William Wimsatt

Wimsatt weaves a first-person tour of America's cultural and political movements from 1985-2010. It's a story about love, growing up, a generation coming of age and a vision for the movement young people will create in the new decade. With humour, story-telling and historical insight, Wimsatt lays out a provocative vision for the next 25 years of personal and historical transformation.

A Midterm Report on My Generation and the Future of Our Super Movement

Please Don't Bomb the Suburbs

Biology of Bats, Volume I, examines most of the basic characteristics related to the anatomy, physiology, behavior, and ecology of the bat. It covers the animal's evolution, as well as karyology, bioeconomics, zoogeography, principles of classification, and procedures and issues involved in the care and management of bats as research subjects in the laboratory. Organized into 10 chapters, this volume begins with a historical overview of bat origins and evolution, karyotypic trends in bats, and the role of karyotypes in studying the biology of bats. It then discusses the bat skeletal and muscular systems; flight patterns and aerodynamics; prenatal and postnatal development; migration and homing; ecology and physiological ecology of bat hibernation; thermoregulation and metabolism; and the urinary system, including gross anatomy and embryology, histophysiology, and renal physiology. It also looks at morphological contrasts between the skulls and dentitions of different families and genera of bats. This book will benefit biologists, zoologists, teachers, and others concerned with the general biology of Chiroptera.

Biology of Bats

Alan C. Love

Interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution that reject meme theory in favor of a complex understanding of dynamic change over time How do cultures change? In recent decades, the concept of the meme, posited as a basic unit of culture analogous to the gene, has been central to debates about cultural transformation. Despite the appeal of meme theory, its simplification of complex interactions and other inadequacies as an explanatory framework raise more questions about cultural evolution than it answers. In Beyond the Meme, William C. Wimsatt and Alan C. Love assemble interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution, providing a nuanced understanding of it as a process in which dynamic structures interact on different scales of size and time. By focusing on the full range of evolutionary processes across distinct contexts, from rice farming to scientific reasoning, this volume demonstrates how a thick understanding of change in culture emerges from multiple disciplinary vantage points, each of which is required to understand cultural evolution in all its complexity. The editors provide an extensive introductory essay to contextualize the volume, and Wimsatt contributes a separate chapter that systematically organizes the conceptual geography of cultural processes and phenomena. Any adequate account of the transmission, elaboration, and evolution of culture must, this volume argues, recognize the central roles that cognitive and social development play in cultural change and the complex interplay of technological, organizational, and institutional structures needed to enable and coordinate these processes. Contributors: Marshall Abrams, U of Alabama at Birmingham; Claes Andersson, Chalmers U of Technology; Mark A. Bedau, Reed College; James A. Evans, U of Chicago; Jacob G. Foster, U of California, Los Angeles; Michel Janssen, U of Minnesota; Sabina Leonelli, U of Exeter; Massimo Maiocchi, U of Chicago; Joseph D. Martin, U of Cambridge; Salikoko S. Mufwene, U of Chicago; Nancy J. Nersessian, Georgia Institute of Technology and Harvard U; Paul E. Smaldino, U of California, Merced; Anton Törnberg, U of Gothenburg; Petter Törnberg, U of Amsterdam; Gilbert B. Tostevin, U of Minnesota.

Development and Structure in Cultural Evolution

Beyond the Meme

Thomas Nickles

Léna Soler

Emiliano Trizio

Mature sciences have been long been characterized in terms of the “successfulness”, “reliability” or “trustworthiness” of their theoretical, experimental or technical accomplishments. Today many philosophers of science talk of “robustness”, often without specifying in a precise way the meaning of this term. This lack of clarity is the cause of frequent misunderstandings, since all these notions, and that of robustness in particular, are connected to fundamental issues, which concern nothing less than the very nature of science and its specificity with respect to other human practices, the nature of rationality and of scientific progress; and science’s claim to be a truth-conducive activity. This book offers for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the problem of robustness, and in general, that of the reliability of science, based on several detailed case studies and on philosophical essays inspired by the so-called practical turn in philosophy of science.

William Wimsatt

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