When Joseph Carroll’s Evolution and Literary Theory appeared in 1995, I read the first hundred pages or so with great interest and took comfort from its critique of the then poststructuralist-dominated literary academy. Carroll’s presentation stood out for its comprehensiveness and its uncompromising embrace of empirical values—the same values to which, since 1980, I myself had been appealing against applied deconstruction and its ideologized progeny. 62 In addition, I found that Carroll and I shared an intellectual hero, Charles Darwin, who, for both of us, epitomized a determination to explain observed effects only by reference to commonly ascertainable, temporally prior facts and factors, without appeal to “final causes” and other such remnants of an exhausted supernaturalism. I had no quarrel in 1995, and I have none now, with the central role that Carroll assigned to Darwin’s theory of evolution for an explanatory overview of our species. As I have recently stated,“Only a secular Darwinian perspective... can make general sense of humankind and its works.” 63 But whether that perspective ought to become the guiding philosophy of academic literary studies is a different matter. That proposition struck me as lame when I first encountered it, and the reasons now assembled by Carroll in its behalf haven’t caused me to change my opinion. Carroll’s program is truly grand in intended scale. The literary Darwinians, he writes,“aim at fundamentally altering the paradigm within which literary study is now conducted.” Their goal is to “subsume all other possible approaches” to the field. And if they succeed, that field’s current disrepute in empirical circles will give way to admiration. By responsibly connecting literary analysis to reliable knowledge about human nature and by making their own scrupulous additions to such knowledge, critics will contribute to EO Wilson’s consilience, helping to chart “an unbroken chain of material causation from the lowest level of subatomic particles to the highest levels of cultural imagination.” 64 In demurring from Carroll’s initiative, I do not mean to reject the realm of theorizing to which his program appeals (sometimes rather sheepishly) for its scientific backbone, evolutionary psychology. To be sure, that subdiscipline has been