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On the Origin of Tepees: The Evolution of Ideas (and Ourselves) Kindle Edition

by Jonnie Hughes (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 23 ratings
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Why do some ideas spread, while others die off? Does human culture have its very own “survival of the fittest”? And if so, does that explain why our species is so different from the rest of life on Earth?

Throughout history, we humans have prided ourselves on our capacity to have ideas, but perhaps this pride is misplaced. Perhaps ideas have us. After all, ideas do appear to have a life of their own. And it is they, not us, that benefit most when they are spread. Many biologists have already come to the opinion that our genes are selfish entities, tricking us into helping them to reproduce. Is it the same with our ideas?

Jonnie Hughes, a science writer and documentary filmmaker, investigates the evolution of ideas in order to find out. Adopting the role of a cultural Charles Darwin, Hughes heads off, with his brother in tow, across the Midwest to observe firsthand the natural history of ideas—the patterns of their variation, inheritance, and selection in the cultural landscape. In place of Darwin’s oceanic islands, Hughes visits the “mind islands” of Native American tribes. Instead of finches, Hughes searches for signs of natural selection among the tepees.

With a knack for finding the humor in the quirks of the American cultural landscape, Hughes takes us on a tour from the Mall of America in Minneapolis to what he calls the “maul” of America—Custer’s last stand—stopping at road-sides and discoursing on sandwiches, the shape of cowboy hats, the evolution of barn roofs, the 28.99 wording of jokes, the wearing of moustaches, and, of course, the telling features from tepees of different tribes. Original, witty, and engaging, On the Origin of Tepees offers a fresh way of understanding both our ideas and ourselves.
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  5. Publication date
    August 9, 2011
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ambitious and original. Unlike the vast majority of recent writings about memes, this is a serious book that does "add to the theory". It belongs on the reading list of anybody who hopes to use Richard Dawkins's insight into memes, offering a serious scientific account of cultural change and innovation. That it is entertaining is a bonus, not a substitute for substance.” --Daniel Dennett, New Scientist, Letters

"Hughes, an award-winning science writer and documentary maker, explores how big ideas begin, evolve, and converge--and whether culture, like biology, follows any Darwinian dictates of natural selection--in this detective story–cum–road trip memoir. Hughes and his brother, Adam, trek across America in their Chrysler in order to trace the evolution of tepees used by the Plains Indians--that "marvel of human ingenuity... the difference between life and death." Along the way, Hughes maps out the genealogies of other cultural artifacts of Americana--the gambrel-roof barn, bourbon whiskey, regional pronunciations and jokes, why Scandinavian immigrants took to the American Midwest, and the invention of the cowboy hat. Taking his cue from Darwin, Hughes intersperses his technical discussions of genetics and biology with sketches--of tepees and such oddities of the animal kingdom as naked mole rats, hammerhead fruit bats, oarfish--and snapshots from the road that keep the reading brisk, personal, and pleasurable. This ambitious book braids together studies in biology, psychology, history, linguistics, geology, and philosophy into an impressively succinct and readable taxonomy of human culture." --Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

"On the Origin of Tepees is not your usual sort of book. Jonnie Hughes, a British TV and radio science guy, is like a carnival barker on serious weed. He is like Carl Sagan without segues, Jacques Cousteau without the hat, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom without the kingdom … Wait, wait, I’ve got it: On the Origin of Tepees reminds me of a mind-blowing book I was given in first grade. It was called Animals Do the Strangest Things, and it called into question pretty much everything I’d been told so far (at 6) vis-À-vis evolution; namely that people were in charge of animals, people were smarter than animals, people were more inventive than animals and, of course, people were funnier and nicer than animals (none of which turned out to be true). Hughes wants us to understand the world differently; to understand the evolution of ideas and how those ideas shape the choices we make (individually and as a species) and our cultural evolution. He has chosen to do this in what he considers a surreal landscape — America. Now don’t get huffy: This is not Baudrillard exclaiming over the American materialist wasteland, or even de Tocqueville marveling in his paternal way over our fabulous optimism; this guy is totally comfortable (maybe too comfortable) with the idea that, grand theories aside, we are not in control of our evolution, any more than the hammerheaded fruit bat, the oarfish, or the naked mole rat. We need new goggles with which to see ourselves and through which to fully appreciate Darwin’s work. Hughes has got some."--Los Angeles Review of Books

