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About the author
Robert N. Watson (B.A. summa cum laude from Yale, Ph.D. in English with Highest Honors from Stanford) taught at Harvard before moving to UCLA, where he has been Chair of the Faculty of Letters and Science and Vice-Provost for Educational Innovation, and is now Distinguished Professor of English. He is the author of prize-winning scholarly books, and poems in the New Yorker and many other journals. He has been awarded Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, as well as visiting fellowships at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Christ Church College, Oxford, and prizes for excellence in teaching and public service.
Summary
People worry that computers, robots, or Satan himself – brilliant ruthless creatures – may seize control and destroy what’s uniquely valuable about us. Cultural Evolution and its Discontents shows that our cultural systems are already doing that, and doing it so adeptly that we seldom even notice.
Additional text
Memeplexes are clusters of ideas and habits that persist in societies often because they can reproduce themselves well rather than because they benefit us. Watson’s fiercely intelligent, intelligently fierce book argues that we need the arts, the humanities, and universities to recognize and critique the memeplexes we often do not even realize shape and skew our choices. Drawing on art and science, mixing high culture and low, applying the long perspective to current predicaments, Cultural Evolution and its Discontents teems with ideas, insights, and challenges: not just food for thought but a banquet for the mind and a diet for change. Anyone who weirdly supposes that "evolution" when applied to humans must mean the status quo rather than transformation—transformation we can partly direct—will have to think again.
Brian Boyd, The University of Auckland
Author of 'On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction'
