The publisher's blurb is here. It says, among other things:
Human beings are a very different kind of animal. We have evolved to become the most dominant species on Earth. We have a larger geographical range and process more energy than any other creature alive. This astonishing transformation is usually explained in terms of cognitive ability — people are just smarter than all the rest. But in this compelling book, Robert Boyd argues that culture — our ability to learn from each other — has been the essential ingredient of our remarkable success.
Google books has it here and offers a peek inside.
The publisher's site says:
Based on the Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University, A Different Kind of Animal features challenging responses by biologist H. Allen Orr, philosopher Kim Sterelny, economist Paul Seabright, and evolutionary anthropologist Ruth Mace, as well as an introduction by Stephen Macedo.
A new book on Internet memes was published by MIT press in 2016. It is called "The World Made Meme" and it is by Ryan M. Milner. Here is the MIT press page about the book. The book has 272 pages and there are hardback and paperback editions.
I have very briefly skimmed the book in a boostore. It has a large number of pictures of image macros in it, along with a lot of accompaning text. The blurb explains that the book is about internet memes and their effect on public conversations. I'll try to review the book in due course.
This is the second MIT press book on internet memes in recent years. While I look forward to there being more, scientists really need to work on memes more than internet memes. It's true that internet memes are the latest, shiniest type - but it all seems rather like Darwin writing about earthworms rather than evolution.
Kevin Laland shows how the learned and socially transmitted activities of our ancestors shaped our intellects through accelerating cycles of evolutionary feedback. The truly unique characteristics of our species--such as our intelligence, language, teaching, and cooperation--are not adaptive responses to predators, disease, or other external conditions. Rather, humans are creatures of their own making.
It goes on to say:
This book tells the story of the painstaking fieldwork, the key experiments, the false leads, and the stunning scientific breakthroughs that led to this new understanding of how culture transformed human evolution. It is the story of how Darwin's intellectual descendants picked up where he left off and took up the challenge of providing a scientific account of the evolution of the human mind.
This sounds promising. Laland has previously written other books on the same topic. The book Sense and Nonsense was a well-written overview of the subject area. The first edition had a whole chapter omn memetics. Kevin's recent book apparently mentions memes only in a brief footnote explaining how irrelevant they are. Laland also once co-authored the paper Mathematical Models for Memetics which proposed that the various schools of cultural evolution would benefit from putting their heads together and encouraged meme enthusiasts to get their math on.
[Laland's] contribution is to realize that the spark that got the whole thing started were innovations in food-processing techniques that let us get more energy from our diet. More efficient eating allowed for brain growth, an extension of lifespan, and population growth.
It seems to be Patrik's fourth book. The blurb starts out by saying:
This book takes the reader on a journey, navigating the enigmatic aspects of cooperation; a journey that starts inside the body and continues via our thoughts to the human super-organism.
Cooperation is one of life’s fundamental principles. We are all made of parts – genes, cells, organs, neurons, but also of ideas, or ‘memes’. Our societies too are made of parts – us humans. Is all this cooperation fundamentally the same process?
In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, [Dennett's] most comprehensive exploration of evolutionary thinking yet, he builds on ideas from computer science and biology to show how a comprehending mind could in fact have arisen from a mindless process of natural selection. Part philosophical whodunit, part bold scientific conjecture, this landmark work enlarges themes that have sustained Dennett’s legendary career at the forefront of philosophical thought. In his inimitable style―laced with wit and arresting thought experiments―Dennett explains that a crucial shift occurred when humans developed the ability to share memes, or ways of doing things not based in genetic instinct. Language, itself composed of memes, turbocharged this interplay. Competition among memes―a form of natural selection―produced thinking tools so well-designed that they gave us the power to design our own memes. The result, a mind that not only perceives and controls but can create and comprehend, was thus largely shaped by the process of cultural evolution.
Collects the most advanced work in the consilience movement
Demonstrates how far science has gone toward unifying knowledge about the human species, and what still needs to be done
Each chapter takes a different disciplinary approach to the question of "human nature"
Features expert perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including evolutionary biology, the humanities, social sciences, and more
The book seems quite focussed on Wilson's concept of consilience. There doesn't seem to be much about cultural evolution, though a few of the contributors are knowledgeable about it. Wilson doesn't seem to have got to grips with cultural evolution yet - still favoring the 'it all boils down to DNA genes' version he was promoting in the 1980s. This seems like a head-in-the-sand approach to me, ruling out the possibility of a memetic takeover on a-priori grounds. The main mention of memes is some meme FUD from Massimo Pigliucci. Initial impressions lead to low expectations for this volume here, though perhaps some of the contributions will be of interest.
