Techno Cultural Evolution

Author : William McDonald Wallace
Publisher : Potomac Books, Inc.
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2011-07
Category : Science
ISBN : 9781612343259

Get Book

Techno-Cultural Evolution by William McDonald Wallace Pdf

Evolution has long shaped human behavior. Yet just recently have we learned that evolution based on natural selection is not the continuous process Darwin assumed. It is instead a two-part process of change and stability called punctuated equilibrium, with natural selection operating mainly on the frontiers of change. Taking account of biology's latest understanding of evolution, it becomes clear that culture evolves by a similar process. This is important because over the past 30,000 years most human evolution and the behavioral changes that go with it have occurred in our cultures-not in our genes. Knowing the process by which culture evolves clarifies the origin of many of our current problems, both within and between cultures. The author contends that new technology drives cultural evolution much as mutations change our DNA. The problem is that technology is now coming at us so fast that it is inducing "circuit overload" in cultures all over the world, leading to conflict. Techno-Cultural Evolution, which builds on the insights of such bestsellers as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, explains how this process works--and what it means for all of us.

Author : Peter J. Richerson,Morten H. Christiansen
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2013
Category : Human evolution
ISBN : 146195035X

Get Book

Cultural Evolution by Peter J. Richerson,Morten H. Christiansen Pdf

Author : Allen W. Batteau
Publisher : Waveland Press
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2009-06-09
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9781478607977

Get Book

Technology and Culture by Allen W. Batteau Pdf

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.

Author : Robbie Davis-Floyd
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 222 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 2021-03-31
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 9781000364637

Get Book

Birthing Techno-Sapiens by Robbie Davis-Floyd Pdf

This ground-breaking book challenges us to re-think ourselves as techno-sapiens—a new species we are creating as we continually co-evolve ourselves with our technologies. While some of its chapters are imaginary, they are all empirically grounded in ethnography and richly theorized from diverse disciplines. The authors go far beyond a techno-optimism vs. techno-pessimism stance, stretching our thinking about birthing techno-sapiens to consider not only how our cyborgian reproductive lives are constrained and/or enabled by technology but are also about emotions and spirit. The world of reproductive health care and particularly that of genetic engineering is developing exponentially, and current challenges are vastly different from those of a decade ago. The book is provocative, intended to generate debate, ideas, and future research and to influence ethical policy and practice in human techno-reproduction. It will be of interest across the social sciences and humanities, for reproductive scholars, bioethicists, techno-scientists, and those involved in the development and delivery of maternity services.

Author : Stephen Shennan
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2009-03-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780520943360

Get Book

Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution by Stephen Shennan Pdf

This volume offers an integrative approach to the application of evolutionary theory in studies of cultural transmission and social evolution and reveals the enormous range of ways in which Darwinian ideas can lead to productive empirical research, the touchstone of any worthwhile theoretical perspective. While many recent works on cultural evolution adopt a specific theoretical framework, such as dual inheritance theory or human behavioral ecology, Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution emphasizes empirical analysis and includes authors who employ a range of backgrounds and methods to address aspects of culture from an evolutionary perspective. Editor Stephen Shennan has assembled archaeologists, evolutionary theorists, and ethnographers, whose essays cover a broad range of time periods, localities, cultural groups, and artifacts.

Author : Carlos A. Scolari
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 310 pages
File Size : 46,9 Mb
Release : 2023-06-23
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000901634

Get Book

On the Evolution of Media by Carlos A. Scolari Pdf

This book describes the lifecycle of media in the context of the media ecology, presenting a general theoretical framework and a series of methodological procedures to support the construction of an eco-evolutionary approach to media change. Focusing on a series of processes - emergence, competition, dominance, hybridization, adaptation, extinction - this book goes beyond a chronological approach to propose a reticulated and multi-layered conception of media evolution. If media evolution is a network, what are the relationships between "media species" like? What happens when a new media emerges into the media ecology? How do new media influence the old ones? Can media become extinct? How do media adapt when the social and economic context changes? How can media evolution be analysed? What kinds of quantitative and qualitative techniques can be applied in media evolution research? By presenting an innovative research approach and theoretical framework to media studies, this book will be of keen interest to scholars and graduate students of new media, media history and theory, philosophy of technology, mass communication, and organisational studies.

