Imperfect Cognitions

We celebrate Darwin Day (12th February) with a post by Matteo Mameli (King’s College London) on his new monograph,  Why Human Nature Matters: Between Biology and Politics  (Bloomsbury 2024). In the book, Mameli discusses Darwin’s views on mental faculties, human differences, and the transformative agency of organisms.  My monograph addresses classic and contemporary perspectives on human nature and makes a novel proposal, one that stresses the biological and political significance of human diversity and mutability. Darwin’s ideas on variation and niche construction play an important role in my argument, which also draws on insights from Marx, Engels, Gramsci, Sebastiano Timpanaro, Sylvia Wynter, and others. The cover image is a plate from one of Darwin’s books on barnacles. To discover why Darwin was so interested in barnacles, you will have to read the book! Below are some excerpts from the introductory chapter: Organisms inherit genetic material from their parents, but ...

In this post, part of a series on the new journal Memory, Mind & Media , Katie Laker interviews Robyn Fivush, whose article, co-authored with Ariel Grysman, is entitled: ' Narrative and gender as mutually constituted meaning-making systems ’ and is available open access. Robyn Fivush KL: Firstly, thank you for being part of the Memory, Mind & Media inaugural collection. Why was MMM a good fit for your paper? RF: The two core constructs that we explore in our paper, narrative and gender, are inherently interdisciplinary and culturally mediated. No single discipline can fully define or even describe either of these constructs; they require a broad synthesis across multiple ways of knowing. And both are fully culturally mediated; both narrative and gender derive from socially and culturally saturated lenses that find expression in multiple media formats, from books to memes.  MMM is committed to fostering conversations at the intersection of cognitive, social and cultural app...