“This book is a delight. Not only has Hughes described the world with meme’s eye vision but he has woven the insights of this view into a funny and endearing travel tale. Anyone interested in memes and the evolution of culture is bound to enjoy it. At last! At last not only has someone seriously adopted a meme’s-eye view of the world but has described the world seen through its lenses with humour, intelligence and real insight. Hughes’ hilarious travels through the American west do for culture what Darwin did for biology. I will buy a copy for both my meme-loving and my meme-hating friends.”—Professor Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine

About the Author

Jonnie Hughes is a science writer and filmmaker with over twelve years experience in communicating science to a broader public on radio, television, in print, and face-to-face. He is an award-winning writer and documentary filmmaker and regular contributor to Geographic Magazine, BBC Wildlife Magazine, The Guardian, and The Times. His films have aired on National Geographic, Discovery, BBC One and Two, and Channel 5. He has won the Association of British Science Writers and the Wellcome Trust Awards for science writing and a BBC Radio One Award for factual radio and the American Genesis Award for Best Popular Television Documentary. He lives in London, England.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B004FGMDFK
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Free Press (August 9, 2011)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 9, 2011
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4423 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 322 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 23 ratings

About the author

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Jonnie Hughes

Jonnie Hughes

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Jonnie Hughes spent his childhood methodically scouring the rock pools of the Devon coast in South West England. Captivated by the miniature wildernesses he discovered, he studied ecology and evolution at the University of Leeds, then moved to London to build a career telling others all about Life, what it is and how it works. He has since taught about it in college, written about it in newspapers and magazines, and made films about it for the BBC, Netflix and National Geographic Channel. His journalism, radio and television work have all won awards. In 2020, Jonnie was producer and director on the Netflix film Sir David Attenborough A Life on Our Planet. He currently runs an impact film company, Studio Silverback, in Bristol, UK.

Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
4.2 out of 5
23 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Tim Tyler
5.0 out of 5 stars Memes with beauty and humor
Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2012
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This book has a title which is obviously based on Charles Darwin's 1859 book. It's about the author's discovery of cultural evolution and memetics. The author imitates Darwin's trip to the Galapagos by seeking out cultural islands within the American mainland - mainly looking at artefacts - hats, barns and tepees. It is an unusual mixture of popular science and road trip.

The author uses the metaphor of view-point-altering goggles to help describe his journey. When he puts the goggles on he looks at things through the eyes of a cultural evolutionist - and the world looks pretty different and unusual to him.

The memetics in this book is good. Jonnie Hughes has a pretty good understanding of the topic, in my opinion.

The author spends most of the book on cultural evolution, and then describes how the "gene" revolution - which transformed evolutionary biology in the 1950s and 1960s - has a direct parallel in cultural evolution - which has its own little bits of inherited cultural information: memes. This insight has led to the "meme's eye view" - and other important developments.

If I made scientific criticisms, I would first point to the author's endorsement of internalism, which I find to be an unhelpful perspective. The other thing that I thought was wrong was his explanation for why memes have not made much progress in academia. He says it is the difficulty in actually identifying them in the brain. That isn't really the right answer. Plenty of other things that can't be directly observed don't face the same problem. There are several other reasons why academia has had trouble digesting memetics.

Much of the serious science in the book is confined to a bibliography at the end. It is four pages long. I would have preferred the whole book to have been like that. Memetics needs the attention of scientists more than it needs conversion stories by science writers.