Author : Cadell Last
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 339 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2020-07-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9783030469665

Get Book

Global Brain Singularity by Cadell Last Pdf

This book introduces readers to global brain singularity through a logical meditation on the temporal dynamics of the universal process. Global brain singularity is conceived of as a future metasystem of human civilization that represents a qualitatively higher coherence of order. To better understand the potential of this phenomenon, the book begins with an overview of universal history. The focus then shifts to the structure of human systems, and the notion that contemporary global civilization must mediate the emergence of a commons that will transform the future of politics, economics and psychosocial life in general. In this context the book presents our species as biocultural evolutionary agents attempting to create a novel and independent domain of technocultural evolution that affords us new levels of freedom. Lastly, the book underscores the internal depths of the present moment, structured by a division between subject and object. The nature of the interaction between subject and object would appear to govern the mechanics of a spiritual process that is key to understanding the meaning of singularity inclusive of observers. Given its scope, the book will appeal to readers interested in systems approaches to the emerging world society, especially historians, philosophers and social scientists.

Author : Leonid E. Grinin,Andrey V. Korotayev
Publisher : ООО "Издательство "Учитель"
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2013-09-30
Category : Human evolution
ISBN : 9785705737420

Get Book

Evolution: Development within Big History, Evolutionary and World-System Paradigms by Leonid E. Grinin,Andrey V. Korotayev Pdf

The application of the evolutionary approach to the history of nature and society has remained one of the most effective ways to conceptualize and integrate our growing knowledge of the Universe, life, society and human thought. The present volume demonstrates this in a rather convincing way. This is the third issue of the Almanac series titled ‘Evolution’. The first volume came out with the sub-heading ‘Cosmic, Biological, and Social’, the second was entitled ‘Evolution: A Big History Perspective’. The present volume is subtitled Development within Big History, Evolutionary and World-System Paradigms. In addition to the straightforward evolutionary approach, it also reflects such adjacent approaches as Big History, the world-system analysis, as well as globalization paradigm and long wave theory. The volume includes a number of the exciting works in these fields. The Almanac consists of five sections. The first section (Globalization as an Evolutionary Process: Yesterday and Today) contains articles demonstrating that the Evolutionary studies is capable of creating a common platform for the world-system approach, globalization studies, and the economic long-wave theory.The articles of the second section (Society, Energy, and Future) discuss the role of energy in the universal evolution, human history and the future of humankind. The third section (Aspects of Social Development) touches upon four aspects of social evolution – technological, environmental, cultural, and political. The fourth section (The Driving Forces and Patterns of Evolution) deals with various phases of megaevolution. There is also a final sectionwhichis devoted to discussions of contemporary evolutionism. This Almanac will be useful both for those who study interdisciplinary macroproblems and for specialists working in focused directions, as well as for those who are interested in evolutionary issues of Cosmology, Biology, History, Anthropology, Economics and other areas of study. More than that, this edition will challenge and excite your vision of your own life and the new discoveries going on around us!

Author : Josef Barla
Publisher : transcript Verlag
Page : 233 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2019-02-28
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783839447444

Get Book

The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production by Josef Barla Pdf

What if the terms "technology" and "the body" did not refer to distinct phenomena interacting in one way or another? What if we understood their relationship as far more intimate - technologies as always already embodied, material bodies as always already technologized? What would it mean, then, to understand the relationship between technology and the body as a relation of indeterminacy? Expanding on the concept of the apparatus of bodily production in the work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, Josef Barla explores how material bodies along with their boundaries, properties, and meanings performatively materialize at sites where technological, biological, technoscientific, (bio-)political, and economic forces intra-act.

Author : Loet Leydesdorff
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 55,5 Mb
Release : 2021-01-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9783030599515

Get Book

The Evolutionary Dynamics of Discursive Knowledge by Loet Leydesdorff Pdf

This open access book addresses three themes which have been central to Leydesdorff's research: (1) the dynamics of science, technology, and innovation; (2) the scientometric operationalization of these concept; and (3) the elaboration in terms of a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations. In this study, I discuss the relations among these themes. Using Luhmann's social-systems theory for modelling meaning processing and Shannon's theory for information processing, I show that synergy can add new options to an innovation system as redundancy. The capacity to develop new options is more important for innovation than past performance. Entertaining a model of possible future states makes a knowledge-based system increasingly anticipatory. The trade-off between the incursion of future states on the historical developments can be measured using the Triple-Helix synergy indicator. This is shown, for example, for the Italian national and regional systems of innovation.

Author : John M. Ziman,John Ziman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2003-09-18
Category : Science
ISBN : 0521542170

Get Book

Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process by John M. Ziman,John Ziman Pdf

Ground-breaking yet non-technical analysis of the analogy that technological artefacts 'evolve' like biological organisms.