Here are some of my books on memes and the evolution of culture. This is for anyone curious about my dead tree collection after reading some of my reviews. Moving to America in 2011 took my personal library through the eye of the needle - and not much made it through. These books are some of what I've been reading since then. These books are currently all within easy reach of my one-year-old daughter - so I thought I would snap them before they are reduced to shreds. Feel free to click if you would like to see bigger images.
Rather to my surprise, I found quite a bit to disagree with in Matt's book. In my humble opinion, the basic problem is that Matt didn't take on the ideas described in Keeping Darwin in Mind. This leads him to regard intelligent design by human designers as a form of creationism - making it a foe to be vanquished. I don't think that this is a very well-balanced perspective.
I have long thought that the idea of incorporating intelligent design into Darwinism might cause some people to choke. So far, to the best of my knowledge, only Matt Ridley and Daniel Dennett seem to have got into problems in this area. Ridley seems to be having more problems than Dennett did.
Indeed, to borrow a phrase from a theorist of innovation, Richard Webb, Darwinism is “the special theory of evolution”. But there is a general theory of evolution, too, and it applies to society, money, technology, language, law, culture, music, violence, history, education, politics, God, morality. The general theory says that things do not stay the same; they change gradually but inexorably; they show “path dependence”; they show descent with modification; they show selective persistence.
The special and general theories of evolution. I love it. What a great way to express the idea of Universal Darwinism. I don't like the term "Darwinism" being reserved for the "special" theory. Rather like Einstien, Darwin pioneered both the special and general theories of evolution; we should give him credit for that.
From the list of examples, it looks as though Ridley might be missing out on Darwinian Physics, though.
You may find that the first chapter is available free here. It's a philosophical/historical overview of bottom-up explanations.
Google Books has the first two chapters online here.
It's a fairly sympathetic critique - the author makes a serious effort to understand the topic before explaining where the perceived flaws lie. As the following quotation indicates, the author regards the blindness of variation as a key tenet of Darwinism:
the Darwinian tenet of the blindness of variation is challenged. It is argued that one should interpret biological evidence in a way that allows for a kind of directed and adapted process of variation – though this process is of course fallible and not omniscient. Paradoxically, this follows from pursueing a Darwinian approach up to its limits. Darwinism thus again demonstrates that it contains the seeds of its own destruction.
It is neo-Darwinism that got dogmatic about variation being undirected. Darwin himself was fairly agnostic about this topic - and indeed proposed a mechanism by which variation was directed by the experience of organisms.
This point revolves around a debate about what the term 'Darwinism' means. Personally, I see no compelling reason to attach Darwin's name to the more useless and out-dated theory - especially when Darwin himself had nothing to do with it.
The author also seem to think universal Darwinism is incompatible with the evolution of evolutionary mechanisms, saying:
Moreover, although it cannot be questioned that we can learn very much from Darwinism, it is claimed that Universal Darwinism as an interpretative framework can and should be replaced by an account of the evolution of evolutionary mechanisms – both in biology and in metaphysics.
...and...
I think the biological trial-and-error theory of Darwinism might also be urged to drop its universalism and acknowledge a certain evolution of evolutionary mechanisms.
The evolution of evolutionary mechanisms seems like a flat fact to me. Particularly the mechanisms that produce selection and introduce variation have complexified over time. Mutations produced inside minds can be a bit different from those produced inside cells. However, as far as evolutionary theory goes, the mechanism of production of mutations can be treated like a modular block box - with specific theories from genetics being plugged into it. A new mutational mechanism needs no changes to evolutionary theory itself - rather it's just a new mutation module. Much the same goes for selection. These days, selection can be produced by intelligent agents - for example by intelligently choosing compatible mate. Darwinism is big enough to include a variety of sources of selection. I think we can have a universal Darwinism while still leaving some space for the evolution of evolutionary mechanisms.
A critic might complain that, with these dependencies on other theories of mutation and selection, Darwinism barely qualifies as a theory in its own right. This has always been true, though. For example, to predict the fitness of a bat genome, Darwinism relies on theories of development, theories of aerodynamics and theories relating to radar. Dependencies on other theories has always been a fundamental part of Darwinism. Evolutionary theory doesn't stand alone.
These are some of the main criticisms in the book. I think that universal Darwinism survives these attacks just fine.
I have generally dismissed Tim Lewens in the past as a feeble-minded meme critic who doesn't know what he is talking about. However the blurb to this book weakly suggests that he is in the process coming round to a sympathetic understanding of cultural evolution. Or maybe not, we will see. Here is the blurb:
Tim Lewens aims to understand what it means to take an evolutionary approach to cultural change, and why it is that this approach is often treated with suspicion. Convinced of the exceptional power of natural selection, many thinkers - typically working in biological anthropology, cognitive psychology, and evolutionary biology - have suggested it should be freed from the confines of biology, and applied to cultural change in humans and other animals. At the same time, others - typically with backgrounds in disciplines like social anthropology and history - have been just as vocal in dismissing the evolutionary approach to culture. What drives these disputes over Darwinism in the social sciences?
