MOST folk in the American west reckon cowboys invented the cowboy hat. Taking wide-brimmed headgear, made back east, cattle ranchers creased in the characteristic ridges that factories later copied. Science writer Jonnie Hughes isn’t convinced. He believes that the cowboy hat invented itself: the wranglers merely provided a “unique selective environment” in which the hat could adapt to the US frontier.
Readers of Richard Dawkins and Susan Blackmore will be familiar with the concept that ideas have a Darwinian existence in which survival of the fittest is played out at the behest of memes, the cultural analogue of genes. Rather…
