Customer Reviews

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

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This book is great! I have to say, I'm not normally a big fan of sciency books, not because I don't like the subject, but because my brain seems to cloud over and not be able to take anything in. Somehow, this book broke right through the clouds. I loved the humour in it, and the fact that it is not only about cultural evolution but is also a story of a road trip across America. But what I like the most about it is the incredibly clear and enlightening way that Jonnie Hughes explains the concept. I'm now looking at everything just that little bit differently.

Framing his big story of cultural evolution as a travel jaunt across the American plains and mountains and northward into Canada, British award-winning science writer and documentary maker Hughes explores how ideas germinate, evolve and reach their pinnacle of perfection -- or at least arrive at "about right."

Looking for the origin and evolution of the various Plains Indians teepees, Hughes, accompanied by his brother Adam, journey from the huge Mall of America to Calgary, ruminating on the geography and history of the land and its inhabitants as he goes, stopping at Indian battle grounds, villages, pow-wows, and museums, looking for that first teepee idea, noting how the grass changes on the prairie and what that meant to the animals that ate it, the people that followed them and the invaders -- like Kentucky bluegrass, that competed for resources.

Various ideas and inventions catch his eye -- the Stetson hat, for instance, or the gambrel roof barn, unique to America. Where did the designs come from, what physical and cultural influences contributed to small, stylistic differences in neighboring barns or styles of Stetson?

Cultures and individual ideas, Hughes reflects, evolve just like organisms do. Well, maybe not just like. We do things that don't appear to benefit our genes in any way such as dying for our country or becoming celibate or "collecting useless things such as stamps." But for the most part "thought inheritance is what we humans ...; are built to do."

Inventions are seldom conjured out of thin air. Tweaks to existing ideas lead to more and better tweaks until, lo, you have the Stetson, a useful item with a design complicated by fashion, identity and status. Good ideas perpetuate themselves, just like useful genes, shaping the culture.

As Hughes fastens onto a cultural idea -- be it a joke or the cross-continental railroads -- he takes it apart, showing how Darwin's view applies.

"Struggling to survive, struggling to reproduce, adapting over time -- this is how Ideas exist in the world created between and within our minds. They evolve like independent beings, designing themselves mindlessly, accidentally/automatically as their generations navigate a path, any path, through the selective environment we consciously/subconsciously/unconsciously create."

Hughes delves into history as he goes, examining the connections between the extinction of the buffalo and the continental railroads, the movements of various Indian tribes from the Eastern woodlands onto the plains, the invention of the telephone and the near simultaneous cataclysm at Little Big Horn, the invasion of European culture into the Americas, the evolution of culture in early primate society, and so much more.

He follows antagonistic sea gulls that appear to be different species but are actually the same. The sea gull mates successfully with the slightly different bird on the next beach and so on around the globe until a herring gull and a black back gull square off against one another and would never dream of mating though they are essentially the same bird.

Language, too, can diverge around physical barriers, acquiring accents, absorbing foreign words and in more drastic cases, combining two languages into a Creole and eventually a whole new language. But don't try to construct an evolutionary tree because it's a tangle "more like the root system that you get beneath mushrooms in a woodland."

Hughes keeps all this from being impossibly head spinning through great organization, a superior storytelling ability and humor, including lots of groaning puns. Crossing easily through numerous disciplines, from psychology to geology, Hughes will have you thinking about humanity in a whole new way.

-- Portsmouth Herald

Science writer Jonnie Hughes sets out on a trip across Middle America and Canada with his brother to explore the evolution of the tepee (how long did it take him to figure out a subject that would sound like `species', I wonder?). Along with the travelogue and his discoveries about the tepee (and cowboy hats and a few other things), he explains to us the theories of evolution and natural selection among living things, and the idea of memes. Not memes as in internet quizzes or cat pictures, but memes as in perpetuated, spreading, ideas. Memes are like genes, but instead of spreading biologically, they spread psychologically. They change through time- parts that don't work get dropped; new things that make the idea better are included. The tepee is a meme; it has changed through time to meet conditions, and has spread to different people.

It's an interesting book; Hughes is humorous and is good at breaking concepts down. That ideas evolve through time and space can't be doubted, but at times Hughes writes about memes as if they are living things that exist independently of human minds, that they have a drive to survive of their own. I found that a bit... odd. Likewise, he writes of genes as if they have an actual wish to survive and so drive evolution purposely. While I'm pretty certain he does this as a writing technique, rather than truly thinking that ideas are living things with a will to live and spread, I found it a bit disturbing.

Despite this one oddity, I really recommend this book. He explains how speciation occurs in both animals and in languages in an extremely clear way; his story of how the cowboy hat evolved to fit the new environment of the west - and how it's now stopped evolving, much as humans have- is wonderful. Hughes has a great future as a writer of science for the layman.

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.