Cultural Science

Humans have evolved to make culture in the same way birds have evolved to make nests and spiders to make webs. Even more telling is the fact that culture has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to make human nature what it is. In this ambitious and persuasive work, Hartley and Potts offer a vision of the unification of behavioral science and cultural studies that shatters traditional disciplinary boundaries. * Herbert Gintis, External Professor, Santa Fe Institute, USA, and Professor of Economics, Central European University, Hungary, and author of A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution (with Samuel Bowles, 2011) * Hartley and Potts Cultural Science firmly grounds the study of culture in a Darwinian evolutionary framework, emphasising how knowledge, morality, innovation and even personal identity emerge from the power of groups or demes pursuing shared goals, often in competition with other similar demes. Cultural Science is suitable for lay audiences and also as a reference text for the modern scholarly study of culture. * Mark Pagel, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Reading, UK, Fellow of the Royal Society, and author of Wired for Culture * The charm of Cultural Science is rather like that of watching David Attenborough or Brian Cox in full flight, peering into rock pools, turning over fossils, bringing to light creatures that are both fascinating in themselves and hold clues to the possibilities of life and the universe. Whatever else it may be, this is an intellectual adventure, full of curious details and surprising discoveries. It brims with enthusiasm and pedagogical passion. ... It is a 'dangerous book in the best sense ambitious, experimental and heedless of risk. -- Mark Gibson (Monash University, Australia) * Communication Research & Practice * Cultural Science is a wonderfully mind-challenging, expansive book that is boldly ambitious. ... As I read it, at times I had moments of exclaiming 'but! but! but!', yet those are signs of how thoroughly it challenged me to reconsider and reconceive much of the field of media, communication, and cultural studies, and much of the work within it. Generative, 'big picture' books like this are rare. -- Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA) * Communication and the Public *

John Hartley is Professor of Cultural Science and Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University, Western Australia; and Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, Wales. He was co-founder of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation at Queensland University of Technology, where he held an ARC Federation Fellowship and was founding Dean of the Creative Industries Faculty. He has held visiting scholar positions in the USA, UK, China, Germany and Denmark. He was awarded the Order of Australia for service to education, and holds fellowships of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Royal Society of Arts, and International Communication Association. He has published more than 20 books (as author, co-author or editor) in communication, cultural and media studies, including Popular Reality (Bloomsbury). Jason Potts, Schumpeter Prize winner, is ARC Future Fellow, Professor and Principal Research Fellow in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia; and Editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics. He is the author of 6 books and over 80 papers in evolutionary economics and innovation.

Intro 1. Curiously Parallel The Nature of Culture Part I: Culture Makes Groups 2. Externalism Identity (Me is We) 3. Demes Universal-Adversarial Groupishness (We vs They) 4. Malvoisine Bad Neighbours 5. Citizens Demic Concentration Creates Knowledge Part II: Groups Make Knowledge 6. Meaningfulness The Growth of Knowledge 7. Newness Innovation 8. Waste Reproductive Success 9. Extinction Resilience and Ossification Part III: Outro 10. A Natural History of Demic Concentration Acknowledgements References Index