Introduction To The Transaction Edition
Calling Margaret Mead an anthropologist is like calling Abraham Lincoln a lawyer a crucial half-truth. At a time when scholars were narrowing their focus of attention, and defining the scope of their subjects in terms that cut them off from all others, she was more interested in exploring the intellectual territories adjoining her own field of study than in shutting herself up inside a pure discipline. The profession of law led Abraham Lincoln out of the Midwest, into national politics and the...
Contents
Introduction to the Transaction Edition xi 1. The Climate of Opinion and the Study of Evolution 3 2. Stress On Continuity 24 3. Conditions of Early Forms of Cultural Transmission 36 4. Evolutionary Implications of Learning by Empathy, Imitation, 54 and Identification 5. Evolutionary Significance of Transmission of Culture through 83 Artifacts 6. Borderlines between Learning and Teaching 107 Part II 7. Directionality of Human Evolution 145 8. The Unit of Cultural Micro-Evolution 170 9. The...
Preface
My interest in evolution was reawakened in 1948, when I was asked to review Touchstone for Ethics 1 and, while I was doing so, also took time to reread The Origin of Species. This reading in turn reawakened memories of discussions, in the mid-1930s, about science and ethics with C. H. Waddington3 and Gregory Bateson.4 Renewed interest in the study of animal behavior, an interest which I owe originally to Kingsley Noble5 and Ray Carpenter,6 was stimulated by contacts with Konrad Lorenz in the...