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Genes Memes And Human History
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Book Synopsis Genes, Memes and Human History by : Stephen Shennan
Download or read book Genes, Memes and Human History written by Stephen Shennan and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uses neo-Darwinian evolutionary ideas to explore the history of human populations and the origins of, and changes to, their cultural traditions.
Download or read book Memetics written by Tim Tyler and published by Tim Tyler. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memetics is the name commonly given to the study of memes - a term originally coined by Richard Dawkins to describe small inherited elements of human culture. Memes are the cultural equivalent of DNA genes - and memetics is the cultural equivalent of genetics. Memes have become ubiquitous in the modern world - but there has been relatively little proper scientific study of how they arise, spread and change - apparently due to turf wars within the social sciences and misguided resistance to Darwinian explanations being applied to human behaviour. However, with the modern explosion of internet memes, I think this is bound to change. With memes penetrating into every mass media channel, and with major companies riding on their coat tails for marketing purposes, social scientists will surely not be able to keep the subject at arm's length for much longer. This will be good - because an understanding of memes is important. Memes are important for marketing and advertising. They are important for defending against marketing and advertising. They are important for understanding and managing your own mind. They are important for understanding science, politics, religion, causes, propaganda and popular culture. Memetics is important for understanding the origin and evolution of modern humans. It provides insight into the rise of farming, science, industry, technology and machines. It is important for understanding the future of technological change and human evolution. This book covers the basic concepts of memetics, giving an overview of its history, development, applications and the controversy that has been associated with it.
Download or read book Genes Vs. Memes written by Walter A. Koch and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Mapping Human History by : Steve Olson
Download or read book Mapping Human History written by Steve Olson and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Olson traveled through four continents to gather insights into the development of humans for this sweeping history of humanity based on a new understanding of genetics. Maps.
Book Synopsis The Meme Machine by : Susan J. Blackmore
Download or read book The Meme Machine written by Susan J. Blackmore and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memes are ideas, behaviours, or skills that are transferred from one person to another by imitation. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his bestselling The Selfish Gene (OUP 1976), in which he described how biological design arises as genes compete selfishly to replicate themselves. Inhis final chapter Dawkins suggested that memes are also 'replicators', and that they compete to get themselves copied into as many brians as possible. Examples include tunes, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, and new ways of building arches. If memes are true replicators, then our minds are fashionedby memes just as our bodies are fashioned by genes. After twenty years the word 'meme' is to be included in the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. However, most academics avoid the word, and a true science of memetics has not yet developed. This book will lay the foundations for such a science, starting with a clear definition of thememe and applying the principles of general evolutionary theory to understanding memetic selection. This approach provides new theories of memetic altruism, the development of language and the origins of the enormous human brain.
Book Synopsis Methods for Human History by : Patrick Manning
Download or read book Methods for Human History written by Patrick Manning and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a concise yet comprehensive survey of methods used in the expanding studies of human evolution, paying particular attention to new work on social evolution. The first part of the book presents principal methods for the study of biological, cultural, and social evolution, plus migration, group behavior, institutions, politics, and environment. The second part provides a chronological and analytical account of the development of these methods from 1850 to the present, showing how multidisciplinary rose to link physical, biological, ecological, and social sciences. The work is especially relevant for readers in history and social sciences but will be of interest to readers in biological and ecological fields who are interested in exploring a wide range of evolutionary studies.
Book Synopsis A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by : Adam Rutherford
Download or read book A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes written by Adam Rutherford and published by The Experiment, LLC. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award—2017 Nonfiction Finalist “Nothing less than a tour de force—a heady amalgam of science, history, a little bit of anthropology and plenty of nuanced, captivating storytelling.”—The New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice A National Geographic Best Book of 2017 In our unique genomes, every one of us carries the story of our species—births, deaths, disease, war, famine, migration, and a lot of sex. But those stories have always been locked away—until now. Who are our ancestors? Where did they come from? Geneticists have suddenly become historians, and the hard evidence in our DNA has blown the lid off what we thought we knew. Acclaimed science writer Adam Rutherford explains exactly how genomics is completely rewriting the human story—from 100,000 years ago to the present.
