William Swears

Innate Storytelling: a Darwinian Consideration William Swears

Early descriptions of culture as a part of Darwinian evolution were ignored or rejected by literary critics and discredited through public disapproval, but have seen renewed interest during the last two decades. Evolutionary psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, formalism, and Darwinist literature independently suggest cultural displays that stem, unrecognized, from innate mental processes. Tropes, narrative forms and functions, and myth may be duplicated between apparently unrelated cultures. Sectors of the brain that activate during language use, biographical storytelling, and fictive storytelling have been identified through modern imaging. These disparate sources suggest not only that the human mind encodes perceived reality into narrative to as an aid to understanding, but also that the narrative falls into a predictable template. Campbell's monomyth may be an exemplar of an instinctive template for human storytelling.