[2] For example, Ugo Angelo Canello argued that literature was the history of the human psyche, and as such, played a part in the struggle for natural selection, while Francesco de Sanctis argued that Emile Zola "brought the concepts of natural selection, struggle for existence, adaptation and environment to bear in his novels".
This argument runs counter to what evolutionary psychologists assert is the central idea in the "Standard Social Science Model": that culture wholly constitutes human values and behaviors.
By "human nature", they mean a pan-human, genetically transmitted set of dispositions: motives, emotions, features of personality, and forms of cognition.
Because the Darwinists concentrate on relations between genetically transmitted dispositions and specific cultural configurations, they often describe their work as "biocultural critique".
Others pose for themselves a form of criticism involving an overarching interpretive challenge: to construct continuous explanatory sequences linking the highest level of causal evolutionary explanation to the most particular effects in individual works of literature.
Starting from the premise that the human mind has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment, literary Darwinists undertake to characterize the phenomenal qualities of a literary work (tone, style, theme, and formal organization), locate the work in a cultural context, explain that cultural context as a particular organization of the elements of human nature within a specific set of environmental conditions (including cultural traditions), identify an implied author and an implied reader, examine the responses of actual readers (for instance, other literary critics), describe the socio-cultural, political, and psychological functions the work fulfills, locate those functions in relation to the evolved needs of human nature, and link the work comparatively with other artistic works, using a taxonomy of themes, formal elements, affective elements, and functions derived from a comprehensive model of human nature.
Brian Boyd (On the Origin of Stories, 2009) argues that the arts are forms of cognitive "play" that enhance pattern recognition.
The idea that the arts function as means of psychological organization subsumes the ideas that the arts provide adaptively relevant information, enable us to consider alternative behavioral scenarios, enhance pattern recognition, and serve as means for creating shared social identity.
The psychologist Donald Campbell advances the idea that all intellectual creativity can be conceived as a form of random variation and selective retention.
They argue that cultural creations "evolve in the same way as do biological organisms, that is, as complex adaptive systems that succeed or fail according to their fitness to their environment.
The chief theorists in this school argue that language is based in metaphors, and they claim that metaphors are themselves rooted in biology or the body, but they do not argue that human nature consists in a highly structured set of motivational and cognitive dispositions that have evolved through an adaptive process regulated by natural selection.
Other literary scholars associated with cognitive rhetoric include Mary Thomas Crane, F. Elizabeth Hart, Tony Jackson, Alan Richardson, Ellen Spolsky, Francis Steen, and Lisa Zunshine.
Other critical commentaries include those of William Benzon, "Signposts for a Naturalist Criticism," (Entelechy: Mind & Culture, Fall 2005/Winter 2006); William Deresiewicz, "Adaptation: On Literary Darwinism," The Nation June 8, 2009: 26-31; William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2008); Eugene Goodheart, Darwinian Misadventures in the Humanities, (New Brunswick: NJ: Transaction, 2007); Jonathan Kramnick, "Against Literary Darwinism," in Critical Inquiry, Winter 2011; "Debating Literary Darwinism," a set of responses to Jonathan Kramnick's essay, along with Kramnick's rejoinder, in Critical Inquiry, Winter 2012; Alan Richardson, "Studies in Literature and Cognition: A Field Map," in The Work of Fiction: Cognition, Culture, and Complexity, ed.
Goodheart and Deresiewicz, adopting a traditional humanist perspective, reject efforts to ground literary study in biology.
Collections of essays that had not, for the most part, been previously published include those edited by Cooke and Turner (1999); Gottschall and Wilson (2005); Headlam Wells and McFadden (2006); Martindale, Locher, and Petrov (2007); Gansel and Vanderbeke;and Hoeg and Larsen (2009).
The first issue of an annual volume The Evolutionary Review: Art, Science, Culture appeared in 2010; the journal ceased publication in 2013.