Wednesday, March 10, 2010
The Evolutionary Review
Here's some very exciting news. Joseph Carroll and Alice Andrews are the editors of a new scholarly journal, The Evolutionary Review. The editorial board is a who's who of some of the most important thinkers in evolutionary approaches to the arts and humanities. I'm very excites about it, and I just ordered it, so I can't wait for my first issue.
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7 comments:
Exciting news. The who's who unfortunately excludes Frederick Turner and Alex Argyros, whose "Dallas School" (Robin Fox) or "conceptual evolutionary approach" (Easterlin, "Making Knowledge") seems to have become the red-headed stepchild of evolutionary literary study. They've been branded "non-Darwinian" (Carroll), accused of colluding in a naive, idealistic teleological view of evolution and/or intelligent design(!) (Easterlin), and generally ignored or banished to footnotes.
No sense getting up in arms about it, but after reading Carroll's and Easterlin's dismissals of Fred and Argyros and some of the weaker essays in The Literary Animal, I do wonder what exactly ER's submission guide means by "serious."
I agree that that's unfortunate. But these are the best friends we've got. Some who are interested in complexity and self-organization, like Paul Cantor, are a bit dismissive of evolutionary psychology, so we unforunately have it coming from both sides. All we can do is continue to make the case in the Dallas School tradition. If we make the evolutionary and systems views more solid (one of the reasons why I get the journal Biological Theory) and clarify their applications in the humane sciences and humanities in general, and literary studies in particular, and we'll go a long way to helping to make their views more legitimate and mainstream.
Fair enough. I think it'd be funny to do a satirical analysis of the Shakespearean intrigues that go on in evolutionary study using, say, ethology, anthropology and game theory. Wonder if ER would publish that.
Evolutionary literary study, I mean. Although the same kind of analysis would probably work for the professional status of group selection since the mid-late 60's.
No Iagos, thank goodness, but the field is just lousy with Edmunds.
You should write that. It would be funny.
Did you read "Challenging Evolutionary Metaphors of Survival: Morris’ News from Nowhere" by Todd O. Williams? Its naive griping about the free market might be a possible foot in the door for a response from a spontaneous orders perspective. For that matter, if liberal-lite apologia buttressed with passing reference Lakoff's work on metaphor and cognition can pass ER publishing muster, one wonders how open they might be to an article on so-called "cosmic evolutionism" that took a similar Lakoffiian tack without being so naive or false.
I'll have to look at that article again. I do recall it being vaguely annoying. May be right about using it as a foot in the door. I'll have to think about it. I think that Stuart Kauffman's work may be a foot in the door for systems theory to be taken seriously -- and, thus, cosmic evolution. What are the odds that I could get one of them to review "Diaphysics"? :-)
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