Stories of Lemurs and Robots-The Social Origin of Story-Telling

Abstract

This chapter discusses narrative intelligence in the context of the origins of primate (social) intelligence. The relationship between social intelligence and narrative intelligence is outlined, with a particular emphasis on 1) the phylogenetic origins of primate (narrative) intelligence, and 2) the ontogenetic origin of autobiographical stories. The chapter is based on the assumption that in order to fully understand the importance and role of narrative in human intelligence one needs to draw attention to 'where stories come from', i.e. addressing whether story-telling can be linked to communication mechanisms that are evolutionary older but served a similar function, under which conditions and constraints story-telling capacities might have evolved, to what extent narrative intelligence is linked to social intelligence, etc, see Read and Miller (1995). [opening paragraph]