Before we get started, today is the LAST day for the Mohs 5.5 Mars e-book. After today, it will only be available as a paperback.
I would love to hear any feedback about this story, and the book overall, as I am considering submitting something to their next effort, which will be themed around asteroids. Is there an asteroid story you’re just dying to hear?
User’s Note: The GoT website is now a lot of cast retrospectives and episode summaries and clips. The family trees in the viewer’s guide that I mention in this episode don’t seem to work any more. However, there are no shortage of fan-made versions, some of them quite beautiful, as an image search shows.
Original Blurb from 2011
I recorded this in April of 2011. Here’s the original blurb that went with it.
This is a short one, and for some reason my voice recorder only did one track today. Don't know what's up with that, but it's still an improvement over the noise of my laptop humming in the background.
A clarifying note. When I listened back to the phrase, "Cynics describe this as deliberate fraud," I realized I hadn't quite finished that thought. Sure, there are cases of deliberate fraud, but what I see is mostly random variation. I've been watching a lot of anime recently, and I was thinking about the way Japanese manga artists recombine elements from different cultures with no real concern for whether they make any sense. They just take what they like, and if it works, that's cool. If it doesn't, they do something else.
And for the record, no, I didn't watch the first episode of Game of Thrones. I don't currently have HBO, and I'm not going to get it for one series, no matter how good it is. I also prefer to watch things in chunks of more than one hour. So I'll probably do them on DVD.
As it turned out over the years that GoT was on the air, my wife was more than willing to get HBO temporarily for a month or two if she hit upon a deal. The same has been true with Prime or Hulu. We always have NetFlix, but the others rotate in and out. We generally don’t have more than one “extra” at a time. There’s no way to watch everything, even if I wanted to spend my whole life in front of a screen (which I don’t).
Right now I’m watching Lena Headey (Queen Circe from GoT) in a previous series from 2008-9 called Terminator: the Sarah Connor Chronicles. I know, I know, time travel is annoying. Lena Headey is pretty much the only reason I’m watching it. I like her quiet intensity.
On cultural evolution a decade later, in 2021
Five years later I wrote this piece on memetics, which is what they were calling it during the 1990s, for IGMS. About that same time (2015-6) a bunch of scientists founded the Cultural Evolution Society, so there are academics now working professionally on these processes, but from my current and cursory reading, another five years later, they’re still at the stage of defining and justifying the field, trying to build buzz and funding for it. CES’s jobs board has maybe a dozen postings, funded mostly by private groups like the John Templeton Foundation (which funds a lot of religion work). That’s not a lot, but it’s more than zero, so it’s moving in the right direction.
To study cultural evolution formally from this perspective means we must set up an analytical accounting system to keep track of the increase or decrease in the frequency of cultural variants in order to establish the causes of frequency change. There are a variety of ways this is done by researchers across the biological and social sciences, as well as the humanities.
One of the more common methods I’m seeing is the social media dump. Facebook and especially Twitter are used by academics as free archives of cultural material that they can track and sort through in almost real time with the aid of automated text-mining tools. No giant Darwin-type breakthroughs yet, as far as I know, but science grinds on.
REFERENCES from the show
“The Way of Cross and Dragon”, by GRRM, at Lightspeed Magazine, in both print and audio (!)
A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara Tuckman
Wikipedia’s summary
short free excerpt at the publisher’s website
Study: Risk of murder higher for step-children
OTHER REFERENCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator:_The_Sarah_Connor_Chronicles
https://culturalevolutionsociety.org/story/What_is_Cultural_Evolution (Less technical)
https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/7782 (More technical journal article)
VSI Episode 5