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Few of us, amidst our daily chores and responsibilities, consider how mundane infrastructures-from electrical grids to sewage systems-have developed over millennia in ways that enable everything we cherish, from democracy to technological innovation to individual liberty. But what drives the evolution of this infrastructure? And why is infrastructure so critical to human flourishing? In this book, the most innovative and interdisciplinary study of cultural evolution ever produced, new concepts are explored, new histories are brought into contact and new ground-breaking insights are defended. What makes creativity unique in human societies is not only our capacity to generate and modify our diverse individual intuitions about the social and physical world, but also our capacity to form and leave groups fluidly in a dancing rhythm of oscillation across the expanse of history. This book walks the reader carefully through these processes, with clear concepts and an approachable writing style.
List of contents
Introduction
1. Humans’ Genetic Unity and Ape Ancestry
2. Fission-Fusion Oscillation as the Central Sustaining Mechanism of Organismality, Part 1
3. Fission-Fusion Oscillation as the Central Sustaining Mechanism of Organismality, Part 2
4. Intuitive Information Processing
5. On the Important Distinction Between “Tools” and “Infrastructure”
6. The Tools and Infrastructure of Fossil Fuel Societies
7. Cities Drive the Metabolism of Societies
8. An “Oscillation-Infrastructural” Theory of Cultural Evolution
About the author
Kevin McCaffree is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. He is the author or co-author of three books, co-editor of Theoretical Sociology: The Future of a Disciplinary Foundation and series editor (with Jonathan H. Turner) of Evolutionary Analysis in the Social Sciences. In addition to these works, he has authored or co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and handbook chapters published on a variety of topics ranging from cultural evolution to criminology to the sociology of empathy.
Summary
Few of us consider how mundane infrastructures?from electrical grids to sewage systems?have developed over millennia in ways that enable democracy, technological innovation, to individual liberty itself. But what drives the evolution of this infrastructure? And why is infrastructure so critical to human flourishing?
