The Role of Fiction in Evolutionary Biology

AROUND 1579 SIR PHILIP SYDNEY ARGUED, in The Apology for Poetry, that poets never lie because they never assert anything. This is a rather strange defense. Literature is acquitted of lying because it lacks the mens rea necessary to tell the truth. The accused is innocent of the charge because he is held to be incompetent. Literature has remained chained to this judgment, or at least to the second half of it, and often for the very reasons invoked in The Apology. A poet is incapable of lying because s/he asserts nothing about the world, which is the touchstone of truth. S/he remains locked in the closed universe of fiction, for the words s/he uses do not evoke real beings. Literary characters, landscapes, woods, mountains, lakes and loves have no referents: nothing in the world corresponds to them. Literature refers only to a fictional realm: truth and falsehood are not in its jurisdiction. In consequence, literature is an art, a game, a cry, a thought, a protest, an expression, or a political act, but it is not cognizance. It is external to science, foreign to knowledge. In effect, knowledge aims at truth, and thus runs the risk of being mistaken. Since fictional beings have no referents in the world, the judgments we make about them are neither true nor false, and this is why literary texts have no cognitive value. This reasoning has been challenged. For example, it has been claimed that all is fiction, and that even science is nothing more than pure rhetoric. Another plea is that truth is a political word, and its use the exercise of power. I believe, though I am not certain if it is true, for I have it only on hearsay from someone who himself heard it from someone else, that it has also been said that every text remains a prisoner of itself and that language itself takes all its meaning from the inter-reference of words, without ever escaping this chalk circle to touch the world or a real presence. So many things have been said, and they are all so much alike, I have surely forgotten some of them

Biology · Computational biology · Evolutionary biology · Genetics, Bioinformatics, and Biomedical Research · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Philosophy and History of Science