A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change -- and the Limits of Evolution

by Felipe Fernández-Armesto

We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live--our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values--seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling, sometimes terrifying. Why is this?

In A Foot in the River, best-selling historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto sifts through the evidence and offers some radical answers to these very big questions about the human species and its history--and speculates on what these answers might mean for our future. Combining insights from a huge range of disciplines, including history, biology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology, ethology, zoology, primatology, psychology, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and even business studies, he argues that culture is exempt from evolution. Ultimately, no environmental conditions, no genetic legacy, no predictable patterns, no scientific laws determine our behaviour. We can consequently make and remake our world in the freedom of unconstrained imaginations.

A revolutionary book which challenges scientistic assumptions about culture and how and why cultural change happens, A Foot in the River comes to conclusions which readers may well find by turns both daunting and also potentially hugely liberating.

Genres: History, Philosophy, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Cultural, Sociology, Nature

304 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2015

About the author

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a British professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and author of several popular works, notably on cultural and environmental history.

Reviews

[Elentarri · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, though frustrating book. The first three chapters were rather verbose and a slog to get through. The next four chapters is where all the interesting stuff gets discussed. I really wish the author would have argued his points in a clearer manner.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a physically beautiful book. Anyone who reads it as an ebook is short changing himself. It has a beautiful dust jacket and uses a good typeface on top quality paper. I would throw away my Kindle if all books could be this nice. The quality of the book enhanced my anticipation and my reading experience. I was also drawn in by the title -- a reference to Heraclitus -- and by the promise that the book would provide a more complete theory of cultural change than can be derived from the theory of evolution. The book is engagingly written and starts with an interesting overview of philosophical perspectives on time. But then it fizzles out and never lives up to its promise. The author surveys and rejects various approaches to applying evolutionary theory to cultural change, but without really providing any convincing refutation. He suggests that cultural variety and change can be explained as a product of human imagination, but this is a tautological approach to the question that lacks explanatory power. The author mistakenly believes that science has become fuzzy and soft, failing to appreciate the power and precision of a scientific theory such as quantum mechanics that derives predictive power from uncertainty and probability. The author at times seems to fall into a false teleological understanding of the theory of evolution, incorrectly believing that evolutionary adaptions have to have some purpose. And he points to the great variety in human culture as evidence that cultural traits cannot be evolved, failing to understand that variation is in fact an essential component of natural selection. I agree that there are some difficulties in trying to use the theory of evolution to explain cultural change, and I was hoping that this book would give me greater insights into those problems and would provide an alternative theory. It just didn't deliver the goods.

[Kristian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good number of very interesting essays in the middle chapters but does stumble towards the end.

Chapters 1-3 lay out the historical timeline of describing and understanding culture, pointing out where work has been mistaken or misguided along the way.

Chapters 4-6 were, for me, the most interesting. Exploring what can be described as 'culture', evidence of culture in other species and what makes human culture unique. Really very interesting content - I'd recommend readers with a passing interest (or the very time strapped) to stick to these three if you're less interested in the academic discourse that sandwiches them.

Chapter 7 while interesting to a point, starts to step towards conjecture. I'm not in the field of cultural research myself, so cannot really comment on the strength of arguments made - but as a lay-reader, I started losing interest here.

The final chapter has some passages that are almost unreadable for the number of clauses and adjectives poured liberally from a thesaurus, that somehow also don't seem to actually say anything. Perhaps this is more aimed at researchers working in the field, but other than a few entertaining remarks or anecdotes, I was relieved to reach the end.

I could have rated it 4 stars had I stopped at chapter 7, but I found myself commenting more on the weird writing than any interesting ideas the further I read beyond this point.

[Ruben González · Rating 4 out of 5]

El libro intenta hacerse cargo de una pregunta compleja, ¿por qué la cultura humana cambia tanto de un país a otro, y por qué evoluciona a ritmo frenético? ¿Se puede cambiar y evolucionar sin límite? A mi parecer el libro tiene una gran fortaleza y es el abundante material bibliográfico del que está nutrido, pero creo que a ratos sucede que la pregunta se difumina por entre los intersticios que el autor transita para responderla.

