The Natural History of Narratives: how stories evolve, spread and survive - and how they decay and die

Storytelling is a universal human behaviour and a unique characteristic of our species. This talk will begin by discussing how our capacity to imagine and share fictional worlds was central to the evolution of human sociality and culture, before turning to some of the recurrent themes and plots that are found in diverse traditions around the world.

Professor Jamie Tehrani will focus especially on so-called “international folktales”, which include such tales as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Beauty and the Beast. He will show that cross-cultural patterns of continuity and variation in these folktales reflect basic evolutionary processes of mutation, selection, and inheritance as they get transmitted from generation to generation and spread into new “habitats”. He will also show how variations in the plots and characters of these stories can be analysed in a similar way to sequences of DNA, enabling us to reconstruct the deep history and dispersal of these traditions. He will end by reflecting on some of the wider implications of this research for understanding the cultural success and stability of traditional stories, what they can tell us about the past, and the complex relationships between patterns of cultural, linguistic, and genetic inheritance.
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