Cultural Evolution (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780521189712)

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.

Author: Kate Distin
ISBN-10: 0521189713
ISBN-13: 9780521189712
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 05/31/2010
Pages: 282
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.87lbs
Size: 8.96h x 6.10w x 0.74d