[Dan Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not so convinced that any characteristics within the realm of human invention are really without function, before or after the bottleneck of technological ideas (which are evolutionary forces that emanate from culture) in spite of what he argues. I think everything we do has purpose, sometimes it's not so obvious. A ritual you might see as useless often contains symbolic lessons for a community. Flamboyant clothing that one might think of as random is going to deal with mate selection or utility of some kind. Folk dances deal with stress relief, art attempts to convey meaning, unique foods are selected for because people like them. Not only that, cultures can be decimated by technological advance or advances in memes that migrate in from anywhere. The whole fact that they are fragile to this shows you even more so they can become squashed from the pressure of someone's idea (as represented in a technology) of behavior.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has some interesting and provocative arguments about the primacy of culture in human history. Although it is not a long book, Fernández-Armesto seems to lose focus in the final quarter and it becomes a bit rambling and repetitive. Still I enjoyed it, like most of his books I've read.

[Chandy John]

This is an excruciatingly boring book. Meant exclusively for academics.

[A. J · Rating 1 out of 5]

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair review. 

I always hate DNFing ARCs, but this book was just so boring I couldn't get through it. And believe me I tried really hard to like it. I've tried to read this book off and on for probably a year or more. I can't even remember now. I kept thinking maybe I just wasn't in the mood for non-fiction, or maybe I just had to start over and reread the beginning again. Nope. I just couldn't get into this book. The synopsis sounds fascinating, but the actual book is all over the place and confusing and just plain boring.

I gave it one star because no book should take me a over a year to read. 

[Paul Sand · Rating 1 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

Another book in the "thought I would like it better than I did" category. (And after I persuaded the library at the University Near Here to purchase a copy, too!)

The author, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, is a British historian, now at Notre Dame. His broad subject here (as the subtitle hints) is cultural change, and his concern that the notion of "evolution" should not be applied to such changes.

At first his writing style seemed lively and picturesque. As the book wore on, I found it increasingly irritating, opinionated, and unfocused. So it goes.

It didn't help that I've been reading a lot about "cultural evolution" over the past few months, for example: Darwin's Unfinished Symphony by Kevin Laland; The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley; The Secret of Our Success by Joseph Henrich. They love using the E-word to describe cultural change. Ridley, for one, describes it as "ideas having sex", producing unexpected results that get selected/deselected in unpredictable ways.

You don't have to buy into this whole notion all the way, but it seems that these writers are onto something. In his dissent, Fernández-Armesto doesn't really engage with this idea, but instead quibbles that "evolution" is a misleading misnomer, with too many Darwinistic implications to be a useful metaphor. That's not a bad argument—nobody wants to misuse a metaphor, or mindlessly apply inapplicable biological lessons. But that's it. Fernández-Armesto mentions (for example) Kevin Laland in a couple of spots, but never seems to fully explore (or understand?) his findings or arguments.

Charles Murray comes in for scorn for The Bell Curve, which Fernández-Armesto describes unfairly. He's also unfairly dismissive of Herbie Spencer.

In a generally positive WSJ review of the book, J.R. McNeill notes that Fernández-Armesto is "striving too hard for effect"; one of his provocative points is that “cannibalism is typically—you might almost say peculiarly—human and cultural.” McNeill then rattles off numerous examples of non-human, not-cultural cannibalism in nature. Geez, if only a scientist had pre-reviewed the book before publication.

And Princess Diana—Felipe's not a fan! "She was, I thought, and think still, a morally abominable person, shallow, meretricious, promiscuous, selfish, exhibitionistic, and talentless." Yeah, but as near as I can remember, she avoided speaking ill of the dead.

Not that Fernández-Armesto's argument depends in any way on Di's alleged character flaws. He just wanted to let us know, a drive-by slagging.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Professor at Notre Dame, advisor to the Vatican makes the case for the power of positive thinking, that our lives and our culture change because of the real power of human imagination.

Big insight is that it's a big, big mistake to assume that change in human lives and in human culture is evolutionary, that good ideas defeat bad ideas automatically, with no human decision. Imagination without discernment is not necessarily leading us towards a better world.

The currently popular concept "memes" is a term to look up in the index and to read about first, profound insight with an argument that seems indisputable to me. I'd very much like your opinion about what he says about memes and the idea that real human change is beyond physical evolution.

[Tacco · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very academically written book in terms of its structure. His hypothesis is answered in one of the latter chapters and it was a long drive to get there. But lots valuable ideas and facts throughout that make it worth reading on.

[Elendil · Rating 1 out of 5]

Complete review at

https://elendilblog.wordpress.com/201...

I didn't like this book, I think the author doesn't argue enough his points of view.