The Neverending Story: Cultural Evolution and Narratives
Lecture 7: Crime
Cumulative cultural evolution has become a key focus of research in Cultural Evolution, but the focus has largely been on the evolution of tools and technology. Are narratives also examples of cumulative cultural evolution? This lecture introduces the concept of cumulative cultural evolution and takes you through the evolution of the crime story, explaining how it has accumulated traits through its evolution. In the exercise you will read an article discussing the evolution of a single literary device - the ‘clue’ in detective fiction.
Resources
This project was supported by Grant #61105 from the John Templeton Foundation to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (PIs: S. Gavrilets and P. J. Richerson) with assistance from the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
The Cultural Evolution Society's Online Learning Tutorial Series is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For designers' contact information, click here.