Interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution that reject
meme theory in favor of a complex understanding of dynamic change
over time How do cultures change? In recent decades, the concept of
the meme, posited as a basic unit of culture analogous to the gene,
has been central to debates about cultural transformation. Despite
the appeal of meme theory, its simplification of complex
interactions and other inadequacies as an explanatory framework
raise more questions about cultural evolution than it answers. In
Beyond the Meme, William C. Wimsatt and Alan C. Love assemble
interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution, providing a
nuanced understanding of it as a process in which dynamic
structures interact on different scales of size and time. By
focusing on the full range of evolutionary processes across
distinct contexts, from rice farming to scientific reasoning, this
volume demonstrates how a thick understanding of change in culture
emerges from multiple disciplinary vantage points, each of which is
required to understand cultural evolution in all its complexity.
The editors provide an extensive introductory essay to
contextualize the volume, and Wimsatt contributes a separate
chapter that systematically organizes the conceptual geography of
cultural processes and phenomena. Any adequate account of the
transmission, elaboration, and evolution of culture must, this
volume argues, recognize the central roles that cognitive and
social development play in cultural change and the complex
interplay of technological, organizational, and institutional
structures needed to enable and coordinate these processes.
Contributors: Marshall Abrams, U of Alabama at Birmingham; Claes
Andersson, Chalmers U of Technology; Mark A. Bedau, Reed College;
James A. Evans, U of Chicago; Jacob G. Foster, U of California, Los
Angeles; Michel Janssen, U of Minnesota; Sabina Leonelli, U of
Exeter; Massimo Maiocchi, U of Chicago; Joseph D. Martin, U of
Cambridge; Salikoko S. Mufwene, U of Chicago; Nancy J. Nersessian,
Georgia Institute of Technology and Harvard U; Paul E. Smaldino, U
of California, Merced; Anton Toernberg, U of Gothenburg; Petter
Toernberg, U of Amsterdam; Gilbert B. Tostevin, U of Minnesota.
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