How might literature do harm?(Responses)

Literature enriches human experience, as Carroll and other evolutionary theorists have pointed out. Many positive aspects of literature, such as how it can be used to transmit social information and how it can help people organize knowledge about the world, have been highlighted recently by evolutionary theorists (Boyd, "Evolutionary"; Scalise Sugiyama, "Reverse-Engineering"). As Carroll's essay indicates, there is an on-going debate about whether the capacity to produce and comprehend narratives is an adaptation or is parasitic on other evolved cognitive abilities. We suggest that this debate should be more informed by the possible negative--and sometimes ...