Day: November 23, 2008

Andy Clark & Michael Wheeler: Embodied cognition and cultural evolution

The Cognition and Culture website has posted a link to the new edition of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on ‘cultural transmission and evolution of human behaviour.’ I wanted to comment on just one piece on embodied cognition and cultural evolution, by philosophers Michael Wheeler and Andy Clark (unfortunately, Philosophical Transactions B is behind a subscription wall, although there’s a one-page ‘free preview’ [ouch] here). The Cognition and Culture website has the table of contents posted here. I was vaguely familiar with Michael Wheeler’s work before this piece, but Andy Clark (it’s not much of a profile) has written some of the work that’s most influenced my thinking about the effects of varied skill acquisition on cognition, especially his remarkable book, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Amazon listing).

A ream of Clark’s papers can be found here. A review of Michael Wheeler’s book, Reconstructing the cognitive world: The next step, written by Leslie Marsh can be downloaded here. We’ll come back to Andy Clark’s work again in later posts.

I must admit a certain morbid fascination with how one of my favorite streams of thought — embodied cognition — would fare combined with cultural evolution — an area of scholarship that, well, to put it nicely, is uneven (before you get all defensive, let me just stop you with one word: mimetics). It’s sort of like watching one of your good friends get hit on by a sleazy guy at a bar. She looks happy, but you’re sort of cringing at the chance that she might actually take him home. In spite of this instinctual cringe, this special edition of Philosophical Transactions has some really interesting work on cultural evolution, especially because many of the pieces focus tightly on the enormously problematic issue of cultural transmission.

Continue reading “Andy Clark & Michael Wheeler: Embodied cognition and cultural evolution”

Neuroanthropology best anthro blog not ending in ‘Matters’

Like Daniel, I’m at the San Francisco meetings of the American Anthropology Association, where we’ve been busy plotting the future of this site and other projects (more on these soon). But I wanted to stop to thank you all for your support in the voting for the First Annual Anthropology On-line Awards (or whatever the title officially was). Last night, in an awards ceremony that can only be described as soulful and heartfelt, in a hotel lobby surrounded by people who were unaware what was going on, the very good folks from Savage Minds, the ‘papa bear’ of anthropology blogs, gave out their first annual awards. The winners were:

Most Excellent Blog
Runner up: Anthropologi.info
Winner: Culture Matters

Most Excellent OA Journal
Runner Up: Cultural Analysis
Winner: Anthopology Matters

Most Excellent Blog or Journal that does not end in “Matters” (The Category formerly known as Most Excellent Unclassifiable Digital Thingamajob)
Runner Up: Digital Anthropology
Winner: Neuroanthropology

I can’t tell you how proud Daniel and I are (mostly because I don’t really know how proud Daniel is), but my heart swelled to receive the Spinning Pen and to feel the love, especially knowing that we had single-handedly moved the category name itself by our failure to use the word ‘Matters’ in our title (We are considering fixing that and going head to head with the ‘-Matters’ crowd…).

Thanks to you all, our readers, for stuffing ballot boxes, hacking Diebold voting machines, intimidating supporters of our rival blogs, and everything else that you did in our support. I think it’s fair to say that the surge in late voting that came about when Paul posted a brief note about the voting impressed (or ‘mortified’ might be more accurate) the international election observers sent in to make sure that the process was fair.

In all seriousness, I’m really glad that Savage Minds is doing this. They’re taking a really crucial role in promoting on-line anthropology, open access publishing, and a host of other efforts. A lot of our readers wander over from psychology, brain sciences, and other fields, and we welcome you all, but we’re also really pleased to get noticed by other anthropologists. Thanks to Savage Minds for their contribution to the future health of our field and to helping us get more widely noticed within it.