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Wired For Culture: Origins Of The Human Social Mind (2012)

by Mark Pagel(Favorite Author)

3.9 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0393065871 (ISBN13: 9780393065879)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

review 1: I ultimately came away from this book feeling quite disappointed. Where Pagel talks about evolution and biology he often shines, but as soon as he tries to tie these concepts in a more concrete way to culture (and with it social psychology, anthropology etc) the book becomes incredibly lose. So discussions on the role of deception or language - both very relevant for any discussion of human cultural evolution - end up being more frustrating than informative.
review 2: For whatever reason, late spring and early summer is my slowest reading time so this one took me a while to finish. It was not because it was not good or interesting. The concept of what makes humans uniquely human has evolved over the years and has settled on symbolic language and culture. We are... more the only animal that can record our thoughts or instructions in a form that someone can later reproduce (almost) perfectly. Symbolic language allows us to pass ideas or memes amongst ourselves in a manner similar to how DNA is used to replicate genes. The memes work on a cultural level rather than on a biological level as with your bodies. The end result is that human culture can evolve at a dizzying rate compared to biological evolution which allows us to have unprecedented cooperation amongst ourselves. So for all of our emphasis on being unique and competitive, it is really cooperation enabled by symbolic language and culture that makes us what we are. less

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