{"id":42165,"date":"2011-06-28T23:32:17","date_gmt":"2011-06-29T07:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=12591"},"modified":"2011-06-28T23:32:17","modified_gmt":"2011-06-29T07:32:17","slug":"the-punctuated-equilibrium-of-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2011\/06\/28\/the-punctuated-equilibrium-of-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"The punctuated equilibrium of culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/06\/225px-JohnWinthropColorPortrait.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-12592\" title=\"225px-JohnWinthropColorPortrait\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/files\/2011\/06\/225px-JohnWinthropColorPortrait.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"442\" height=\"276\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<strong>John Winthrop, ~1600. Mitt Romney, 2008<\/strong> &#8211; image credit, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/File%3AMitt_Romney.jpg\">Jessica Rinaldi<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Recently <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/business\/archive\/2011\/06\/imagining-the-future\/241075\/\">Megan Mcardle<\/a> had a post up where she expressed curiosity as to why &#8220;futurists&#8221; circa 1900 had a tendency not to imagine revolutions in clothing style which might have been anticipated to occur over the next few decades. You also see see this in <em>Star Trek<\/em> in the 1960s, where faux-future fashion was clearly based on the trends of the day, from the beehive hair to miniskirts. So I thought this comment was of interest:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know the answer, but I don&#8217;t know that they were wrong to do it.   Keeping fashions exactly the same as the present generally winds up with more in common with the actual future than deliberate &#8220;future&#8221; fashions.  A fair number of men still wear ties, and on rare occasions a few even wear tailcoats; rather fewer wear silver jumpsuits.<\/p>\n<p>There have been a few counters to extreme fashions in media SF: &#8220;Blade Runner&#8221;&#8216;s lead wore the same trenchcoat as his noir forebears; &#8220;Babylon 5&#8243; went for modified business suits and moderate variations on military uniforms; the &#8220;Battlestar Galactica&#8221; &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/gniR32joA4g\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Winthrop, ~1600. Mitt Romney, 2008 &#8211; image credit, Jessica Rinaldi<\/p>\n<p>Recently Megan Mcardle had a post up where she expressed curiosity as to why &#8220;futurists&#8221; circa 1900 had a tendency not to imagine revolutions in clothing style &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,8,1568],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-evolution","category-culture","category-punctuated-equilibrium"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42165"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42306,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42165\/revisions\/42306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}