Word: beene
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Lately, this view, "cultural evolutionism," has been revived and given a new vocabulary. "Meme"--a word chosen to stress the parallel with "gene"--is the label for packets of cultural information: technologies, songs, beliefs and so on. Just as those genes most conducive to their own replication are the ones...
The economic historian Joel Mokyr, stressing this sort of international synergy, has attributed Europe's Industrial Revolution to "chains of inspiration" by which one idea sparked another. But, as we've seen, chains of inspiration had been vital to the whole history of technical advance, even the glacial process by...
And each such advance--by easing the transmission of data, whether by sound, print or image--only raised the chances of further advances. Via endless positive feedback, the technological infrastructure for a mature global brain was, in a sense, building itself. And so it had been, ever since the Middle...
Indeed, if you believe, as I do, that intelligent, culture-generating animals were a likely outcome of biological evolution, then you might even say the first great evolutionary process naturally spawned the second, which has since taken over as the great molder of the material world. In this view, the...
We need not choose between these visions. Both are true. Both are untrue. What we need to do is wonder at how firmly this brief, incredibly fecund period set the terms of the cultural argument that would preoccupy the rest of the century. The shock of the new drew much...