Cultural Evolution

by Kate Distin

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.

282 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2010

Reviews

[So Hakim · Rating 3 out of 5]

A primer on the field of memetics, that, unfortunately, suffers from the author's (very) dry prose. The coverage is decent, but wouldn't recommend it for casual readers.

There is interesting aspect in this book, in that the author refuses to use terminology "meme" (though with good reason, see the appendix). Those who have glimpses into the field may think it passable, however it is guaranteed to at least confuse (or frustrate) readers trying to learn it the first time.