Madame Bovary's Ovaries

What if Charles Darwin wrote a novel? What if he wrote them all? Well, maybe he did, in a sense; the thesis of "Madame Bovary's Ovaries" is that Darwin, or rather the forces of evolution and natural selection that Darwin did write of, underlie the plot and behavior of all human characters in literature. It's the kind of all-encompassing theorizing, both radical and obvious at the same time, that is likely to enlighten some and seriously upset others.

David Barash is a well-known zoologist at the University of Washington, and his daughter Nanelle is a student at Swarthmore. They call their perspective that of "evolutionary psychology," but it's also been termed "sociobiology." Almost 30 years ago, a massive tome bearing that title by famed Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson posited that human behavior has a strong genetic component, and set off a firestorm of criticism, both scientific and, especially, political. A number of subsequent books, such as Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene," have explored this perspective with similarly controversial results. Many of us don't like having our most important feelings and actions reduced to biological imperatives -- we like to feel apart and above other species. Just look at the art and literature we produce as proof of our difference, we argue...more here