Author : Mark Schaller,Ara Norenzayan,Steven J. Heine,Toshio Yamagishi,Tatsuya Kameda
Publisher : Psychology Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2011-03-17
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781136950490

Get Book

Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind by Mark Schaller,Ara Norenzayan,Steven J. Heine,Toshio Yamagishi,Tatsuya Kameda Pdf

An enormous amount of scientific research compels two fundamental conclusions about the human mind: The mind is the product of evolution; and the mind is shaped by culture. These two perspectives on the human mind are not incompatible, but, until recently, their compatibility has resisted rigorous scholarly inquiry. Evolutionary psychology documents many ways in which genetic adaptations govern the operations of the human mind. But evolutionary inquiries only occasionally grapple seriously with questions about human culture and cross-cultural differences. By contrast, cultural psychology documents many ways in which thought and behavior are shaped by different cultural experiences. But cultural inquires rarely consider evolutionary processes. Even after decades of intensive research, these two perspectives on human psychology have remained largely divorced from each other. But that is now changing - and that is what this book is about. Evolution, Culture, and the Human Mind is the first scholarly book to integrate evolutionary and cultural perspectives on human psychology. The contributors include world-renowned evolutionary, cultural, social, and cognitive psychologists. These chapters reveal many novel insights linking human evolution to both human cognition and human culture – including the evolutionary origins of cross-cultural differences. The result is a stimulating introduction to an emerging integrative perspective on human nature.

Author : Adrian Bejan,Gilbert W. Merkx
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 41,9 Mb
Release : 2007-10-26
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780387476810

Get Book

Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics by Adrian Bejan,Gilbert W. Merkx Pdf

Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics brings together for the first time social scientists and engineers who present predictive theory of social organization, as a conglomerate of mating flows that morph in time to flow more easily. The book offers a new way to look at social phenomena as part of natural phenomena, and examines a new domain of application of engineering such as thermodynamic optimization, thermoeconomics and "design as science".

Author : Agostino Petrillo,Paola Bellaviti
Publisher : Springer
Page : 484 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 2017-11-24
Category : Science
ISBN : 9783319619880

Get Book

Sustainable Urban Development and Globalization by Agostino Petrillo,Paola Bellaviti Pdf

This book equips readers with a deeper understanding of the challenges posed by radical socioeconomic, environmental, and cultural changes due to globalization and describes effective, sustainable solutions to these challenges. The focus is especially on the rapid urbanization processes in countries of the Global South, which are giving rise to dramatic new problems of spatial and social inequality and difficult environmental challenges in relation to climate change. Readers will gain skills and knowledge that will help them to develop an integrated, multidisciplinary approach to planning, design, and management of urban settlements and territories in contexts with a high level of social, economic, territorial, and landscape vulnerability. The coverage includes, for example, strategies to promote social inclusion, improve housing quality, ensure adequate education, protect cultural heritage, enhance risk management, and address issues in the food-energy-water nexus. Among the authors are leading experts from the Polytechnic University of Milan, where a multidisciplinary set of studies and research projects in the field have been undertaken in recent years.

Author : John R. Nesselroade,Alexander Von Eye
Publisher : Academic Press
Page : 392 pages
File Size : 55,6 Mb
Release : 2013-09-24
Category : Family & Relationships
ISBN : 9781483274829

Get Book

Individual Development and Social Change by John R. Nesselroade,Alexander Von Eye Pdf

Individual Development and Social Change: Explanatory Analysis represents a convergence of three lines of emphasis now visible in developmental research and theory building. The three are (1) the life course as a focus for the study of development and social change, and their interrelationships; (2) the life-span orientation to the study of individual development, with its acknowledgment of the salience of contextual features for understanding development; and (3) the growth of methodological innovations that provide more appropriate and powerful ways of exploiting data gathered to describe and explain developmental change processes. The book opens with a study on how major cultural change originates and unfolds over time. This is followed by separate chapters on the use of sequential designs for explanatory analyses; evolutionary aspects of social and individual development; the concepts of the theory of causal and weak causal regressive dependence; and the concepts of age, period, and cohort from the perspective of developmental psychology. Subsequent chapters examine development and aging as lifelong processes of historical populations; the methodological integration of natural and cultural science perspectives in developmental psychology; and application of the multifaceted methodology to the mutuality of constraint between sociocultural group and individual dynamics.