Description: Cultural Science is a new way of thinking about culture. The book synthesises recent work across different disciplines, setting out a new, evolutionary approach to cultural studies. Engaging with scientific traditions in a way that previous literature has failed to do, it promises to be break new ground in social scientific scholarship.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes:
"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