Information: Evolution, Psychology, and Politics

Abstract

This chapter explores three theories of information: social evolution, which ties social information to broader conceptions of information at the root of physical existence and the evolutionary process; schema theory, which conceptualizes how the human brain absorbs, processes, and stores information; and social representations theory, which explains and explores how large chunks of socially shared information disseminate through a population. These approaches cover three ascending levels, from the individual bit of information to the information within an individual brain, to the sets of information widely shared within a society. Combining them, the resulting approach views ideas as bits of information that evolve and spread, in an ecology of information featuring selection pressures of various sorts: psychological, cultural, political-economic.