Norman Holland, who has a blog This is Your Brain on Culture over at Psychology Today could not possibly be more wrong about literary Darwinism in his posting How the Literary Darwinists Got It Wrong. The problem seems primarily to be that he confuses reading with literature. He might as well be saying that the ability to create tools did not have evolutionary origins because jackhammers weren't around when we started making tools.
The thing he misses lies in the very statement he makes that it gives him pleasure. Yes, but why? That is what he doesn't answer. The answer to that is the key.
The discussion is carried on further here. I know I'm a bit late to this, but it's a discussion worth looking at.
I would say that Dehaene's book on reading does answer some of the issue raised -- as well as an understanding that "literature" isn't what's written in books, though it includes it. Just because some literature is written, that does not mean all literature is written. Tis a logical fallacy, you know.
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