Fairy Tale Biology

I found Zipes’ breadth of research for “What Makes a Repulsive Frog So Appealing” to be very impressive; though the article seemed at times to be a hodgepodge of little “previews” for the fields he looked into (memetics, evolutionary biology, neurology, etc.), his tangents on the whole added up to a thoughtful and generally cogent argument. Memetics often seems to be a useless and overly systematized view of what are actually very complex cascades of communication and alteration, but The Frog Prince’s thematic link to sexual selection makes it a very believable example of a meme in action. What most interested me, however, was the potential to extend evolutionary ideas to other facets of fairy tale history. For example, Zipes’ crusade against the “Disney spell” casts Disney-fication as a sort of “dumbing down” process resulting from Disney’s own social agenda. But the less vindictive among us are quick to point out that Disney may have just been “giving the people what they want,” and I wonder if we might more accurately describe it as an analogy to evolution’s Fisherian runaway. We have all wondered why a male peacock would be so focused on getting an unwieldy and predator-attracting set of feathers, and the answer is that female peacocks just like them (because it’s beneficial to mate with a male who will give you very attractive sons!). In the same way, Disney movies have (arguably, of course) descended into a saccharine, romance-obsessed, conservative morass only because people like such versions (and people only like those versions because it’s culturally good to have seen popular movies…or something like that).
An easier application lies in explaining the “universal human psyche/disposition” hypothesis of why we find similar tale types all over the world (I believe Propp was a fan of this one). At first glance, it appears far-fetched that our neurology would be so rigid in dictating the creative processes of all human storytellers that any culture left to its own devices would come up with a definite set of tales. But we might view it this way: that humans come up with all sorts of tales (most of which have only been heard by a very small portion of individuals throughout history), and that it is only those tales that are most easily transmitted and make the most “sense” to our brains that survive from generation. Thus, we all know Cinderella not because the story is hard-wired into the genome, but because the story has features that are naturally more agreeable to us than the features of other stories. I suppose this idea is just Memetics 101, but I’d like to call it literary convergent evolution.