Cultural Evolution [Paperback]

Expounds a theory of cultural evolution and shows how it can help us to understand the development of human culture.This book presents a range of evidence for the theory of cultural evolution and shows how it can help us to understand the origin and development of human culture. Evolution of any kind needs a mechanism of inheritance, to transmit variations from one generation to the next. This book introduces a new distinction between natural and artefactual languages and argues that human languages are the mechanism of cultural inheritance. It demonstrates how this theory can answer questions in areas as diverse as economics, linguistics, and developmental biology.This book presents a range of evidence for the theory of cultural evolution and shows how it can help us to understand the origin and development of human culture. Evolution of any kind needs a mechanism of inheritance, to transmit variations from one generation to the next. This book introduces a new distinction between natural and artefactual languages and argues that human languages are the mechanism of cultural inheritance. It demonstrates how this theory can answer questions in areas as diverse as economics, linguistics, and developmental biology.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 howli