Expounds a theory of cultural evolution and shows how it can help us to understand the development of human culture.

Culture is a unique and fascinating aspect of the human species. How did it emerge and how does it develop? Richard Dawkins suggested culture evolves and that memes are cultural replicators, subject to variation and selection in the same way as genes are in the biological world. Thus human culture is the product of a mindless evolutionary algorithm. Does this imply, as some have argued, that we are mere meme machines and that the conscious self is an illusion? This highly (...) readable and accessible book extends Dawkins's theory, presenting for the first time a fully developed concept of cultural DNA. Distin argues that culture's development can be seen as the result of memetic evolution and as the product of human creativity. Memetic evolution is perfectly compatible with the view of humans as conscious and intelligent. This book should find a wide readership amongst philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and non-academic readers. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Radical Constructivism and Radical Constructedness: Luhmann’s Sociology of Semantics, Organizations, and Self-Organization” by Loet Leydesdorff. > Upshot: Leydesdorff emphasises the uncertainties involved in the communication of meaning. Luhmann posited three types of media, each of which reduces one type of communicative improbability. The theory of cultural evolution supports Leydesdorff’s emphasis on the uncertainty of communication, and agrees that different media are needed for communication within and across social boundaries. But it highlights the distinction between (...) media and the symbolic codes that give them structure; and it raises the question whether Luhmann’s symbolically generalized communication media are really media at all. (shrink)

Kate Distin introduces the theory of the selfish meme meme machines’.

Kate Distin introduces the theory of the selfish meme – and questions whether we are all ‘meme machines’.

Natural language provides a mechanism for cultural evolution by ensuring the persistent heredity of variations in both cultural information and information about its own construction. In the process, it not only facilitates but also limits our thinking to the ways its vocabulary and structures make possible. But the human capacity for metarepresentation frees cultural information from the restrictions of any one medium or language, and has also propelled the evolution of artefactual languages, which provide evolutionary mechanisms for specialist areas of (...) culture. And cooperation between diverse cultural specialists can stimulate further, innovative competition between the cultural information that they share. (shrink)