On natural literary selection

Rose Nunez at No Credentials has been doing some fascinating blogging about a Darwinian approach to literature [be sure to check out Gullyborg's rant about Ph.D's in Rose's comments section]. I know next-to-nothing about evolutionary biology/psychology (though I have read Steven Pinker's excellent book, The Blank Slate), but I've long believed that there is something innate -- something "deep in the [human] race" -- that prompts us to make stories, to create art, to take the chaos of human experience and give it a pleasing shape.

I've been working on a post of my own about what I see as the demise of plot in "serious" contemporary fiction (don't look for it any time soon, except in truncated form), and I wonder if there's a way that the Darwinian approach to literature might inform my musings. It seems to me that the gatekeepers of High Art have relegated a concern for plot to the "middle-brow" realms of genre fiction; is it merely an accident, then, that that's where all the devoted readers are? Isn't there something almost instinctive about the deep pleasure of wanting to find out what happens next?

I'm looking forward to Rose's future blogging on this subject. I can't wait to see what happens next.