A Response to Dirk Vanderbeke

I’ve just read Dirk Vanderbeke’s essay, Rhymes without Reason? Or: The Improbable Evolution of Poetry, (www.politicsandculture.org), and get the sense that he has only lately arrived to meet the “primordial horde” at the evolutionary theory crossroads and, in a feat of Improbable Balance, still has a foot firmly entrenched in a weary social constructionist camp. In seeking to have it both ways Vanderbeke has, through many contradictions, prejudices, misjudgements, naiveties and oversights, split both his argument and its effectiveness by halves. He has concluded that poetry, “a rather useless form of communication” evolved essentially as a learning mechanism for the transmission of culturally important information “which must have been a considerable advantage for survival in a hostile environment.” And, that if “the odd bard increased his attractiveness to the female sex by lays of love or exciting sagas” then, well, so much the better. So much too then for Geoffrey Miller’s pioneering and seminal book, The Mating Mind.

I am drafting a more detailed response to Vanderbeke’s essay but fear I will be beaten to the punch by others (and there are many) who possess greater gifts of erudition, verbal weaponry and, alas, time for such things.

But in the meantime I want to make a couple of immediate points. Vanderbeke, in seeking to dismiss the argument that follows it posits that: “If we accept the situation of courtship and male display, the delight we take in poetically formed statements is the cause of female sexual selection.” Would that I knew women that simple-minded. No, that is not the case nor the right premise to dismiss when it comes to poetry. Of course there is more to it than “the ability of the male to sing sweet nothings into the ears of choosy female partners.”

Poetry in its forms important to the discussion is first about the message and the meaning and then the “meter” and the “sound” that Vanderbeke refers to. Even a non-Darwinian minded Emerson understood “It is not meters but a meter making argument that makes the poem.” And this point is painstakingly understood by the writers of poetry. Poetry imagines a world-view. Listeners of poetry decipher this world view through the medium of the message: its music and sound. Poetry offers the listener, in this case, the female listener, the chance to observe the presence of genuine indicators of the type of male fitness she is interested in. In other words she has a keen ear to decipher both the poet’s virtues and the sound of his language. She, the listener, who, let us not forget evolved in tandem with the speaker, would be keenly interested in the poet’s treatment of virtues such as morality, bravery, kindness, humour, generosity, sacrifice and love: the subjects of poetry. But the same holds true for listeners other than courtship targets. It was not for the “delight we take” in alliteration and verbal gymnastics that Alexander carried with him everywhere a copy of Homer. Nor would we delight in any of Shakespeare’s plays regardless of the poetic music of his words without the genius-level treatment of the contrasting moral world-views of the characters.

And close to home Vanderbeke seems to suggest by reference to Aborigines that “poetic narration” and other “genre forms of information” may have evolved to keep them on the road of “safe paths and passages”. One cannot help but visualise languageless matriarchal elephants and patriarchal chimps and their followers languishing in endless circles lost in the jungle of your choice. Needless to say, yawn, the adaption pressures for not getting lost evolved quite some time before language. Were sagas and myths, orally transmitted in dramatic and alliterative language important to the transmission of culture and the creation of tribal identity? Yes, but this is a different subject.

Sexual Selection is a phenomenon at once so powerful and so subtle that it is easy to misunderstand. Dirk Vanderbeke doesn’t quite get it. Which is a shame because some of his observations almost bring him there, such as dual-coding, for example. But when one’s premise and prejudices are ultimately self-defeating then poetry really is an ‘easy target.”

© Rhett Talley 02April2010