While making a case for the value of evolutionary thinking for students of culture, Lewens shows why the concerns of sceptics should not dismissed as mere prejudice, confusion, or ignorance. Indeed, confusions about what evolutionary approaches entail are propagated by their proponents, as well as by their detractors. By taking seriously the problems faced by these approaches to culture, Lewens shows how such approaches can be better formulated, where their most significant limitations lie, and how the tools of cultural evolutionary thinking might become more widely accepted.
Update 2016-02-08: C. Heyes review. From this polite review, the book doesn't sound to me as though it is going to be much good.
One of the tactics is to argue that, if religion is a plague of viral memes, then so is science - and so is memetics - hah! take that, science!
It looks as though the religious apologists just got some support for their "theory" from academia. Two new books (published this year) explicitly treat memetics as a religion. Here they are:
This book presents an objective method for understanding and comparing belief systems, irrespective of their subject matter and of whether or not the investigator happens to agree with them. The method, descriptive logic, is illustrated through analyses of various phenomena, including Zoroastrianism, Dawkinsism, Fabianism, 9/11 Truth, 'alternative' Egyptology, Gnosticism, flying saucer sightings, and the hymns of Charles Wesley.
"Dawkinsism", eh! I can just imagine Saint Richard rolling his eyes towards the "heavens".
This 2013 book is titled "MEMEnomics: The Next Generation Economic System" (Amazon, Google books). It is by Said Dawlabani. The blurb reads:
Books about subjects like economics are rarely written from the perspective of human or cultural evolution. Seldom, if ever, does a reader come across a narrative with pioneering methods that reframe a specialized discipline through a wide-cultural whole systems approach. This is precisely what Said E. Dawlabani does in this revolutionary book, Memenomics: The Next-Generation Economic System. This is a book that reframes the issues of competing economic and political ideologies and places them into an evolutionary new paradigm. This is a book about change done right.
I've reviewed some books over the last few years - many of them relevant to cultural evolution in some way. I used to make videos of my book reviews relating to cultural evolution and memetics - and post them on this blog. These videos have become less frequent - but I still read and review many books. To summarize this activity, my reviews are listed below:
Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book:
The Things We Do - Using the Lessons of Bernard and Darwin to Understand the What, How, and Why of Our Behavior by Gary Cziko
Cziko wrote this book in the year 2000 - after writing Without Miracles.
It contains a history of evolution, a history of cybernetics and perceptual control theory, and section on applying these ideas to human behaviour.
Darwin will be familiar to most, but not everyone will have heard of Claude Bernard. Bernard was a french physiologist who lived at about the same time as Darwin. He studied how organisms act to control their internal environment. Cziko traces ideas about goal-directed systems through Bernard and the pioneers of cybernetics to William Powers, and perceptual control theory.
The main point seems to be that the standard, input/output model of information flow through organisms - which has perceptions leading to processing and processing leading to action - is a "linear" model which misses out something very important - namely the idea of control of perception. Feedback via the environment from action to perception is actually very important. By contrast, in perceptual control theory, organisms act so as to control their own perceptions.
The book is a good one. Most of the material about Darwinism and univeral selectionism is expressed in more detail in Without Miracles. However, this book has more historical perspective, more philosophy, and a lot more cybernetics and perceptual control theory.
The book is a little bit on the dry and boring side. However, one section that was more interesting than most was a chapter where Cziko shows how other thinkers stack up in their understanding of the subject. He rates Chomsky, Piaget, Skinner, Pinker and Dennett on their understanding of the topics in his book, giving them marks out of three. To summarize, he gives Chomsky zero, Piaget and Skinner, a half point, Pinker gets one full point and Dennett gets two and a half points. I would have given Skinner and probably Dennett more points, but otherwise, this seems about right. While this chapter seems a bit like Cziko showing off, he has a reasonable point - which is that this important material is much neglected by other thinkers.
While it's hard to argue with the significance of Darwin, Cziko makes a weaker case for the significance of Bernard. I didn't think the ideas from perceptual control theory, cybernetics and feedback were in as opposition to the conventional perception -> processing -> action models as Cziko implies. However, even if this material is less revolutionary than Cziko suggests, these are still interesting and important subject areas.
While this is a nice book, those interested in Cziko's ideas should definitely read Without Miracles first.
Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book:
The Darwin Economy - Robert Frank
This book argues that Adam Smith's idea of an invisible hand in economics is a metaphor with some significant limitations - and that a Darwinian perspective shows how individual self-interest and group benefit are often in conflict and that individual selfishness often leads to bad outcomes at higher levels.
Frank's examples of unhealthy individual self-interest in biology include products of runaway sexual selection. He lists a number of examples - such as peacock's tails and oversize antlers. He compares these with similar wasteful processes in economics - such as "conspicuous consumption" and other forms of status displays. Frank says that a Darwinian perspective predicts and explains such cases - while the idea of an "invisible hand" does not.
These ideas are good, but they are only a small part of the book. Most of the book argues for making some economic changes, in the light of a Darwinian perspective.
The main proposed changes seem to be changes to taxation. Frank promotes the idea of sin taxes. He proposes we tax total consumption directly - rather than directly taxing sales - and suggests a sliding scale where the rich get taxed more. He proposes taxing heavy vehicles, tobacco and alcohol, and emissions of carbon dioxide sulphur dioxide.
He pictures his main opponents as libertarians, who oppose most taxation. A substantial fraction of the book involves pointing out how crazy the libertarian positions are. I tired of this material rather quickly - since Frank was preaching to the converted in my case - I can't take libertarian positions seriously.
The book is generally great. However, Frank spends a lot of time on his libertarian critics - and not enough time on other more interesting criticisms.
Frank seems to generally favour more taxes - but he doesn't spend much time addressing the question of how much taxation is the right amount. Cries for more taxation should try to address this question.
Frank realizes that countries with higher taxes will be unattractive places to run businesses. His argument about why this is not a problem invokes the idea that countries with less taxes are not such nice places to live. This idea appears to be nonsense to me. I spent much of my life in England, which has a few nearby tax havens - in the form of Ireland and the channel islands: Jersey and Guernsey. Jersey and Guernsey in particular have a great climate, are full of rich people and are miniature paradises. Businesses based there have pretty good access to English consumers. Most people don't live there - simply because they can't afford the land prices. In such cases, Frank's argument about tax havens being places where people don't want to live seems to fall on its nose.
Lots of taxation tends to produce black markets which fund criminal undergrounds. Sin taxes can only be taken so far because this sort of effect starts to kick in after a while.
Similarly Frank doesn't spend much time on tax evasion. Some taxes are easier to avoid than others - and tax evasion is pretty big business. Levels of taxation on undesirable actions have to be set in the light of the ease of tax evasion. Fortunately, conspicuous consumption is often easy to tax - since it is by nature easily visible.
Frank's plans mostly seem to revolve around taxing activities that are currently not taxed very much. However there's also scope for raising funds via taxing actions that are currently illegal - such as consuming some drugs and prostitution. Such a discussion might have added some spice and could have replaced some of the book's more repetitive elements - but this topic was not covered.
Lastly, Frank is basically proposing a tax plan that benefits the poor, at the expense of the rich. It is true that many people might vote for such a tax plan, but it is also true that other people might use lobbying, campaign donations and so forth to oppose it. Politics, proverbially, is the fine art of getting money from the rich and votes from the poor while promising each that you will protect them from the other. Frank's proposed policies might get votes from the poor, but they probably won't attract much money from the rich. This makes them less likely to be implemented.
Despite spending his energy on some of the the sillier criticisms of his ideas, many of Frank's proposals seem sensible. Consumption taxes are generally favoured by most economists, and a sliding scale that taxes the rich more makes obvious sense - compared to sales taxes. Sin taxes are fairly common anyway - the main issue is where they can be best applied.
In summary, this is a pretty good book, which should be read by anyone with an interest in how biological ideas apply to economic issues.
Robert Boyd's new book on cultural evolution is out. It is titled:
A new book on Internet memes was published by MIT press in 2016. It is called "The World Made Meme" and it is by Ryan M. Milner. 
Laland's recent book on cultural evolution is out. It is titled: 
A new book on cultural evolution is coming out soon: 
Daniel Dennett is coming out with his book on cultural evolution in 2017. Here's 
A new book on social applications of Darwinism is out:
My 
The book, "The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge" by Matt Ridley is out later this month.
Momme von Sydow has a 2012 book titled:
Tim Lewens has a book on cultural evolution coming out later this year: 
This 2013 book is titled "MEMEnomics: The Next Generation Economic System" (
"
I've reviewed some books over the last few years - many of them relevant to cultural evolution in some way. I used to make videos of my book reviews relating to cultural evolution and memetics - and post them on this blog. These videos have become less frequent - but I still read and review many books. To summarize this activity, my reviews are listed below:
Dennett's latest book is out.
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