The Romanian warlord, Wladislaus Dragwlya, aka Vlad the Impaler, reputedly turned back an Ottoman army by impaling twenty thousand of his own citizens on stakes. The Turks took one look and marched back to Turkey. Closer to home, a friend of mine likes to tell the story of how his parents met one night at a pub in Bunbury, WA. One evening at the bar, a promising courtship had started up between the two, until coming back from the toilet, his father-to-be noticed that another player had swooped in and bought his love-interest a drink. He marched up to the other guy, grabbed the glass beer bottle, and took a bite out of it. The competitor fled the scene. Five broken teeth and thirty stitches in the mouth later, the young couple was happily married.

There’s a term for these violently self-abnegating strategies: costly signaling. And once you’ve heard of it, you can’t help seeing it everywhere. I came upon it—and much else—in Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction by William Flesch, a professor of literature at Brandeis University. Flesch’s work could be classed with the ‘Darwinian literary studies’ movement that has managed to carve out a niche by taking authors and their fictional characters off the couch of Freudian/Lacanian/Marxist analysis, and reading them with through the lens of natural history. The heroes of The Iliad brawl and squabble like male chimpanzees. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is, it turns out, is all about about Newland Archer’s choice of whether to pursue the ‘domestic bliss strategy’ or the ‘he-man strategy’ when selecting a mate, and so on. Since a Lacanian analysis of a novel probably has as much connection to the real world as an astrological one, it’s good that people are now turning to other areas—like evolutionary psychology—as a tool for literary analysis. Unfortunately, the results often seem inspired more by science-envy rather than scientific rigor.