In evolutionary science, storytelling is suspect. This is due, in large part, to the proliferation of “just so” stories which explain all traits and behaviors as optimal adaptations. When nothing can happen by chance or constraint and selection hones everything toward utility, the inevitable result is a kind of storytelling in which the current function of something is explained by its imagined usefulness in the evolutionary past. Not all evolutionary stories, however, are just so.

In 1758, Carl Linnaeus gave humans the specific name Homo sapiens or “wise man.” Questions of wisdom aside, there are some who contend that a more apt name would have been Homo narrans or “narrating man.” Humans are natural storytellers. We construct our experience and render the world through narrative. In this fundamental sense, we are compelled to tell stories — both to ourselves and others. Stories, in this sense, can’t be avoided. They are essential to personal identity and social interaction.

While we are all storytellers, there are of course different kinds of stories. Some are fact and others are fiction. Or so we think. Because the fact/fiction binary is so casually and often used we rarely stop to consider what it conceals. There is no story which is either pure fact or unadulterated fiction. All stories contain elements of each. For obvious reasons, scientific stories strive toward the factual. But no story can be pure fact. Facts, in and of themselves, have little meaning. They acquire meaning when rendered as narrative and contextualized.

Because storytelling is inevitable and unavoidable, the issue for scientists is one of awareness. Knowing that a story will be told, how does one tell it so tends toward fact rather than fiction? The answer to the question may seem simple — say nothing more than the data allow — but this is easier said than done. Data and facts have their own rules and conventions, which differ from the rules and conventions of narrative. When facts are married to narrative, the hybrid result betrays our impulse to explain. This is the same impulse that has given rise, in all cultures, to creation myths. The universality of such myths speaks to their function: to situate us in time and space by explaining who we are and from where we come. Because evolutionary origins stories speak to a similar need, we should not be surprised to learn that this impulse sometimes leads to gap filling.

Whether fact or fiction, good stories are coherent stories. They have a beginning, a middle journey, and an end. Stories that lack one of these elements violate narrative strictures and are confusing or worse: “pointless.” We prefer logical or temporal unfoldings in which one thing leads to another, from start to finish. We see this at work in human evolution considered broadly. From the beginning, people have attempted to fit fossils into a framework and each new fitting is proclaimed as the “missing link.” Each time a missing link fills a perceived gap, our deep-seated narrative habits and expectations are satisfied.

Because stories have a basic and finite structure, there are only so many ways to tell them. For all their local diversity and color, creation myths the world over resemble one another. Characters, plots, settings, and themes appear again and again. There are only so many ways to create people, and nearly all those ways have been discovered, told, and retold. When the strictures of narrative combine with the conventions of history, archetypes emerge. While not subconsciously embedded in the Jungian sense, the archetypes of myth and folklore become embedded nonetheless. We reflexively and habitually avail ourselves of their themes and conventions. When our stories are meant to be fictional, there is nothing wrong with this. But when our stories are meant to be factual, it becomes a concern.

If we think about the personal (identity) and cultural (memory) work that creation myths do, it is not hard to imagine they were among the first stories ever told. They are foundational. But it was only after Darwin that such stories were relegated to the fictional realm of mythology. The need for such stories and the work they perform did not disappear. While after Darwin there could be only one origins story, perceived in fleeting glimpse and broad outline, as a stand-in or replacement it carried additional burdens. It wasn’t just a scientific story that drily explained who we are and from where we came. It had to be more and had to do work.

The burden has been heavy, especially for a science that can’t observe its object of study in real-live time and can’t conduct evolutionary experiments. There have been times, however, when those best positioned to tell the human evolutionary story have filled gaps where data are missing, or used archetypes to explain that which is not known. This is what is meant by human evolutionary storytelling.

Much of this may sound familiar. Aside from obvious resonances with Carl Jung, Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Joseph Campbell, anthropologists also have examined the influence of narrative and myth on human evolutionary storytelling. Among the first was Misia Landau, whose 1984 article “Human Evolution as Narrative” presaged her 1991 book Narratives of Human Evolution. In 1994, Wiktor Stoczkowski published Anthropologie naïve, anthropologie savante, an expanded version of which appeared in 2002 as Explaining Human Origins: Myth, Imagination and Conjecture. Landau and Stoczkowski reveal, each in their sobering way, the extent to which human evolutionary storytelling imbibes and reflects other kinds of storytelling. The resemblances are real and, as a consequence of narrative form, unavoidable. Knowing this, those who tell such stories should be on guard lest fact give way to fiction.

This wariness can and should be cultivated. As a step in that direction, in the next few posts I will be taking a close look at Landau’s and Stoczkowski’s ideas. Stay tuned for the rest of the story.

– Posted by Cris

Reference:

Landau, Misia. (1984). Human Evolution as Narrative: Have Hero Myths and Folktales Influenced Our Interpretations of the Evolutionary Past? American Scientist, 72 (3), 262-268