Edited Journal by Emelie Jonsson
Papers by Emelie Jonsson
Evolutionary Perspectives on Imaginative Culture, 2020
The introduction explains what imaginative culture is and why it matters. Imaginative culture—the... more The introduction explains what imaginative culture is and why it matters. Imaginative culture—the subjects traditionally studied in the humanities—is that part of culture that consists in shared and transmissible mental experiences that are aesthetically and emotionally modulated. Such experiences include religion, ideology, and the arts. Evolutionary cultural theory has heretofore concerned itself mostly with technology and social organization. Imaginative culture is the last major piece in the puzzle of human nature. After describing the historical and disciplinary context for this volume and summarizing its contents, the introduction describes a toolkit of concepts and methods used by the authors in this volume: Tinbergen’s four categories of ethological analysis (phylogeny, ontogeny, mechanism, and adaptive function), cross-species comparison, cross-cultural comparison, and the psychology of individual identity. Under the category “mechanism,” subheadings include neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the psychology of emotion. These concepts and methods are used as categories for describing subjects, observations, and arguments in the various chapters of the volume. “Directions for Further Research” identifies subject areas that have as yet received little attention from evolutionary scholars and scientists, describes opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborative research, and discusses the tension between institutional disciplinary inertia and the impulses of advancing knowledge.
Ian Duncan’s Human Forms and Devin Griffiths’s Age of Analogy attempt to illuminate interactions ... more Ian Duncan’s Human Forms and Devin Griffiths’s Age of Analogy attempt to illuminate interactions between evolutionary theories and literature from the late eighteenth century up through the nineteenth century. They do not advance knowledge about this subject. Both authors treat evolution as a semi-fictional construction that owes more to literary inspiration than to the scientific method, and they reduce literature to a battleground for ideological forces. They write using dense terminology, shifting rhetoric, and flights of verbal performance that obscure their claims. In all these respects, they are representative of the field “science and literature”-and particularly of the subfield that studies evolution and literature. I analyze the history of this subfield of literary scholarship and attempt to explain how it developed into its present form. The subfield was founded in the 1980s on the basis of poststructuralist theory and has never escaped the core assumptions of that theory:...
The Early Evolutionary Imagination
The Early Evolutionary Imagination
The Early Evolutionary Imagination
The Early Evolutionary Imagination
The Early Evolutionary Imagination
The Early Evolutionary Imagination
The Early Evolutionary Imagination
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture
This article applies a life history model to advance the evolutionary understanding of poetry tha... more This article applies a life history model to advance the evolutionary understanding of poetry that inspired nineteenth-century Swedish National Romanticism. We show that the characters featured in two of Erik Gustaf Geijer’s poems, “The Viking” and “The Yeoman Farmer” (1811), display patterns of time perspective, mating effort, and parental investment that are now recognized as central life history attributes: a fast strategy and a slow strategy, respectively. These patterns were identified by undergraduate participants (N = 427) who read excerpts of the poems that had been stripped of identifying information and mentions of romantic or sexual relationships. Participants read each poem and rated each character on validated scales of the life history dimensions of mating effort and parental investment, relationship interests and attractiveness, characteristics of his developmental environment, and physiological characteristics. Results are consistent with generally accepted associ...
The Early Evolutionary Imagination
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2017
How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into... more How far has the Darwinian revolution come? To what extent have evolutionary ideas penetrated into the social sciences and humanities? Are the " science wars " over? Or do whole blocs of disciplines face off over an unbridgeable epistemic gap? To answer questions like these, contributors to top journals in 22 disciplines were surveyed on their beliefs about human nature, culture, and science. More than 600 respondents completed the survey. Scoring patterns divided into two main sets of disciplines. Genetic influences were emphasized in the evolutionary social sciences, evolutionary humanities, psychology, empirical study of the arts, philosophy, economics, and political science. Environmental influences were emphasized in most of the humanities disciplines and in anthropology, sociology, education, and women's or gender studies. Confidence in scientific explanation correlated positively with emphasizing genetic influences on behavior, and negatively with emphasizing environmental influences. Knowing the current actual landscape of belief should help scholars avoid sterile debates and ease the way toward fruitful collaborations with neighboring disciplines.
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 2017
Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interact... more Biocultural theory is an integrative research program designed to investigate the causal interactions between biological adaptations and cultural constructions. From the bi-ocultural perspective, cultural processes are rooted in the biological necessities of the human life cycle: specifically human forms of birth, growth, survival, mating, parent-ing, and sociality. Conversely, from the biocultural perspective, human biological processes are constrained, organized, and developed by culture, which includes technology , culturally specific socioeconomic and political structures, religious and ideological beliefs, and artistic practices such as music, dance, painting, and storytelling. Establishing biocultural theory as a program that self-consciously encompasses the different particular forms of human evolutionary research could help scholars and scientists envision their own specialized areas of research as contributions to a coherent , collective research program. This article argues that a mature biocultural paradigm needs to be informed by at least 7 major research clusters: (a) gene-culture coevolution; (b) human life history theory; (c) evolutionary social psychology; (d) anthropological research on contemporary hunter-gatherers; (e) biocultural socioeconomic and political history; (f) evolutionary aesthetics; and (g) biocultural research in the humanities (religions, ideologies, the history of ideas, and the arts). This article explains the way these research clusters are integrated in biocultural theory, evaluates the level of development in each cluster, and locates current biocultural theory within the historical trajectory of the social sciences and the humanities.
H.G. Wells was one of the first literary authors to depict human beings from an explicitly Darwin... more H.G. Wells was one of the first literary authors to depict human beings from an explicitly Darwinian perspective. The enduring appeal of his fiction testifies to his artistic intuition and imaginative understanding of evolution. However, Wells drew a sharp line between nature and culture, trusting culture to work against nature toward his ideal social state. From a modern evolutionary perspective, that split gave him an inadequate view of two important parts of human nature: imaginative culture and dispositions toward cooperative group behavior. In this article, I put Wells back on the Darwinian ground from which literary scholars have detached him. Taking The Time Machine and The Island of Dr. Moreau as examples, I use historical, biographical sources and modern evolutionary science to explain the psychological functions, imaginative effect and ambiguous canonical status of Wells’s early fiction.
Uploads
Edited Journal by Emelie Jonsson
A new journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, society, popular culture. Issue 1.1 appeared July 2017: http://journals.academicstudiespress.com/index.php/ESIC/issue/view/10 Accepting submissions.
Papers by Emelie Jonsson
A new journal dedicated to evolutionary studies in imaginative culture--literature and the arts, society, popular culture. Issue 1.1 appeared July 2017: http://journals.academicstudiespress.com/index.php/ESIC/issue/view/10 Accepting submissions.
This Research Topic aims to demonstrate that imaginative culture is an important functional part of evolved human behavior—diverse in its manifestations but unified by species-typical sets of biologically grounded motives, emotions, and cognitive dispositions. The topic encompasses four main areas of research in the evolutionary human sciences: (1) evolutionary psychology and anthropology, which have fashioned a robust model of evolved human motives organized systemically within the phases and relationships of human life history; (2) research on gene-culture coevolution, which has illuminated the mechanisms of social cognition and the transmission of cultural information; (3) the psychology of emotions and affective neuroscience, which have gained precise knowledge about the evolutionary basis and neurological character of the evolved emotions that give power to the arts, religion, and ideology; and (4) cognitive neuroscience, which has identified the Default Mode Network as the central neurological location of the human imagination. By integrating these four areas of research and by demonstrating their value in illuminating specific kinds of imaginative culture, this Research Topic aims at incorporating imaginative culture within an evolutionary conception of human nature.