Lastly I'll tell you about my favourite bit of the book. It's a bit near the end - where the author likens pioneer species colonising a new environment to memes colonising an infant's mind. Hughes explains in some detail how the early species in an environment create the ecosystem for those that follow them - in the same way that early memes create a mental environment for the more complex ones that follow them. This is a beautiful analogy, and in the hands of an eloquent science writer like Hughes, it is a joy to read.

Let's hope Jonnie keeps those memes coming in the future.
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Student of History
4.0 out of 5 stars travelogue plus the history of human culture
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2012
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This book contains a light-hearted "modern Englishman travels in the New World" story, interspersed with a vivid summary of broad evolutionary reasons why people are the way they are, written by someone with a fine grasp of popular writing for thoughtful people. I bought several extra copies to give as college graduation presents to psychology and communications majors.

Based on my several years of research into macrohistory, I only found one or two minor points to quibble with; for instance, in discussing the spread of Old World humans to the New World, the author repeated the "inland valley route" theory without mentioning a competing theory of coastal migration. But this is trivial compared to the real accomplishment of presenting a readable, thorough theory to explain the uniqueness of human accomplishments, relative to other creatures on Earth.
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R. Golen
3.0 out of 5 stars I Wish I Understood the Point
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2012
I enjoyed this book. So why only three stars? I think the author is making a point about genes and evolution and culture and memes. And I think that this is probably an important attempt. And I kept reading because Hughes is a delightful author telling a compelling travelogue story. I was interested in his travels and all he experienced. And I figured I'd get to the end and there would be an explanation concerning the point of the book. If there was an explanation it went right over my head. Seems to me Hughes had an ambitious idea, he just couldn't deliver in a manner that a normal guy like me could understand.

I do agree with Hughes though that we humans are darn special. I think human consciousness is the most special things in the cosmos.
3 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Great Introduction to a Fascinating Topic
Reviewed in the United States on August 3, 2016
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If you are looking for an introduction to the subject of cultural evolution then this book is a great place to start. I recommend you start with this book rather than one of the other more academic books on the subject. If this book peaked your interest then I would continue with "Cultural Evolution" by Mesoudi.

What I really liked was the author's fearlessness in exploring how ideas evolve. He comes to the conclusion that we might not be as much in the driver's seat as we like to think. This is a fascinating hypothesis and one I found convincing. It has a Copernican feel to it, moving humankind away from the center of the cultural universe. Of course, it's more complicated than that but that is gist of his argument.

You will see in other reviews that the notion of memes is "discredited" or "a canard". This is simply not true. It is true, however, that memes remain a controversial topic and many cultural evolutionist have backed away from the idea, at least temporarily. Culture is very complex and it will take time for scientists to work out the best genotype vs phenotype model for it. For now scientists have chosen to focus on the phenotype, i.e. the stetson hat itself, rather than whatever genotype underlies it (meme or otherwise).

It also seems from some of the reviews that the entire notion of cultural evolution makes some people uncomfortable. You can tell when this is happening because they will use words like "determinism" or "reductionism". Sadly, science isn't there to make us feel comfortable or to confirm our political and emotional biases. It's goal is to accurately describe how the world is, not how we wish it were. If culture does evolve in a darwinian way, and if the empirical evidence supports it, then we must be brave enough to accept it.
2 people found this helpful
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Ed
4.0 out of 5 stars Evolution of Ideas.
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2014
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Quite interesting. A lot of food for thought. I will need to re-read & highlight an number of concepts.
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Chuck Jenkins
5.0 out of 5 stars Memes and Genes
Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2012
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Jonnie Hughes as done an excellent job of introducing me to the subject of memes through the exploration of Indian life on the Great Plains and the evolution of tepees. I highly recommend this as a valuable addition to anyone interested in the evolution of ideas and culture and the subject of Epistemology.
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Top reviews from other countries

Simon
5.0 out of 5 stars An outstanding insight into our origins
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 15, 2011
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Hughes has a way with words which enables him to present ideas in a very readable way. The origins of human culture wrapped up in a road trip across the plains of North America with a good dose of Darwin along the way. I found this book pleasantly humorous and fascinating and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in why we are the way we are.
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