I think too much can be made of story-telling being a human trait or activity. I have heard of a penguin leading a scientist to a cache of whale bones. I'm quite sure that, had the penguin been able to communicate verbally, it would have had a story to tell. And don't bees tell quite a story about their discovery of a source of nectar through a dance they perform on their return to the colony?
Another useful function of story-telling is to avert physical violence. For example, the Inuit societies had a custom (and perhaps still have) whereby potential combatants were brought together in public and were allowed to tell stories on each other in song without reservation with the purpose of achieving a catharsis without violence.

A True Love Story
I was fortunate some years ago to be invited to my brothers time share in Maui, a wonderful place to just be. About half way through the week the four of us, my twin brother and his wife and my girl friend and I decided to take a snorkel boat trip for the day with a 150 dollar discount if my brother attended a time share sales meeting for an hour anytime that week. Well being we were staying for free at his beautiful beach front abode and being identical twins I offered my girlfriend and I to go in their place. Well it was far from a group meeting which I assumed, my girl friend and I got involved in a one on one interview with a salesmen who grilled us with questions regarded my brother and his life. I lied over and over again for about a half an hour holding to the deception that we were my brother and wife and finally said thats enough, I couldn't do the sales meeting anymore. The salesmen said if I could not finish the meeting I would have to go to the reception desk and pay the 150 dollars we had already spent. Reluctantly I couldn't lie for money anymore so we left and I paid.
That afternoon the four of us found another beautiful beach to snorkel and low and behold I found a gold ring lying amongst the coral of the Pacific Ocean, and it fit my ring finger perfectly. That night on the Way to dinner we passed a jewelry store and I walked in to find out what the gold ring was worth, they said (years ago when gold was valued much less than today) 150 dollars.
Karma?
I wear the ring still today to remind me truth is worth more than money and as fortune goes the ring became much more than just a truth ring, recently it has become a loving wedding ring.
Truly me,
=

Storytelling is old, while stories about storytelling are ever-evolving, and in this sense, new. I am reminded of a film---and a story within that story. The film was Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. And the story within the story dealt with a tribe of feral children who maintained the myth of Captain Walker---a myth that gave them hope and reason to hang on to their small world and their otherwise dwindling humanity. Mel Gibson (as Max)was rescued by these young offcasts. It took him awhile to figure out the mythology under which they operated. But the symbology was clear and the filmmaker "got the right of it." Other commenters may say more or less on this post. I look forward to their remarks.

The ape in the monkey suit is an insult to apedom. But apes cannot fight back. Yet. Supposedly, an elephant can "talk" now. Is he/she only aping an ape, or pretending to be a human in elephant's clothing? It is confusing---isnt it? Some say I think too much. Well, cogito, ergo, sum. And so on.

I have a general question about Philosophy Talk -- not sure this is the best place for it, but it's a philosophical question. There's a term that gets thrown around a lot on the show, and I feel like either I've missed the definition, or it's been a bit sloppy.
When KT and JP use the term "rational," what precisely do they mean? Formally, I would expect it to indicate that the conclusion in question follows from an explicit set of axioms, in combination with a set of logical rules, and that the conclusion follows from an appropriate application of those rules. Of course, we aren't generally so formal that we have to spell out that whole argument, but "rational" indicates that we could do so with relatively little effort.
Does "rational" apply, though, regardless of the content of the axioms? That is, if an argument chooses entirely different axioms (and maybe even rules of logic), but proceeds according to those rules in a self-consistent way, does it qualify as rational?
For example, suppose there is a system with the following axiom: "Zeus controls every bit of physical matter at every instant according to his purposes." From this, one can conclude that there need not be any "laws of physics" by which things must happen; after all, Zeus is doing what Zeus does. If he chooses to be consistent for a long time, that's his business. All observations we make are simply observations of what Zeus' purpose in the moment was, without any content about what "must" happen. Missing from this description of the universe is Occam's Razor and the scientific method. But it's entirely self-consistent. Is it "rational"?
If not, what does "rational" mean? If it insists on a particular set of axioms, then calling any other system "irrational" may be correct by the definition, but seems a bit ad hominem. Or maybe it means something entirely different that the formal definition above?

I haven't heard so much about how stories are received by listeners. I think the ability to be affected by stories, instead of parsing them for facts, is noteworthy.

Knowing that John did a lot of work on identity I'm surprised he didn't make the natural point that storytelling reinforces our sense of personal identity over time, something dear to us but whose logical foundations are shaky at best.

