Narrating Descent: Popular Science, Evolutionary Theory and Gender Politics

Abstract

This article examines a narrative dilemma that popular texts on evolution face. On the one hand, popular science tends to privilege linear and culturally familiar narrative structures, as previous studies of popularization have often emphasized. On the other hand, however, the Darwinian idea of natural selection resists linear narration, as narrative theorist H. Porter Abbott has argued. This resistance arises from the fact that evolution by natural selection lacks proper narrative entities and narrative events and that it relies on two parallel narrative levels, the levels of species and organism. This paper explores how two popular science books on evolution negotiate this narrative dilemma by introducing a third narrative level. Both texts appropriate characteristics from the narrative levels of species and organism and project them on molecular and minute scales by portraying evolution as a micro-narrative that takes place in chromosomes, genes, cells and microscopic details of human organs. While this textual strategy produces a coherent and compelling narrative that for the most part succeeds in masking the structural gap between the narrative levels of species and organism, it also risks naturalizing cultural imagery. In particular, this micro-narrative tends to represent popular gender ideologies as biological truths embedded in molecular processes within our bodies.