Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Civilizations, Art, Networks, Reputation, and the Online Revolution (Best of Edge Series)

“To accomplish the extraordinary, you must seek extraordinary people.”

people are cultural beings. They can’t help themselves.

A benefit by itself is not explanatory; a benefit in a vacuum is indeed a sort of mystery. Until it can be shown how the benefit actually redounds to enhance the replicative power of a replicator, it just sits there, alluring, perhaps, but incapable of explaining anything.

Between randomness and routine lie the good stories, whose

New cultural thinking isn’t like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It’s the act of conferring that makes things valuable.

Culture is a way of getting people to that point of understanding. The work of a lot of modern culture is to say to people: You’re making value.

The vast mass of routinely rational human behavior doesn’t make good novels, but it is just such humdrum rational narrative that provides the background pattern that permits us to make sense, retrospectively, of the intriguing vagaries we encounter, and to anticipate the complications that will arise when the trains of events they put in motion col

intentional stance: the strategy of analyzing the flux of events into agents and their (rational) actions and reactions. Such agents—people, in this case—do things for reasons, which can be predicted—up to a point—by cataloguing their reasons, their beliefs and desires, and calculating what, given those reasons, the most rational course of action f

The great biologist D’Arcy Thompson once said: “Everything is the way it is because it got that way.” If he is right—if everything is the way it is because it got that way—then every science must be, in part, a historical science.