Cultural Evolution
Cambridge University Press, 7/29/2010
EAN 9780521189712, ISBN10: 0521189713
Paperback, 282 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
In this book, Kate Distin proposes a theory of cultural evolution and shows how it can help us to understand the origin and development of human culture. Distin introduces the concept that humans share information not only in natural languages, which are spoken or signed, but also in artefactual languages like writing and musical notation, which use media that are made by humans. Languages enable humans to receive and transmit variations in cultural information and resources. In this way, they provide the mechanism for cultural evolution. The human capacity for metarepresentation - thinking about how we think - accelerates cultural evolution, because it frees cultural information from the conceptual limitations of each individual language. Distin shows how the concept of cultural evolution outlined in this book can help us to understand the complexity and diversity of human culture, relating her theory to a range of subjects including economics, linguistics, and developmental biology.
1. Introduction
small consequences of one general law
Part I. The Inheritance of Cultural Information
2. What is information?
3. How is information inherited?
Part II. The Inheritance of Cultural Information
Natural Language
4. Natural language and culture
the biological building blocks
5. How did natural language evolve?
6. Language, thought, and culture
Part III. In Inheritance of Cultural Information
Artefactual Language
7. How did artefactual language evolve?
8. Artefactual language, representation and culture
9. Money
an artefactual language
10. Money
the explanatory power of artefactual languages
Part III. The Receivers of Cultural Information
11. How does human diversity affect cultural evolution?
Part IV. The Expression of Cultural Information
12. Aspects of the cultural ecology
13. Patterns of cultural taxonomy
14. Conclusion
a representational understanding of cultural evolution
Appendix
what about memetics?