be it adaptation or by-product, storytelling is the product of a mind adapted to hunter-gatherer conditions, and it emerged when our ancestors practiced a foraging way of life.6 Because many of these conditions no longer exist, it is possible that, in industrialized state societies, storytelling no longer serves its original purpose. Thus, adaptationist inquiries regarding narrative function are properly conceptualized not in terms of present-day applications but, rather, in terms of a problem of forager existence that storytelling might have solved. The question of function can be usefully pursued through reverse-engineering —that is, inferring the function of the whole by examining the operation of its parts.7 Anyone who has ever visited the junkyard and pondered the purpose of an unfamiliar object has practiced reverse-engineering. Why do we ponder thusly? Because such complexity is so obviously not accidental. Complexity is the product of deliberate design, and design implies intention: as tool-making primates, we cannot help but wonder, when confronted with an unfamiliar, painstakingly crafted object, “What is this for?” As evolutionary biologists and psychologists have discovered, the same logic applies to the component parts of organisms. Complex anatomical, physiological, and cognitive features—wings, immune systems , sonar—imply design. However, we must be careful not to take this analogy too far: whereas artifacts are designed by sentient beings with intentions and foresight, organic structures are “designed” by the blind and unpremeditated process of natural selection—that is, through the differential reproduction of variants over generations. Reverse-engineering addresses another important issue. The dominant trend in adaptationist studies of art behaviors has been to examine them as a singular phenomenon. Dissanayake, for example, characterizes visual art, dance, and music as “rhythmic-modal elaboration”—that is, the transformation of everyday actions or materials through the use of “vivid description, repetition, and other rhythmic and modal devices of emphasis, added figuration, or intensification.” The effect of this behavior, she argues, is to strengthen group solidarity and cooperation in times of crisis by “arousing interest, riveting joint attention, synchronizing bodily rhythms and activities, conveying...

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