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I'm kinda maybe beginning to see the connection with evolving stories and evolving biological processes. I see it as a time frame sort of thing. On Beauty came out during a time period when the content of the book would make sense. We are struggling with the issues that her book addresses, especially race, today. It has evolved to the right thing because of it's time, and has therefore survived. I think if Smith hadn't changed as much as she had, like only flopped the gender of the characters, the story wouldn't make sense in modern times. People wouldn't relate to the time period and it would be an evolutionary failure. Howard's End was a success because it too was appropriate for it's time and audience. Biological evolution is a timing thing also. Humans wouldn't have survived if we evolved in the early oxygen-lacking atmosphere.

I'm still having a hard time saying that literary and biological evolution are exactly the same. I can't see the randomness in literature that biological evolution has. Maybe it doesn't have to be there. Literature and art are not organisms, so maybe they don't evolve exactly like them. Maybe the processes of evolution are different for each medium, but they still occur.