Alan C. Love & William C. Wimsatt (eds.), Beyond the Meme: Development and Structure in Cultural Evolution , Minneso
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Alan C. Love & William C. Wimsatt (eds.), Beyond the Meme: Development and Structure in Cultural Evolution, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 22, Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019, xxxii + 510 pp. Mathieu Charbonneau1
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
The edited volume Beyond the Meme is a collection of thought-provoking essays dealing with the multifaceted complexity and wide diversity of cultural systems. The topics addressed by the essays span from language evolution to religious institutions, from the material constraints acting on cultural transmission to the evolution of distributed cognitive systems, tackling along the way social identity, writing systems, and the sociology of data sharing, among many other topics. The volume celebrates methodological pluralism: it offers ethnographic studies, formal modelling, theoretical contributions, and detailed historical case studies. A reader interested in any of the topics covered by the chapters will find a lot to chew on (and a lot more to explore), and the diversity of the contributors’ perspectives is refreshing. Beyond the Meme is, to my mind, one of the most intellectually stimulating edited volumes on cultural evolution published in a long time. The obvious danger of editing a volume with such a wide-ranging set of topics, disciplinary focuses, and contributing expertise is to trade off systematicity for breadth. One confessed goal of the editors is to illustrate the wide spanning range of cultural phenomena in need of explanations and the plurality of perspectives that an interdisciplinary research agenda of cultural evolution could (and should) include, with each chapter serving as exemplars of a multifaceted, methodologically rich science of cultural evolution. In this respect, Beyond the Meme is a blatant success. * Mathieu Charbonneau [email protected] 1
Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Oktober 6 utca, 7, 1051 Budapest, Hungary
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The theoretical side of the editorial project, however, is not as accessible. The contributors of the volume were brought together because their research agendas would serve as exemplars of Wimsatt’s alternative framework to the mainstream, informational approach to cultural evolution, one set more along the lines of ‘EvoDevo’ than population genetics. Wimsatt’s substantive contributions to cultural evolution have not had a wide impact on mainstream cultural evolution and thus may be unfamiliar to many. This is unfortunate as Wimsatt’s contributions on the topic—together with those made by his close collaborators over the years—are an extremely rich source of critical and constructive insights which deserve to be taken seriously within the field. Wimsatt is a systematic thinker, a rare and valuable quality, but this systematicity often comes with the use of a difficult and specialist prose which can easily alienate readers not already verse in his contributions to philosophy of science. Wimsa
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