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Setting the Stage

from Section 1 - Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2021

Edward A. Wasserman
Edward A. Wasserman
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Summary

All history is retrospective. We’re always looking at the past through the lens of later developments. How else could we see it? We are ourselves, as subjects, among those later developments. It’s natural for us to take events that were to a significant extent the product of guesswork, accident, short-term opportunism, and good luck, and of demographic and technological changes whose consequences no one could have foreseen, and shape them into a heroic narrative about artistic breakthrough and social progress. But a legend is just one of the forms that history takes.

Type
Chapter
Information
As If By Design
How Creative Behaviors Really Evolve
 , pp. 5 - 12
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

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