Description
Book SynopsisIn this ground-breaking synthesis of evolutionary and cultural theory, Wendy Wheeler draws on the new field of complex adaptive systems and biosemiotics in order to argue that - far from being opposed to nature - culture is the way that nature has evolved in human beings. Her argument is that these evolutionary processes reveal the fundamental sociality of human creatures, and she thus rejects the selfish individualism that is implied both in the biological reductionism of much recent evolutionary psychology, and in the philosophies of neoliberalism. She shows, instead, that the complex structures of biosemiotic evolution have always involved a creativity which is born from the difficult but productive phenomenological encounter between the Self and its Others; and she argues that this creativity, in both the sciences and the humanities, is fundamental to human progress. In this major contribution to both cultural studies and ecocriticism, Wheeler shows how complexity and biosemiotics forge the link between nature and culture, and provide a new and better understanding of how 'the whole human creature' operates as both social and biological being.
Trade Review'What a pleasure to read this book, which integrates biosemiotics into a wider argument about the material basis for human sociality. What struck me the is the political dimension which Wheeler brings to my work. When I began developing biosemiotics my old political friends didn't appreciate it because they didn't see how it connected to other issues. I was therefore extraordinarily pleased to see her drawing social consequences which I had had in mind from the outset. I am grateful to her for seeing that.' Jesper Hoffmeyer This book provides some really useful pathways to an important truth - that culture is natural. That obvious fact has been amazingly obscured of late by fashionable doctrines, and by the walls that now divide different learned specialities from each other. Wendy Wheeler helps us to break through these barriers and to see that we are indeed Whole Creatures. Mary Midgley
