No. That wasn't the first warning. I'd ignored that one.

Will Storr's *The Science of Storytelling* is an odd book. It's not on my postgrad's reading list. In fact, I was recommended this book by a Twitter post years ago. The premise seemed interesting enough, and I thought it relevant to tack on as extra material.

I don't want to crank the lever and cry 'SCIENCE BRO!' as such, but if your book's title has the word 'science' in it, then - and I did judge the book by its cover - its theses adopt the verisimilitude of having stood up to the scientific method. Which is why the first chapter is, more or less, underpinned by a #critihype take on evolutionary psychology, a proposed subfield notorious for producing unfalsifiable just-so theories at a pace too rapid to be considered happenstance.

👆 That was irony, by the way.

Evopsych (a.k.a 'Darwinian psychology,' 'human sociobiology' and 'A Story of Science-Telling') presents itself as something you can't just casually unpick or disregard, like swiping past a video on social media you almost certainly know is full of #bullshit. It's a bundle of hypotheses about human cognition and behaviour that you can tell to your friends, family, and passersby on the street, and find them nodding in vague agreement. It sounds… truthy.

On the other hand, if you've heard anything about evopsych before, I'm 99% sure it's not because of the actual ideas it posits ("we are products of evolution" isn't a bad premise on the surface), but a certain *audience* those ideas attract. They're the sort of folk who claim that natural selection alone can prove we are genetically wired (read: destined) to seek out criminality, hierarchy, war, or greed; believe that, and they can make you believe much worse.

Not unlike the #Monomyth, starting with the TL;DR of Darwin's theories is more open-ended than you'd think, and this means it lends itself to being fertilizer for shithead ideologues to make their means to an end palatable. Not all evopsych enthusiasts see themselves as bedfellows with eugenicists, nor successors to the phrenologists before them, but if you *are* for #eugenics, then evopsych is the perfect smokescreen, and you might as well call yourself one to confuse everyone else.*

> Evolutionary theory tells us our purpose is to survive and reproduce. These are complex aims, not least reproduction, which, for humans, means manipulating what potential mates think of us. Convincing a member of the opposite sex that we’re a desirable mate is a challenge that requires a deep understanding of social concepts such as attraction, status, reputation and rituals of courting. Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control.
- pp. 16-17

Right off the bat, the evopsych framing is front and center. Evolution, alone, can explain why we behave the way we do, and thus, how plot elements work to stir our emotions.

He takes no pause to consider what this might imply. Were this actually the case, we could quite happily throw #anthropology in its entirety out the window with few consequences; eschew the full, uncut archive of human experience and social/political experimentation, in favour of a few shelves, and say, "Well, it looks better this way, and it makes more sense.*" I find that quite myopic.

There's a brief section in Chapter 3 of #DavidGraeber and #DavidWengrow's #DawnOfEverything where they argue starting from a common evopsych claim: hierarchy-seeking behaviour after groups pass a certain number is an adaptation from our simian ancestors. Social inequality, therefore, is an effect of genetic destiny. Some erudite Pleistocene archaeologists, "forced to confront" recent evidence of royal burials and commons areas, propose no alternatives. Open and shut case, right?

The Davids bring in the work of #ChristopherBoehm, an evolutionary anthropologist and specialist in primate studies, who writes that yes, we inherited dominant and submissive behaviours from the simians we descended from, but what separates humans - and human societies - from other primates is that not only can we consciously choose not to act in a certain way, we also understand how our society is impacted if we do not act to keep bullies in check (see next post):

And yes, I DO know that I'm writing this only having read the first chapter. Let the irony come back to hit me if it turns out the whole book isn't like this.

As in, his sources rooted in evopsych are in proximity to those in neuroscience and anthropology, but the former takes significant precedence in his points over the latter.