ANNOUNCEMENT
New book on the integration of Darwinian natural selction theory and
complexity theory - FEBRUARY 2000.
Complex Life: Nonmodernity and the Emergence of Cognition and Culture
Alan Dean
Complex Life argues for the importance of the new perspective of nonmodern
social theory in understanding human agency. Darwinian natural selection
theory and complexity theory are used to provide new insights into human
origins, mind and culture. Through bringing these ideas together it is
argued that nature and culture are inseparably linked within human agency
and that in consequence it is time to transcend the limitations of both
modern and postmodern social science.
This book argues that nature has never been controlled or transcended.
Humankind is instead an emerged outcome of the historical interweaving of
the environment, morphology, mind and culture. This wide-ranging analysis
offers new insights into human nature for anthropologists and sociologists
interested in human evolution, social theory or human agency.
Contents: Acknowledgements; Introduction; From primate to human; The
emergence of symbolic reasoning; Cognition and adaptation; Encountering the
cultural world; Nature in culture; Nonlinearity in the social world;
Nonmodernity and the emergence of cognition and culture; Bibliography.
Alan Dean, The University of Hull, UK.
ISBN: 0-7546-1049-7 2000 154 pages £35.00 Hardback
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|