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| Books and Reviews  | Dawinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science Oxford University Press, 2001. Howard E. Aldrich reviews (January 21, 2002) for etss.net a new book about the meme concept edited by Robert Aunger. Aunger brought together both supporters and opponents of meme theory (Susan Blackmore, Maurice Bloch, Robert Boyd, Rosaria Conte, David L Hull, Adam Kuper, Kevin Leland, John Odling-Smee, Henry Plotkin, Peter J. Richerson, Dan Sperber) to debate the validity of a concept regarded by many as scientifically suspect. Click here for a table of contents. Share your thoughts on the book or the review by posting a message in the discussion forum. Aldrich Review Aunger's Response | | 
| Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process. Cambridge University Press, 2000. For our third original review (published January 9, 2001), Keith Pavitt has taken on the challenging task of evaluating this important new edited book for etss.net. John Ziman (editor) brought together leading scholars on technological change (John Ziman, Eva Jablonka, Joel Mokyr, Richard Nelson, Alan Macfarlane, Sarah Harrison, Gerry Martin, David Turnbull, Paul A. David, W. Bernard Carlson, David Perkins, Walter G. Vincenti, Joan Solomon, Geoffrey Miller, Edward W. Constant II, Rikard Stankiewicz, James Fleck, Gerard Fairclough, Janet Davies Burns) to appraise the usefulness of evolutionary ideas in explaining technical change. You can download the first chapter of the book as a pdf file here. Share your thoughts on the book or the review by posting a message in the discussion forum. Pavitt's Review Loasby's Essay |  | Social Transformations. A General Theory of Historical Development. Expanded Edition We continue today (May 9, 2000) our book review feature with Charles Tilly's reviews Stephen Sanderson's "Social Transformations. A General Theory of Historical Development. Expanded Edition." Stephen Sanderson writes a response clarifying his position. Share your thoughts on the book or the reviews by posting a message in the discussion forum. This review will be published in paper form in the Canadian Journal of History.
|  | Organizations Evolving
We are kicking off our book review feature today (February 8, 2000) with Howard Aldrich's new oeuvre "Organizations Evolving." (Click on title for table of contents) Hayagreeva Rao and Arthur Stinchcombe have read the book over the holidays for us and we are very pleased to publish their reviews on etss.net. As will be customary for all our reviews, we invited Howard Aldrich to respond to the two evaluations of his book. You can share your views and participate in a discussion of the book by posting a message in our discussion forum. Later we will post the most useful contributions to this discussion along with the reviews. (Rao, Stinchcombe and Aldrich will follow the discussion and jump in where appropriate.)
|  | An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change
Synopsis
The authors "argue that the emphasis in theorizing about ('modelling')competition should be on the analysis of evolutionary and revolutionary change (the 'perennial gale of creative destruction,' as Schumpeter put it), ratherthan on the conditions for general or partial equilibrium; that motivation should be Simon's 'satisficing' as 'bounded rationality' within an enormously complex world, rather than the maxima/minima calculation emphasized by orthodox micro theory of the past 40 years." (Choice) Bibliography. Index.Reviews
From William J. Baumol - Choice:
Nelson and Winter, economists at Yale, continue the tradition of Smith, J. S. Mill, Marx, Knight, Marshall, Schumpeter, Mises, Hayek Kirzner, and Simon: competition in the market is a process, not an equilibrium. . . . This volume is likely to be recognized as a major contribution to the emerging theory that is altering economists' views both of the market mechanism and of public policy (both for the better). . . . Much can be learned from this volume even byundergraduates with little mathematical background. |
 | Science as a Process
JPM: Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" is the most widely read and cited book in the philosophy and sociology of science. If you want an philosophical foundation for an evolutionary view, this is the book you should read and not Kuhn. Hull delivers not only a philosophical foundation for evolutionary theories in the social sciences, but he also provides a wonderful case study of how a school of thought in the world of biological taxonomy won the competition among alternative approaches. Excerpts of Reviews |
 | At Home in the Universe
Synopsis
Kaufman, a MacArthur Fellow and visionary pioneer of the science of complexity, offers a brilliant account of a new scientifc revolution that rivals Darwin's theory of importance. The book illuminates this new paradigm as it weaves together the excitement of discovery and a fertile mix of ideas. Provides stunning insights into the origin of life, the development of embryos and more. This book examines the question: "why is there order in nature? . . . Mr Kauffman argues {that} much order in the natural world arises spontaneously." (Economist) Index.Excerpts of Reviews and Commentary |
 | Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Synopsis
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal. Read Joel Mokyr's Review on eh.net. Brad DeLong's Review Excerpts from other reviews | |