Editor’s Note
Misia Landau, in her paper “Human Evolution as Narrative” for American Scientist, asked a seemingly innocent question: “Have hero myths and folktales influenced our interpretations of the evolutionary past?” (Spoiler alert: yes). I read Dana Walrath’s graphic (nonfictional) narrative as asking the converse question: Have our interpretations of the evolutionary past influenced the stories we tell?
If Evolutionary theory has taken away our old religious explanations of who we are and how we came to be, it has also enabled new ways to divide us. All too often, bias is dressed up in a lab coat and sent out to address the press. As Dana shows, one merely has to glance at the headlines announcing a new fossil discovery or genetic “breakthrough” to see how fake origin narratives get spread. Dana’s narrative deals with the Armenian thread in evolutionary narratives, but its moral does not depend on this specificity. This is about me. About you. This is us.
—Anil Menon
The Bombay Literary Magazine
Acknowledgements
Image credits: Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (frontispiece), 1883, albumen silver print from glass negative, 20 x 11/8 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art).
Francis Galton wasn’t a bad sort. He genuinely believed his work (and those of his like-minded colleagues) would improve the lot of humanity as a whole and Englishmen in particular. Though his research career is now something of a cautionary tale in science, it would be wiser to pay heed to Dana’s argument that tales often serve to strengthen one’s ideological commitments.
Author | Dana Mashoian Walrath
Dana Mashoian Walrath is an Armenian American writer, artist, and anthropologist who believes in the transformative power of art. Her award-winning books include Aliceheimer’s (Penn State University Press, 2013), a graphic memoir about her mother and dementia, Like Water on Stone (Delacorte Press, 2014), a verse novel about the Armenian genocide, and The Book of Genocides, an interactive art installation turned disaster comic forthcoming from Harvard University Press. A MacDowell Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and Atlantic Fellow, her comics, art, essays, and poetry have appeared in places like The Nation, The Lancet, Slate, on National Public Radio & in numerous anthologies including Menopause: A Comic Treatment (Penn State University Press) – a New York Times Best of 2020 and Eisner Award Winner. New creative terrain includes the libretto for the Aliceheimer’s chamber opera, a 2D animation Between the Wall and the Sides that was part of Collation 2 at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, in Johannesburg South Africa, and a Virtual Reality animation Girl Earth Fire Time.
Photo credits: Adrineh Gregorian
