Cultural evolution

Kate Distin sets out a theory of cultural evolution and uses it to explain how human culture arose and changed over time. Her central claim is that people transmit information through more than natural languages such as speech and sign. They also rely on artefactual languages, including writing and musical notation, which are carried by objects that humans have made.

According to Distin, these languages allow cultural information and resources to be passed on, altered and received, and so they supply the mechanism behind cultural evolution. She argues that our ability to metarepresent, or reflect on our own thinking, speeds this process up by releasing cultural information from the limits that any single language places on what can be conceived.

The book applies this account to the complexity and variety of human culture, drawing connections to economics, linguistics and developmental biology.