Darwinizing Culture: the status of memetics as a science
Edited by Robert Aunger, Oxford University Press, 242pp, $AUS 85.00
A book worth reading, despite the outrageous price--get the library to buy
it. Excellent intro and wrap-up by anthropologist Aunger, with mostly good
meaty focussed papers (it's from a conference) by Susan Blackmore (rather
the weakest piece, I felt), Plotkin, Laland and Odling-Smee (*not* a meme
from the late Douglas Adams), Richard Boyd and Peter Richerson, Dan
Sperber, some others, and two biting critical essays by Adam Kuper and
Maurice Bloch. Anyone who complacently believes the dreaded Standard Social
Science Model is nothing more than doctrinal cant will have fun attempting
to refute the objections of these social scientists.
Sample http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~rva20/
especially chapter summaries at http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~rva20/Darwin.html
Damien Broderick
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