Everything evolves, Everything, that is, involving life and/or consciousness. Philosophers and life-scientists have been dancing with this notion for decades---without stating the obvious. Professionals are fearful of being wrong, or of advancing unproven (unprovable?) hypotheses. There is a research engineer in my town who claims to have tinkered with time. He says he has a device, the effects of which may ultimately lead to time travel. Certainly, he has detractors---and rightly so. I do not know about warped space or other anomalies of physics. This local guy, Marshall Barnes, may know something. Or, he may not. Not for me to say. I grow vegetables.
Live as well as I am able---given fixed income issues, and give no more than I can. Google Mr. Barnes, if you like. I'm sure he is on the net. I mean, why wouldn't he be, hmmmm?
The oasis is calm tonight. The camel says: hmmmmph. And why wouldn't he?
Oh, alright. I'll pose two questions about time travel. First, the past: If Barnes and many others are right about the immutability of history, why should we wish to go there? If it is broke but we can't fix it, uh----?
The future: we might change this now---if we wanted to do so; or understood NOW why it should be changed, and how. And so, time travel is an enigma and so hypothetical---or is it? Ask Marshall Barnes. he seems to know.

Rational is probably in the dictionary. Zeus is also, certainly---but Zeus is a myth. Perhaps rational is also a myth? Occam's Razor? The Sword of Damocles? Myths and metaphors---most in the dictionary or other quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. Linguists such as Steven Pinker and his colleagues banter these things around a lot. Whether Zeus or any such myths truly formed our dreams and visions seems far-removed from, uh, the rational. But there are all of these axioms---aren't there? Complexity is just another way of saying: hey, I've got to take this call, d'you mind? Yeah. I do. See you again---whenever---if I'm so unlucky...

Although it may not be entirely topical, I am intrigued by the question raised by Brian. I have often wondered why 'rational' has a positive connotation but 'rationalization' has a negative one. Perhaps rational should be considered a psychological rather than philosophical term. Then, according to the Freudian view, rational thinking includes (a) consideration of all the available facts, not just the desirable ones, and (b) sound logical reasoning.
Rationalization usually refers to a process that begins with a desired conclusion and then goes in search of facts that fit.
Rationalism as a philosophy, the belief that truth and knowledge can be attained through reason alone, has been discredited by the historical process (or, so I take it).
Perhaps, too, a degree of ambiguity is unavoidable. Otherwise we may end up like the two hapless philosophy professors of Barrows Dunham's delightful vignette, who, after an overly critical philosophical examination of the proposition "it is good to be healthy," had one forced to admit that he didn't know what he meant, while the other was forced to admit that his statements meant nothing at all but were just grunts of approval or disapproval.

Truth
If your searching for a Way to box in Truth with axiomatic ideals, natural laws, scientific theories and proofs, religious dogmas of gods and faiths, or even philosophical rationalism's and reasonings, you've gone the wrong Way.
Truth is absolutely free.
Just be,
=

There's another important function of storytelling that's relevant to the evolution of our ability for it. Somebody above in comments touched on it. I think story-telling is more than just reinforcing of identity. I think our ability to tell stories may be absolutely and fundamentally integral to consciousness itself. The other important social aspects of it, yes, those are important, but in a different way. Our ability to shape our experiences into some kind of creative self-image, whether it's truthful or totally coherent, is a fundamental part of identity formation. I think that perhaps story-telling then is not a result of our nature but our nature as consciousness is a result of our story-telling ability.
I write diaries each week at dailykos about classical music and have for years. The subject of how we, as listeners, are able to process all that abstract sound coming at us and get something out of it is a much more interesting one to me than the process by which the composer himself imbues it with something we imagine as its meaning. I have, before, compared it to the process by which a a human looks at a Rorschach inkblot and sees an image in it, even though we might objectively say there is no REAL image there -- only whatever subjective meaning we impose on the inkblot. Since inkblots have no composer, by making this comparison, I suggest that the two-way communication that we imagine when we listen to Beethoven isn't Beethoven to you or me, but you or me to that firehose of sounds itself. We knit together and integrate all that sound into something subjectively meaningful, then, just as we do when we interpret a Rorschach, or when we make up the story of who we are and where we came from and want to go.
This has some implications as well, I think, in AI and artificial consciousness, an area of interest to me. Any successful artificial consciousness, I think, will have to have some process for both keeping a log of past events and of knitting them together into some kind of storyline of what it has been doing, what is happening to it now, what it wants, etc.

Sigmund Freud was a neurotic misfit. I arrived at this conclusion while reading comments on a newer Philoso?hy Talk blog post: Are Some People Better Than Others? It annoys me that Dr. Freud was ever taken seriously at all. Snake oil and hokum; surmise and personal transference. But, it teaches us something about the genetics vs. environment dichotomy: there are mitigating circumstances that enable certain folks to become better than others, whether those be risk-taking or taking a shrewish wife (same thing?). Or being neurotic misfits? Well, its a Grimm prospect, isn't it? (Heh,heh...) End of story(?)