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  1. The Sympathetic Plot, Its Psychological Origins, and Implications for the Evolution of Fiction.Manvir Singh - 2021 - Emotion Review 13 (3):183-198.
    The sympathetic plot—featuring a goal-directed protagonist who confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards—is ubiquitous. Here, I propose that it recurs because it entertains, engaging two sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it triggers mechanisms for learning about obstacles and how to overcome them. It builds interest by confronting a protagonist with a problem and induces satisfaction when the problem is solved. Second, it evokes sympathetic joy. It establishes the protagonist as an ideal cooperative partner pursuing a goal, appealing to mechanisms (...)
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  • Music as a coevolved system for social bonding.Patrick E. Savage, Psyche Loui, Bronwyn Tarr, Adena Schachner, Luke Glowacki, Steven Mithen & W. Tecumseh Fitch - 2021 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44:e59.
    Why do humans make music? Theories of the evolution of musicality have focused mainly on the value of music for specific adaptive contexts such as mate selection, parental care, coalition signaling, and group cohesion. Synthesizing and extending previous proposals, we argue that social bonding is an overarching function that unifies all of these theories, and that musicality enabled social bonding at larger scales than grooming and other bonding mechanisms available in ancestral primate societies. We combine cross-disciplinary evidence from archeology, anthropology, (...)
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  • Evolutionary Perspectives on Popular Culture: State of the Art.Catherine Salmon - 2018 - Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 2 (2):47-66.
    Utilizing an evolutionary perspective has proven fruitful in a number of areas of interest outside of the standard psychological or anthropological topics. This includes a wide range of fields from applied disciplines such as law, criminology, medicine, and marketing, to the study of the imagined worlds found in art and literature, the domains of the humanities. A number of excellent books, as well as numerous articles, detail the impressive work done in applying evolutionary insights to the study of art and (...)
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  • Language, Childhood, and Fire: How We Learned to Love Sharing Stories.Gerhard Lauer - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 12.
    Stories do not fossilize. Thus, exploring tales shared during prehistory, the longest part of human history inevitably becomes speculative. Nevertheless, various attempts have been made to find a more scientifically valid way into our deep human past of storytelling. Following the social brain hypothesis, we suggest including into the theory of human storytelling more fine-grained and evidence-based findings about the manifold exaptation and adaptation, genetic changes, and phenotypic plasticity in the deep human past, which all shaped the emergence of storytelling (...)
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  • Cognition and the evolution of music: Pitfalls and prospects.Henkjan Honing & Annemie Ploeger - 2012 - Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (4):513-524.
    What was the role of music in the evolutionary history of human beings? We address this question from the point of view that musicality can be defined as a cognitive trait. Although it has been argued that we will never know how cognitive traits evolved (Lewontin, 1998), we argue that we may know the evolution of music by investigating the fundamental cognitive mechanisms of musicality, for example, relative pitch, tonal encoding of pitch, and beat induction. In addition, we show that (...)
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  • Defending the Humanities with Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).Daniel M. Gross - 2010 - Critical Inquiry 37 (1):34-59.
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  • A consilience of equal regard: Stephen Jay Gould on the relation of science and religion.Alister E. McGrath - 2021 - Zygon 56 (3):547-565.
    This article offers a fresh assessment of the views of the American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould on the relation of science and religion. Gould is best known for his celebrated notion of “nonoverlapping magisteria,” which is often seen in somewhat negative terms as inhibiting dialogue. However, as a result of his critique of the unificationist approach to knowledge developed in Edward O. Wilson's Consilience, Gould later made increased use of the more positive notion of a “consilience of (...)
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  • Micromégas: Altered Body–Environment Scaling in Literary Fiction.Sebastian Dieguez - 2016 - Frontiers in Psychology 7.
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  • Art and Aesthetic Behaviors as Possible Expressions of our Biologically Evolved Human Nature.Stephen Davies - 2014 - Philosophy Compass 9 (6):361-367.
    In this paper, I review arguments that have been offered in favor of the view that humans' art and/or aesthetic behaviors are (in part) a product of our biologically evolved human nature, either as adaptations in their own right or as incidental byproducts of adaptations with non-art and non-aesthetic functions. I present an overview of the main positions and options, critically evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, and outline their presuppositions.
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  • IWho Cares about the Evolution of Stories?Paul Bloom - 2012 - Critical Inquiry 38 (2):388-393.
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  • Travelling in Time and Space at the Origins of Language.Francesco Ferretti - 2014 - Humana Mente 7 (27).
    In this paper we propose a narrative hypothesis on the nature of language and a proto-discursive hypothesis on the origin of our communicative abilities. Our proposal is based on two assumptions. The first assumption, concerning the properties of language, is tied to the idea that global discourse coherence governs the origin of our communicative abilities as well the functioning of these abilities. The second assumption, concerning processing devices, is connected to the idea that the systems of spatial and temporal navigation (...)
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  • Steven Pinker.Steven Pinker - 2002 - Cognitive Science 1991 (1996).
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  • Stephen Davies, The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution (2013).John Powell - 2013 - Literature & Aesthetics 23 (2):1-1.
    This review article critiques Stephen Davies' The Artful Species: Aesthetics, Art, and Evolution.
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