In fiction the story lives the more everyone comes to life, the more each character seems to exist in his or her own right.

There's a young Danish guy who has done a lot of work from an evolutionary perspective, Mathias Clasen. Basically, his argument is we've evolved to fear the monstrous, to be very wary of large, unknown, life-threatening forces. In art, we can play with these things in ways that allow us to feel the intensity of the horror, but in "safe mode," if you like, detached from real consequences.

There is behavioral ecology, which looks closely at the difference different ecologies make to behavior and other features of animals and humans. There's evolutionary individual psychology, there's evolutionary social psychology. In Darwin's terms, evolution couldn't exist without variation, and variation is important in behavioral genetics. And so on, and so on. There are so many instances in which evolution actually sharpens the precision, I think, with which one can find out the importance of differences. We're interested in differences as well as commonalities.

Art and literature need extreme sociality to a degree that even dolphins don't have. We are the only large mammalian species that has such intense sociality. There are some small mammals that have become eusocial - the mole rats - but that's a different thing. Humans are able to understand one another at very high levels, to cooperate in very large groups. Humans depend on one another in ways that are an absolute precondition to sharing the kinds of information that makes narrative possible.

Literature often gets taught nowadays as a record of the sins and shortcomings of the past. I see literature and the arts very differently: as essential to being human and to human progress, individual and collective.

Social media takes time and careful, strategic thought. It doesn't happen by accident.

Literature and the other arts play with pattern - our brains understand our world by recognizing patterns - and with possibility. The arts harness our sharpest senses, sight and sound, and our richest ways of understanding, in language and narrative. They were our first schools before schools were ever invented. They develop our imaginations, extend our possibilities, and deepen what we can all share.