A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change - and the Limits of Evolution, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
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A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change - and the Limits of Evolution, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
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We are a weird species. Like other species, we have a culture. But by comparison with other species, we are strangely unstable: human cultures self-transform, diverge, and multiply with bewildering speed. They vary, radically and rapidly, from time to time and place to place. And the way we live - our manners, morals, habits, experiences, relationships, technology, values - seems to be changing at an ever accelerating pace. The effects can be dislocating, baffling,sometimes terrifying. Why is this?In A Foot in the River, best-selling historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto sifts through the evidence and offers some radical answers to these very big questions about the human species and its history - and speculates on what these answers might mean for our future. Combining insights from a huge range of disciplines, including history, biology, anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, sociology, ethology, zoology, primatology, psychology, linguistics, the cognitive sciences, and evenbusiness studies, he argues that culture is exempt from evolution. Ultimately, no environmental conditions, no genetic legacy, no predictable patterns, no scientific laws determine our behaviour. We can consequently make and remake our world in the freedom of unconstrained imaginations. A revolutionary book which challenges scientistic assumptions about culture and how and why cultural change happens, A Foot in the River comes to conclusions which readers may well find by turns both daunting and also potentially hugely liberating.
A Foot in the River: Why Our Lives Change - and the Limits of Evolution, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto- Amazon Sales Rank: #702021 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-10-08
- Released on: 2015-10-08
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review "This is "big history" to the utmost degree, an attempt to unite science and history in a single explanatory scheme much like the work of Jared Diamond. Excessively erudite, extraordinarily wide-ranging, and written with great clarity... Fernandez-Armesto is sure to stir up debate, lure others into similar speculation, and perhaps strengthen the chance of closer mutual endeavors between the physical sciences and the humanities." --Publishers Weekly
"Recommended." -ChoiceAbout the Author Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is the William P. Reynolds Professor of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. His work has been recognized as pioneering across a very wide range of fields, including global history, environmental history, colonial history, maritime history, religious history, art history, the history of ideas, Mediterranean history, Spanish history, American history, the history of cartography, and the history of language. He has published numerous best-selling history books, including Civilizations, Millennium, 1492: The Year Our World Began, and Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, also published by Oxford University Press, which was awarded the World History Association Prize.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful. Great (But Wrong) By Amit Vora Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a beautiful, lyrical writer, worth emulating. I would recommend this book for that reason alone. Reading it will improve your writing.The author is not only skilled, but he is also fearless: Although he is a historian, he is not afraid to delve into philosophy, evolutionary psychology, and comparative cognition, among other subjects. His book is so broad, so sprawling that he (perhaps unwittingly) ends up summarizing all of Western thought on the concept of “change.”I happen to disagree with his thesis. As the author himself observes of Rene Girard: “I always recommend [his writings] to students, although I see his books as belonging in the category of ‘great but wrong.’” I would place this one in the same bin.An evolutionary psychologist such as Dawkins could articulate my objection better than I ever could, but in short: Fernandez-Armesto argues that evolutionary theory lacks the explanatory power to account for the rich, dynamic cacophony of human cultural traditions (or “nostrums”) because the “variation” of human DNA is “infinitesimal” compared with the “enormous diversity” of human culture. But no serious evolutionary theorist contends that evolution functions at such a specific level. His argument is based on a mistaken premise; he rails against a straw man.Consider language. Nature does not dictate that we speak English, as opposed to Chinese. The particular language that we speak is not encoded in our genes. But this obvious fact does not expose the limits of evolutionary theory’s explanatory power. Indeed, evolution harmonizes with – and predicts – linguistic variation. Evolution imposes certain constraints on how we acquire and how we speak language. Certain universal rules govern all human languages. (See Chomsky, Pinker.) But evolution leaves environmental stimuli plenty of room to operate within those constraints.The same goes for culture. Evolutionary theory does not propose that particular human cultural traditions are encoded in our genes. Evolutionary theory is not so bold. Rather, it proposes that our diverse traditions operate within certain universal rules.That is not to say that evolution has no role to play in molding culture. Adopting cultural traditions likely has adaptive value. Specifically, it is likely that: (i) some traditions are adaptive; (ii) other traditions have become maladaptive only because our current environment no longer resembles the ancestral environment; (iii) conformity itself has adaptive value, both for the individual and the group.Nonetheless, even if it is adaptive for a group to, say, adopt a tradition of bathing in the morning (because cleanliness enhances evolutionary fitness), evolutionary theory would not predict that members of this group necessarily share a “bathe-in-the-morning” gene. After all, it might have been equally adaptive for this group, or another group with same DNA, to adopt a tradition of bathing at night. The point is that we all bathe (eventually). Evolutionary theory can account for our divergent cultural traditions without positing that we have genetic commitments to specific behaviors.At bottom, I recommend this book to students of all disciplines, from history to cognitive science. I enjoyed every sentence – even those I dispute. One example of his brilliance: “It is one of the privileges of a predictor to locate his prophecies in a future so remote as to make them unfalsifiable until he is long dead.”This book is a work of art, an interdisciplinary masterpiece. Read it.
0 of 7 people found the following review helpful. ... a free NetGalley ebook that I read during a dull spot of pub trivia on a Wednesday in mid-November By Kristine Fisher A Foot in the River by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a free NetGalley ebook that I read during a dull spot of pub trivia on a Wednesday in mid-November. I can't quite say as to what triggered my yen for this book, but it certainly garnered my attention.Immensely scientific and anthropological while also maintaining a first-person, incredulous, and celebratory tone.
0 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Well satisfied By Lyle Enjoyed
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