Brian Boyd on the Origin of Stories

Professor Brian Boyd delivers a fantastic study of how the findings of evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences shed light on the origin and evolution of storytelling.

As Boyd states in his introduction, "On the Origin of Stories has two main aims: first, to offer an account of fiction (and of art in general) that takes in our widest context for explaining life, evolution; and to offer a way beyond the errors of thought and practice in much modern academic literary study, which over the last few decades has often stifled--and has even sought to stifle--the pleasure, the life, and the art of literature."

In doing so, he has linked the sciences and humanities in an exciting new way. Not that this is terra incognita as a research subject. Only that Boyd has created a popular book that can appeal to both the scientific and the artistic mind; which, as any scientist or artist knows, aren't so very different at all.