INTRODUCTION TO THE FIRST ISSUE Why We Need a Journal with the Title Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture

"The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. . . . Consilience is the key to unification. . . . Its surest test will be its effectiveness in the social sciences and humanities. The strongest appeal of consilience is in the prospect of intellectual adventure and, given even modest success, the value of understanding the human condition with a higher degree of certainty." —Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (1998, 8–9) "Given the recent convergence of evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology-sociobiology, one might expect that the next generation of researchers will rapidly untangle all the major mysteries of human behavior and cognition. Unfortunately, I do not think that this will happen quickly. The main reason is that no branch of the evolutionary social sciences has an adequate understanding of human culture. Culture is a product of evolved cognitive mechanisms, but its existence may significantly alter behavioral patterns from those normally expected (from non-cultural organisms), and its emergence has probably uniquely shaped evolved human cognition and emotion." —Kim Hill , “Evolutionary Biology, Cognitive Adaptations, and Human Culture” (2007, 351)