Abstract

In this paper the author argues that a chief problem of the evolutionary aesthetics is to reverse-engineer the manifestly human urge to both engage in creation of fictional worlds and narratives, and enjoy them. He stresses that any solution to this problem must cope with the fact that it is relatively easy to observe that works of fiction help us to cope with the world, increase our capacity for cooperation, or comfort the sick, but such explanations will remain empty unless we can plausibly envisage how such coping or cooperation or comfort evolved as adaptive functions which were conducive to survival in the ancestral environment. He also argues that a thorough-going Darwinian aesthetics has to a observe specific demand: nothing can be proposed as an adaptive function of fiction unless it explains how the human appetite for fictional narratives increased, however marginally, the chances of our Pleistocene forebears to survive and procreate. Key words EVOLUTIONARY AESTHETICS, FICTION