literary studies share with Moravec a major blind spot when it comes to the significance of embodiment. This blind spot is most evident, perhaps, when literary and cultural critics confront the fields of evolutionary biology. From an evolutionary biologist’s point of view, modern humans, for all their technological prowess, represent an eye blink in the history of life, a species far too recent to have significant evolutionary impact on human biological behaviors and structures. In my view, arguments like those that Jared Diamond advances in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and Why Sex Is Fun : The Evolution of Human Sexuality should be taken seriously. The body is the net result of thousands of years of sedimented evolutionary history, and it is naive to think that this history does not affect human behaviors at every level of thought and action.
