Description
This monograph intertwines the two themes of historiography and evolutionary biology and shows that both activities are analogous in their practices; they are spinning stories about the past and thus constructing the world to suit the present of a given community as well as, if necessary, the construction of its tilting into the future. This book presents the history and methodology of both branches of historical narrative and demonstrates them through case studies. Alongside the activity of historiographers and evolutionary biologists, this text questions whether individual lineages also constitute their world in analogous ways. This book provides a brief characterization of the biosemiotics that seeks to answer the question. It appeals to students and researchers in these cross disciplinary fields.
1. Historiography and evolutionary biology.- 2. Charade from one pocket.- 3. About things and objects.- 4. Memory and explosion.- 5. The disenchantment of the world.- 6. Non-contemporary contemporaneity.- 7. General in history, or slavery in Bohemia?.- 8. Invariable yet changing.- 9. Not by genes alone.- 10. Of seeds and forms.- 11. Analogies.
Jan Horský is a longstanding senior researcher and lecturer at the Department of Historical Sociology at the Charles University Prague. He graduated in history and also holds higher degrees in social and cultural anthropology. He has long been involved in research into the noetics of historical science and the philosophy of history. He has performed several studies in the field of cultural history, especially on the early modern religious history of Europe and has worked extensively on historical demography, historical anthropology and family history. Furthermore he has discussed various issues of possible research links between historical demography and cultural history (e.g. related to the so-called grandmother hypothesis).
Anton Marko graduated from the Charles University Faculty of Science with a degree in Cell Biology. Emeritus; in his active days he teached in Cell and Theoretical biology. He has published many books, book chapters and articles in the field.
