The four papers in this symposium concern themselves with connecting adaptive behavior and literary representations. Our common starting point is a set of basic problems: What functions do adaptive models serve? How do represented behaviors compare with actual or primary behavior? How are elemental or universal human behaviors inflected by specific environmental and cultural conditions, and how do these inflections enter into literary meaning? Since mental models differ from person to person, how do literary representations cope with differences among characters, author, and audience? Scalise Sugiyama offers a direct adaptive explanation for models--the idea that representations contain information relevant to fitness--and she takes food acquisition as her test case. Easterlin emphasizes the way elemental fitness behaviors are radically inflected by cultural traditions such as literary genre and period. Storey proposes an adaptive explanation for amusement laughter and argues that literary representations dissociate laughter functions into conventionalized generic forms distinct from ordinary experience. Carroll argues that authors create literary meaning by establishing relations among their own mental scenarios and those of their characters and audiences.