Book Synopsis Reading Richard Dawkins by : Gary Keogh
Download or read book Reading Richard Dawkins written by Gary Keogh and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2014 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theological reactions to the rise of the new atheist movement have largely been critically hostile or defensively deployed apologetics to shore up the faith against attack. Gary Keogh contends that focusing on scholarly material that is inherently agreeable to theology will not suffice in the context of modern academia. Theology needs to test its boundaries and venture into dialogue with those with antithetical positions. Engaging Richard Dawkins, as the embodiment of such a position, illustrates how such dialogue may offer new perspectives on classical theological problems, such as the relationship of science and religion, the existence of God, creation, natural suffering and theodicy. Keogh demonstrates how a dialogical paradigm may take shape, rather than merely discussing it as a theoretical framework. A dialogue between such opposing hermeneutics may provide a new paradigm of theological scholarship - one which is up to the task of facing its critics in the public and pluralistic context of modern academia.
Book Synopsis The Watchman's Rattle by : Rebecca Costa
Download or read book The Watchman's Rattle written by Rebecca Costa and published by Vanguard. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why can't we solve our problems anymore? Why do threats such as the Gulf oil spill, worldwide recession, terrorism, and global warming suddenly seem unstoppable? Are there limits to the kinds of problems humans can solve? Rebecca Costa confronts- and offers a solution to-these questions in her highly anticipated and game-changing book, The Watchman's Rattle. Costa pulls headline for today's news to demonstrate how accelerating complexity quickly outpaces that rate at which the human brain can develop new capabilities. With compelling evidenced based on research in the rise and fall of Mayan, Khmer, and Roman empires, Costa shows how t ht tendency to find a quick solutions- leads to frightening long term consequence: Society's ability to solve its most challenging, intractable problems becomes gridlocked, progress slows, and collapse ensues. A provocative new voice in the tradition of thought leaders Thomas Friedman, Jared Diamond and Malcolm Gladwell, Costa reveals how we can reverse the downward spiral. Part history, part social science, part biology, The Watchman's Rattle is sure to provoke, engage and incite change.
Book Synopsis Contagious Metaphor by : Peta Mitchell
Download or read book Contagious Metaphor written by Peta Mitchell and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The metaphor of contagion pervades critical discourse across the humanities, the medical sciences, and the social sciences. It appears in such terms as 'social contagion' in psychology, 'financial contagion' in economics, 'viral marketing' in business, and even 'cultural contagion' in anthropology. In the twenty-first century, contagion, or 'thought contagion' has become a byword for creativity and a fundamental process by which knowledge and ideas are communicated and taken up, and resonates with André Siegfried's observation that 'there is a striking parallel between the spreading of germs and the spreading of ideas'. In Contagious Metaphor, Peta Mitchell offers an innovative, interdisciplinary study of the metaphor of contagion and its relationship to the workings of language. Examining both metaphors of contagion and metaphor as contagion, Contagious Metaphor suggests a framework through which the emergence and often epidemic-like reproduction of metaphor can be better understood.
