Cultural Evolution and its Discontents

Cultural Evolution and its Discontents
Author :
Publisher : Routledge
Total Pages : 485
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780429670879
ISBN-13 : 0429670877
Rating : 4/5 (79 Downloads)

Synopsis Cultural Evolution and its Discontents by : Robert Watson

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.

Civilization and Its Discontents

Civilization and Its Discontents
Author :
Publisher : Courier Dover Publications
Total Pages : 81
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780486282534
ISBN-13 : 0486282538
Rating : 4/5 (34 Downloads)

Synopsis Civilization and Its Discontents by : Sigmund Freud

(Dover thrift editions).

Technology and Culture

Technology and Culture
Author :
Publisher : Waveland Press
Total Pages : 161
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781478607977
ISBN-13 : 1478607971
Rating : 4/5 (77 Downloads)

Synopsis Technology and Culture by : Allen W. Batteau

Technology and Culture provides a comprehensive overview of anthropological and other theories examining the place of technology in culture, and the consequences of technology for cultural evolution. The book develops and contrasts anthropological discourse of technology and culture with humanistic and managerial views. It uses core anthropological concepts, including adaptation, evolution, totemic identity, and collective representations, to locate a broad variety of technologies, ancient and modern, in a context of shared understandings and misunderstandings. The author draws on his own experience as an auto mechanic, computer programmer, ethnographer, and aircraft pilot to demonstrate that technologies are cultural creations, encoding and accelerating the dreams and delusions of the societies that produce them.

Darwinism and Its Discontents

Darwinism and Its Discontents
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Total Pages : 286
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780521829472
ISBN-13 : 052182947X
Rating : 4/5 (72 Downloads)

Synopsis Darwinism and Its Discontents by : Michael Ruse

Publisher description

The Acceleration of Cultural Change

The Acceleration of Cultural Change
Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
Total Pages : 176
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780262036955
ISBN-13 : 0262036959
Rating : 4/5 (55 Downloads)

Synopsis The Acceleration of Cultural Change by : R. Alexander Bentley

How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.

Evolution and Popular Narrative

Evolution and Popular Narrative
Author :
Publisher : BRILL
Total Pages : 311
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9789004391161
ISBN-13 : 9004391169
Rating : 4/5 (61 Downloads)

Synopsis Evolution and Popular Narrative by :

The contributors to this volume share the assumption that popular narrative, when viewed with an evolutionary lens, offers an incisive index into human nature. In theory, narrative art could take a near infinity of possible forms. In actual practice, however, particular motifs, plot patterns, stereotypical figures, and artistic devices persistently resurface, indicating specific predilections frequently at odds with our actual living conditions. Our studies explore various media and genres to gauge the impact of our evolutionary inheritance, in interdependence with the respective cultural environments, on our aesthetic appreciation. As they suggest, research into mass culture is not only indispensable for evolutionary criticism but may also contribute to our understanding of prehistoric selection pressures that still influence modern preferences in popular narrative. Contributions by David Andrews, James Carney, Mathias Clasen, Brett Cooke, Tamás Dávid-Barrett, Tom Dolack, Kathryn Duncan, Isabel Behncke Izquierdo, Joe Keener, Alex C. Parrish, Todd K. Platts, Anna Rotkirch, Judith P. Saunders, Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Sophia Wege.

Consumer Culture and Modernity

Consumer Culture and Modernity
Author :
Publisher : Polity
Total Pages : 240
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0745603041
ISBN-13 : 9780745603049
Rating : 4/5 (41 Downloads)

Synopsis Consumer Culture and Modernity by : Don Slater

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the issues, concepts and theories through which people have tried to understand consumer culture throughout the modern period, and puts the current state of thinking into a broader context. Thematically organized, the book shows how the central aspects of consumer culture - such as needs, choice, identity, status, alienation, objects, culture - have been debated within modern theories, from those of earlier thinkers such as Marx and Simmel to contemporary forms of post-structuralism and postmodernism. This approach introduces consumer culture as a subject which - far from being of narrow or recent interest - is intimately tied to the central issues of modern times and modern social thought. With its reviews of major theorists set within a full account of the development of the subject, this book should be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the many disciplines which now study consumer culture, including communications and cultural studies, anthropology and history.

Appetite and Its Discontents

Appetite and Its Discontents
Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Total Pages : 444
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780226693040
ISBN-13 : 022669304X
Rating : 4/5 (40 Downloads)

Synopsis Appetite and Its Discontents by : Elizabeth A. Williams

Why do we eat? Is it instinct? Despite the necessity of food, anxieties about what and how to eat are widespread and persistent. In Appetite and Its Discontents, Elizabeth A. Williams explores contemporary worries about eating through the lens of science and medicine to show us how appetite—once a matter of personal inclination—became an object of science. Williams charts the history of inquiry into appetite between 1750 and 1950, as scientific and medical concepts of appetite shifted alongside developments in physiology, natural history, psychology, and ethology. She shows how, in the eighteenth century, trust in appetite was undermined when researchers who investigated ingestion and digestion began claiming that science alone could say which ways of eating were healthy and which were not. She goes on to trace nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the nature of appetite between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, and localists and holists, illuminating struggles that have never been resolved. By exploring the core disciplines in investigations in appetite and eating, Williams reframes the way we think about food, nutrition, and the nature of health itself..

The Culture of Critique

The Culture of Critique
Author :
Publisher :
Total Pages : 540
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0759672210
ISBN-13 : 9780759672215
Rating : 4/5 (10 Downloads)

Synopsis The Culture of Critique by : Kevin MacDonald

The City Cultures Reader

The City Cultures Reader
Author :
Publisher : Psychology Press
Total Pages : 564
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0415302455
ISBN-13 : 9780415302456
Rating : 4/5 (55 Downloads)

Synopsis The City Cultures Reader by : Malcolm Miles

Cities are products of culture and sites where culture is made. By presenting the best of classic and contemporary writing on the culture of cities, this reader provides an overview of the diverse material on the interface between cities and culture.