Notes on narrative, cognition, and cultural evolution

Drawing on non-Darwinian cultural-evolutionary approaches, the paper develops a broad, non-representational perspective on narrative, necessary to account for the narrative “ubiquity” hypothesis. It considers narrativity as a feature of intelligent behaviour and as a formative principle of symbolic representation (“narrative proclivity”). The narrative representation retains a relationship with the “primary” pre-symbolic narrativity of the basic orientational-interpretive (semiotic) behaviour affected by perceptually salient objects and “fits” in natural environments. The paper distinguishes between implicit narrativity (as the basic form of perceptual-cognitive mapping) of intelligent behaviour or non-narrative media, and the “narrative” as a symbolic representation. Human perceptual-attentional routines are enhanced by symbolic representations: due to its attention-monitoring and information-gathering function, narrative serves as a cognitive-exploratory tool facilitating cultural dynamics. The rise of new media and mass communication on the Web has thrown the ability of narrative to shape the public sphere through the ongoing process of negotiated sensemaking and interpretation in a particularly sharp relief.

First evidence for a bipolar distribution of dominant freshwater lake bacterioplankton

As a result of the recent application of DNA based technology to the investigation of maritime Antarctic freshwater lakes, patterns have begun to emerge in the bacterioplankton communities that dominate these systems. In this study, the bacterioplankton communities of five Antarctic and five Arctic freshwater lakes were assessed and compared with existing data in the literature, to determine whether emerging patterns in Antarctic lakes also applied to Arctic systems. Such a bipolar comparison is particularly timely, given the current interest in biogeography, the global distribution of microorganisms and the controversy over the global ubiquity hypothesis. In addition, it has recently been discovered that commonly encountered bacterial sequences, often originating from uncultivated bacteria obtained on different continents, form coherent phylogenetic freshwater clusters. In this study we encountered both identical sequences and sequences with a high degree of similarity among the bacterioplankton in lake water from both poles. In addition, Arctic freshwater lakes appeared to be dominated by some of the same groups of bacterioplankton thought to be dominant in Antarctic lakes, the vast majority of which represented uncultivated groups.