Book Synopsis The Irresistible Fairy Tale by : Jack Zipes
Download or read book The Irresistible Fairy Tale written by Jack Zipes and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative new theory about fairy tales from one of the world's leading authorities If there is one genre that has captured the imagination of people in all walks of life throughout the world, it is the fairy tale. Yet we still have great difficulty understanding how it originated, evolved, and spread—or why so many people cannot resist its appeal, no matter how it changes or what form it takes. In this book, renowned fairy-tale expert Jack Zipes presents a provocative new theory about why fairy tales were created and retold—and why they became such an indelible and infinitely adaptable part of cultures around the world. Drawing on cognitive science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, psychology, literary theory, and other fields, Zipes presents a nuanced argument about how fairy tales originated in ancient oral cultures, how they evolved through the rise of literary culture and print, and how, in our own time, they continue to change through their adaptation in an ever-growing variety of media. In making his case, Zipes considers a wide range of fascinating examples, including fairy tales told, collected, and written by women in the nineteenth century; Catherine Breillat's film adaptation of Perrault's "Bluebeard"; and contemporary fairy-tale drawings, paintings, sculptures, and photographs that critique canonical print versions. While we may never be able to fully explain fairy tales, The Irresistible Fairy Tale provides a powerful theory of how and why they evolved—and why we still use them to make meaning of our lives.
Book Synopsis A Troublesome Inheritance by : Nicholas Wade
Download or read book A Troublesome Inheritance written by Nicholas Wade and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2015-04-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on startling new evidence from the mapping of the genome, an explosive new account of the genetic basis of race and its role in the human story Fewer ideas have been more toxic or harmful than the idea of the biological reality of race, and with it the idea that humans of different races are biologically different from one another. For this understandable reason, the idea has been banished from polite academic conversation. Arguing that race is more than just a social construct can get a scholar run out of town, or at least off campus, on a rail. Human evolution, the consensus view insists, ended in prehistory. Inconveniently, as Nicholas Wade argues in A Troublesome Inheritance, the consensus view cannot be right. And in fact, we know that populations have changed in the past few thousand years—to be lactose tolerant, for example, and to survive at high altitudes. Race is not a bright-line distinction; by definition it means that the more human populations are kept apart, the more they evolve their own distinct traits under the selective pressure known as Darwinian evolution. For many thousands of years, most human populations stayed where they were and grew distinct, not just in outward appearance but in deeper senses as well. Wade, the longtime journalist covering genetic advances for The New York Times, draws widely on the work of scientists who have made crucial breakthroughs in establishing the reality of recent human evolution. The most provocative claims in this book involve the genetic basis of human social habits. What we might call middle-class social traits—thrift, docility, nonviolence—have been slowly but surely inculcated genetically within agrarian societies, Wade argues. These “values” obviously had a strong cultural component, but Wade points to evidence that agrarian societies evolved away from hunter-gatherer societies in some crucial respects. Also controversial are his findings regarding the genetic basis of traits we associate with intelligence, such as literacy and numeracy, in certain ethnic populations, including the Chinese and Ashkenazi Jews. Wade believes deeply in the fundamental equality of all human peoples. He also believes that science is best served by pursuing the truth without fear, and if his mission to arrive at a coherent summa of what the new genetic science does and does not tell us about race and human history leads straight into a minefield, then so be it. This will not be the last word on the subject, but it will begin a powerful and overdue conversation.
Book Synopsis Cultural Evolution and its Discontents by : Robert N. Watson
Download or read book Cultural Evolution and its Discontents written by Robert N. Watson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People worry that computers, robots, interstellar aliens, or Satan himself – brilliant, stealthy, ruthless creatures – may seize control of our world and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about the human race. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems – especially those whose last names are "ism" – are already doing that, and doing it so adeptly that we seldom even notice. Like other parasites, they’ve blindly evolved to exploit us for their own survival. Creative arts and humanistic scholarship are our best tools for diagnosis and cure. The assemblages of ideas that have survived, like the assemblages of biological cells that have survived, are the ones good at protecting and reproducing themselves. They aren’t necessarily the ones that guide us toward our most admirable selves or our healthiest future. Relying so heavily on culture to protect our uniquely open minds from cognitive overload makes us vulnerable to hijacking by the systems that co-evolve with us. Recognizing the selfish Darwinian functions of these systems makes sense of many aspects of history, politics, economics, and popular culture. What drove the Protestant Reformation? Why have the Beatles, The Hunger Games, and paranoid science-fiction thrived, and how was hip-hop co-opted? What alliances helped neoliberalism out-compete Communism, and what alliances might enable environmentalism to overcome consumerism? Why are multiculturalism and university-trained elites provoking working-class nationalist backlash? In a digital age, how can we use numbers without having them use us instead? Anyone who has wondered how our species can be so brilliant and so stupid at the same time may find an answer here: human mentalities are so complex that we crave the simplifications provided by our cultures, but the cultures that thrive are the ones that blind us to any interests that don’t correspond to their own.
