"Madame Bovary's Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature"
by David P. Barash and Nanelle R. Barash
Delacorte, 262 pp., $24

Attention novelists, the jig is up!

To heck with the devil, God, fate, free will, the soul, love, hate, hope, fear, purloined letters, mistaken identity or unexpected inheritances.

What really motivates your characters is DNA's determination to replicate and sustain itself. The human tragicomedy comes down to the endless complexities of the mating game.

Or so contend University of Washington zoologist and psychologist David Barash and his daughter Nanelle, a literature and biology student at Swarthmore College. It's the theme of their delightful, deliberately provocative, and quick-footed "Madame Bovary's Ovaries."

From Tom Jones to Bridget Jones, from the matrimonial strategies of Jane Austen to the adulterous affairs of Madame Bovary, all characters are locked in a Darwinian struggle to reproduce with the most attractive set of genes they can find. They favor their offspring, discriminate against stepchildren and orphans, and their friendships are a calculated trading of favors. Charity? Heroism? Ambition? Teen rebellion? It's all just a means to a DNA end.

More than a few readers will find such reductionism annoying, of course.

And that's nothing new. It was back in the 1970s that Harvard ant expert E.O. Wilson helped launch the field of sociobiology by observing that in a lot of ways humans and their society act, well, like ants. Wilson, who set off a storm of outrage, gives a back-cover plug for this book.

Other animal experts drew additional parallels between evolutionary behavior and human beings, and the Barash duo bring in elephant seals, bats, birds and gorillas to show how literary characters echo evolution.

It's a sly application of a biological idea to the liberal arts. We see the convoluted courtships of "Pride and Prejudice" played out in the maneuvers of peacocks and peahens. The Musketeers' "All for one and one for all" looks a lot like the tit for tat of chimpanzees.

It is said that men trade love for sex and women trade sex for love. The authors contend each are trying to maximize their DNA's chance for immortality. For example, an older man and younger woman marry because the former is physically attracted to a fertile child-bearer (even if he doesn't want children) and the latter seeks financial security to ensure the survival and reproductive success of her offspring.

That's what happened to Madame Bovary in Gustave Flaubert's 19th-century novel. Flaubert shocked readers by having his heroine take a series of lovers younger and more sexually exciting than her husband. The authors theorize that she wanted the security of her comfortable marriage, but unconsciously also wanted the attractive genes of her lovers so that her offspring would also be attractive — giving her DNA the maximum chance of reproduction in generations to come.

This kind of instinctual sexual strategy is so common, the authors argue, that it seems credible to us that Shakespeare's Othello would believe lies that his wife, Desdemona, is cheating on him with his friend, Cassio. Driven mad by sexual (DNA) jealousy, he kills Desdemona and then himself.

The wicked stepparents of fairy tales and "Harry Potter"? They have a factual basis in modern studies that show stepchildren are 40 to 60 times more at risk for neglect, abuse and infanticide than biological children, the authors write.

The book uses swift summaries and quotes from dozens of literary classics to argue that book characters ring true when they exhibit nature as well as social nurture: "Human beings are concatenations of genes that have evolved to do their best at copying themselves and then kicking those copies into the future."

Barash & Barash caution that this is not the only thing that motivates us, acknowledging in their epilogue that humans are more than animals. But they persuasively argue that to understand literature, one should understand evolutionary biology — that science is at least as useful a path to understanding the human heart as art.

David Barash is an unabashed Darwinian enthusiast and anti-war activist who wrote a book defending liberalism. He has practiced genetic cooperation by co-authoring four books with his wife, Judith Eve Lipton, and one each with daughters Ilona and Nanelle. He hopes to someday collaborate with daughter Eva as well.

One can get a sense of his impish mode of inquiry from his joint writing, with his psychiatrist wife, in "The Myth of Monogamy." No, it wasn't an invitation to free love, but rather an explanation of where temptation comes from. And yes, they're still happily married.

"Madame Bovary's Ovaries" started when Nanelle Barash had to do a paper on Virgil's "Aeneid" for Overlake School and Dad suggested a Darwinian analysis. She did so, her father developed the Darwin lit-crit further in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times cited it as one of a "hundred best ideas of the year" in 2002, and a book deal followed.

David Barash provided the science and the bulk of the writing, Nanelle the rereading of the classics and the selection of passages to prove the point.

But are we really best understood as predictable pawns of evolutionary struggle?

Like all one-stop solutions, the book seems to explain some lives better than others. Anna Karenina yes, but the complex late life of her creator, Tolstoy? Napoleon was big on nepotism, but while Hitler's racial policies dwelt on genetics, his personal life doesn't fit the mold. "Moby Dick" seems beside the Barash point, and isn't the protagonist of "The Red Badge of Courage" more Darwinian when he runs away the first day than when he fights on the second? The book is silent on homosexuality, celibacy, human sacrifice or mothers who kill their own children. From Hannibal the Cannibal to Mother Teresa, human variety is pretty broad.

Yet you'll likely recognize yourself in these pages, just as we recognize ourselves in a good novel. Any English teacher or book club hoping to provoke spirited discussion should take a look at "Madame Bovary's Ovaries."

Bill Dietrich is a writer for Pacific Northwest Magazine. His latest novel

is "The Scourge of God."