EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE AND LITERARY DESIGN: TEACHING HUXLEY’S BRAVE NEW WORLD INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION

The authors, faculty at a small, private liberal arts college, have collaborated many times in interdisciplinary pedagogical ventures, linking evolutionary science with literary study. One of us is an animal behaviorist in the Biology Department, the other a literary scholar in the English Department. Our goal is to lay the groundwork for a scientific understanding of human behavior, including cognitive and emotional functions, thus enabling students to analyze literature in an evolutionary context, as an artifact of the adapted mind. Readings from the biological sciences provide evidence that mental life is inextricably rooted in human physiology, that patterns of motivation and behavior are susceptible to shaping by natural selection. For purposes of this discussion we collapse the experience of many semesters into description of a single, team-taught course: Evolution, Behavior, and Literature. In addition to offering a panoramic overview of our course design, including its goals, structure, calendar, readings, and assignments, we present some of the strategies and benefits of our collaborative pedagogy. To lend specificity to these descriptions, general comments are grounded in an illustrative example, focusing on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. We identify a few key topics in evolutionary psychology and cognition pertinent to interdisciplinary analysis of Huxley’s book, situating these within the framework of the course. I. Course Design This 200-level class was designed for a general population of lower-division students. Typically students enroll in the class in order to fulfill a General Education requirement in literature or in science. Given the number and variety of offerings in these subject areas, it is unlikely that students will be forced into the course; we can assume that most choose it willingly, motivated by an interest in interdisciplinary exploration. Course objectives and expectations necessarily include those prevailing college-wide for General Education classes, which are expected to introduce undergraduate students to foundational concepts, terms, methods, and materials in a targeted subject area–or in two subject areas, in the case of dual-listed courses such as ours. We plan readings and assignments, necessarily, for maximum efficiency and impact. Once the biologist has identified concepts and topics essential to an introductory understanding of evolutionary science, her colleague chooses compatible literary materials: narratives, poems, and plays in which issues such as mate selection, intersexual competition, parental investment, and kin selection assume recognizable importance. The foundations of literary study, from cultural-historical context to figurative language and prosody, can be introduced effectively with almost any texts, given sufficient variety in genre. It is feasible, consequently, to select literary works highlighting a few central issues in evolutionary science, thus enabling students to undertake Darwinian literary analysis even at the introductory level. Students must acquire a basic understanding of evolutionary theory before they can engage in meaningful interdisciplinary applications of it. In devising the course calendar, accordingly, we front-load scientific concepts and materials. After the introductory session, in which basic information about both fields of study is presented and discussed, we devote eight class periods exclusively to evolutionary theory. These sessions are taught principally by the biology professor, and assigned readings feature the opening chapters of Robert Wright’s book, The Moral Animal, augmented by pertinent materials from John Alcock’s textbook on Animal Behavior and selected readings from other sources (see the calendar of topics and readings in Appendix I). A short list of concepts to which students are introduced includes the following: natural selection, proximate mechanisms and ultimate goals, adaptation and adaptive value, the evolution of behavior, Bateman’s Principle, the ancestral environment, reproductive value and reproductive strategies (male and female), differential parental investment, inter- and intrasexual competition, dominance hierarchies and status.