Book Synopsis A History of Humanity by : Patrick Manning
Download or read book A History of Humanity written by Patrick Manning and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity today functions as a gigantic, world-encompassing system. Renowned world historian, Patrick Manning traces how this human system evolved from Homo Sapiens' beginnings over 200,000 years ago right up to the present day. He focuses on three great shifts in the scale of social organization - the rise of syntactical language, of agricultural society, and today's newly global social discourse - and links processes of social evolution to the dynamics of biological and cultural evolution. Throughout each of these shifts, migration and social diversity have been central, and social institutions have existed in a delicate balance, serving not just their own members but undergoing regulation from society. Integrating approaches from world history, environmental studies, biological and cultural evolution, social anthropology, sociology, and evolutionary linguistics, Patrick Manning offers an unprecedented account of the evolution of humans and our complex social system and explores the crises facing that human system today.
Book Synopsis Chimpanzees and Human Evolution by : Martin N. Muller
Download or read book Chimpanzees and Human Evolution written by Martin N. Muller and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-27 with total page 849 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Knowledge of wild chimpanzees has expanded dramatically. This volume, edited by Martin Muller, Richard Wrangham, and David Pilbeam, brings together scientists who are leading a revolution to discover and explain human uniqueness, by studying our closest living relatives. Their conclusions may transform our understanding of human evolution.
Book Synopsis Memes, Societies and Human Evolution by : Roger Heppleston
Download or read book Memes, Societies and Human Evolution written by Roger Heppleston and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why has the human species been so successful? Richard Dawkins suggested in The Selfish Gene that it was the ability to transmit memes (or ideas) from generation to generation that distinguished humans from all other animals. Roger Heppleston has developed the concept of memes to explain how humans came to be the most successful large mammal on the Earth. An ambitious synthesis of history, anthropology, paleoanthropology, evolutionary theory and ecology, Memes, Societies and Human Evolution can claim to be the first complete history of human society written from this evolutionary perspective. The very success of humans is now threatening their future, as the level of human population and wealth has reached the limits that planet Earth can support. The study of human evolution gives an insight as to why humans seem unable to co-operate to avoid ecological threats like global warming. At the end of the book the author comes to an unexpected conclusion about the actions necessary to save the planet for our children.
Book Synopsis The Seductions of Darwin by : Matthew Rampley
Download or read book The Seductions of Darwin written by Matthew Rampley and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surge of evolutionary and neurological analyses of art and its effects raises questions of how art, culture, and the biological sciences influence one another, and what we gain in applying scientific methods to the interpretation of artwork. In this insightful book, Matthew Rampley addresses these questions by exploring key areas where Darwinism, neuroscience, and art history intersect. Taking a scientific approach to understanding art has led to novel and provocative ideas about its origins, the basis of aesthetic experience, and the nature of research into art and the humanities. Rampley’s inquiry examines models of artistic development, the theories and development of aesthetic response, and ideas about brain processes underlying creative work. He considers the validity of the arguments put forward by advocates of evolutionary and neuroscientific analysis, as well as its value as a way of understanding art and culture. With the goal of bridging the divide between science and culture, Rampley advocates for wider recognition of the human motivations that drive inquiry of all types, and he argues that our engagement with art can never be encapsulated in a single notion of scientific knowledge. Engaging and compelling, The Seductions of Darwin is a rewarding look at the identity and development of art history and its complicated ties to the world of scientific thought.
