Cultural evolution is an
evolutionary theory of
social change
Social change is the alteration of the social order of a society which may include changes in social institutions, social behaviours or social relations. Sustained at a larger scale, it may lead to social transformation or societal transformat ...
. It follows from the definition of
culture
Culture ( ) is a concept that encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and Social norm, norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, Social norm, customs, capabilities, Attitude (psychology), attitudes ...
as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.
Cultural evolution, historically also known as
sociocultural evolution
Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or social evolution are theories of sociobiology and cultural evolution that describe how Society, societies and culture change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes t ...
, was originally developed in the 19th century by anthropologists stemming from
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English Natural history#Before 1900, naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all speci ...
's research on
evolution
Evolution is the change in the heritable Phenotypic trait, characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, re ...
. Today, cultural evolution has become the basis for a growing field of scientific research in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, psychology, and
organizational studies. Previously, it was believed that social change resulted from biological
adaptation
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the p ...
s; anthropologists now commonly accept that social changes arise in consequence of a combination of social, environmental, and biological influences (viewed from a
nature vs nurture framework).
There have been a number of different approaches to the study of cultural evolution, including
dual inheritance theory
Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: g ...
,
sociocultural evolution
Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or social evolution are theories of sociobiology and cultural evolution that describe how Society, societies and culture change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes t ...
,
memetics,
cultural evolutionism, and other variants on
cultural selection theory. The approaches differ not just in the history of their development and discipline of origin but in how they conceptualize the process of cultural evolution and the assumptions, theories, and methods that they apply to its study. In recent years, there has been a convergence of the cluster of related theories towards seeing cultural evolution as a unified discipline in its own right.
History
Aristotle
Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, a ...
thought that development of cultural form (such as poetry) stops when it reaches its maturity. In 1873, in ''
Harper's New Monthly Magazine'', it was written: "By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage over indirect, words of precise meaning the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere in disadvantage".
Cultural evolution, in the Darwinian sense of variation and selective inheritance, could be said to trace back to Darwin himself.
[Richerson, P.J. and Boyd. R. (2010) The Darwinian theory of human cultural evolution and gene-culture coevolution. Chapter 20 in ''Evolution Since Darwin: The First 150 Years''. M.A. Bell, D.J. Futuyma, W.F. Eanes, and J.S. Levinton, (eds.) Sinauer, pp. 561-588.] He argued for both customs (1874 p. 239) and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language.
Darwin's ideas, along with those of such as
Comte and
Quetelet, influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hodgson and Knudsen single out
David George Ritchie and
Thorstein Veblen, crediting the former with anticipating both dual inheritance theory and universal Darwinism. Despite the stereotypical image of
social Darwinism that developed later in the century, neither Ritchie nor Veblen were on the political right.
The early years of the 20th century and particularly
World War I
World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
saw biological concepts and metaphors shunned by most social sciences. Even uttering the word ''evolution'' carried "serious risk to one's intellectual reputation." Darwinian ideas were also in decline following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics but were revived, especially by
Fisher,
Haldane, and
Wright, who developed the first population genetic models and as it became known the modern synthesis.
Cultural evolutionary concepts, or even metaphors, revived more slowly. If there were one influential individual in the revival it was probably
Donald T. Campbell. In 1960 he drew on Wright to draw a parallel between genetic evolution and the "blind variation and selective retention" of creative ideas; work that was developed into a full theory of "socio-cultural evolution" in 1965
[Campbell, D. T. (1965). "Variation and selective retention in socio-cultural evolution". Social Change in Developing Areas, a Reinterpretation of Evolutionary Theory.] (a work that includes references to other works in the then current revival of interest in the field). Campbell (1965 26) was clear that he perceived cultural evolution not as an analogy "from organic evolution per se, but rather from a general model for quasiteleological processes for which organic evolution is but one instance".
Others pursued more specific analogies notably the anthropologist F. T. (Ted) Cloak who argued in 1975 for the existence of learnt cultural instructions (cultural corpuscles or i-culture) resulting in material artefacts (m-culture) such as wheels. The argument thereby introduced as to whether cultural evolution requires neurological instructions continues to the present day .
Unilinear theory
In the 19th century cultural evolution was thought to follow a unilineal pattern whereby all cultures progressively develop over time. The underlying assumption was that Cultural Evolution itself led to the growth and development of civilization.
Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes ( ; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book ''Leviathan (Hobbes book), Leviathan'', in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. He is considered t ...
in the 17th century declared
indigenous culture to have "no arts, no letters, no society" and he described facing life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He, like other scholars of his time, reasoned that everything positive and esteemed resulted from the slow development away from this poor lowly state of being.
Under the theory of unilinear Cultural Evolution, all societies and cultures develop on the same path. The first to present a general unilineal theory was
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English polymath active as a philosopher, psychologist, biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in '' ...
. Spencer suggested that humans develop into more complex beings as culture progresses, where people originally lived in "undifferentiated hordes" culture progresses and develops to the point where civilization develops hierarchies. The concept behind unilinear theory is that the steady accumulation of knowledge and culture leads to the separation of the various modern day sciences and the build-up of cultural norms present in modern-day society.
In
Lewis H. Morgan's book ''
Ancient Society'' (1877), Morgan labels seven differing stages of human culture: lower, middle, and upper savagery; lower, middle, and upper barbarism; and civilization. He justifies this staging classification by referencing societies whose cultural traits resembled those of each of his stage classifications of the cultural progression. Morgan gave no example of lower savagery, as even at the time of writing few examples remained of this cultural type. At the time of expounding his theory, Morgan's work was highly respected and became a foundation for much of anthropological study that was to follow.
Cultural particularism
There began a widespread condemnation of unilinear theory in the late 19th century. Unilinear cultural evolution implicitly assumes that culture was borne out of the
United States
The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...
and
Western Europe
Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's extent varies depending on context.
The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the Western half of the ancient Mediterranean ...
. That was seen by many to be racist, as it assumed that some individuals and cultures were more evolved than others.
Franz Boas, a German-born anthropologist, was the instigator of the movement known as 'cultural particularism' in which the emphasis shifted to a multilinear approach to cultural evolution. That differed to the unilinear approach that used to be favoured in the sense that cultures were no longer compared, but they were assessed uniquely. Boas, along with several of his pupils, notably
A.L. Kroeber,
Ruth Benedict and
Margaret Mead, changed the focus of anthropological research to the effect that instead of generalizing cultures, the attention was now on collecting empirical evidence of how individual cultures change and develop.
Multilinear theory
Cultural particularism dominated popular thought for the first half of the 20th century before American anthropologists, including
Leslie A. White,
Julian H. Steward,
Marshall D. Sahlins, and
Elman R. Service, revived the debate on cultural evolution. These theorists were the first to introduce the idea of multilinear cultural evolution.
Under multilinear theory, there are no fixed stages (as in unilinear theory) towards cultural development. Instead, there are several stages of differing lengths and forms. Although, individual cultures develop differently and cultural evolution occurs differently, multilinear theory acknowledges that cultures and societies do tend to develop and move forward.
Leslie A. White focused on the idea that different cultures had differing amounts of 'energy', White argued that with greater energy societies could possess greater levels of social differentiation. He rejected separation of modern societies from primitive societies. In contrast, Steward argued, much like Darwin's theory of evolution, that culture adapts to its surroundings. 'Evolution and Culture' by Sahlins and Service is an attempt to condense the views of White and Steward into a universal theory of multilinear evolution.
Robert Wright recognized the inevitable development of cultures. He proposed that population growth was a crucial component of cultural evolution. Population has a symbiotic relationship with technological, economic, and political development.
Memetics
Richard Dawkins' 1976 book ''
The Selfish Gene'' proposed the concept of the "
meme
A meme (; ) is an idea, behavior, or style that Mimesis, spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying c ...
", which is analogous to that of the gene. A meme is an idea-replicator that can reproduce itself, by jumping from mind to mind via the process of one human learning from another via imitation. Along with the "virus of the mind" image, the meme might be thought of as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.), which spreads among the individuals of a population. The variation and selection in the copying process enables Darwinian evolution among memeplexes and therefore is a candidate for a mechanism of cultural evolution. As memes are "selfish" in that they are "interested" only in their own success, they could well be in conflict with their biological host's genetic interests. Consequently, a "meme's eye" view might account for certain evolved cultural traits, such as suicide terrorism, that are successful at spreading the meme of martyrdom, but fatal to their hosts and often other people.
Evolutionary epistemology
"Evolutionary epistemology" can also refer to a theory that applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human knowledge and argues that units of knowledge themselves, particularly scientific theories, evolve according to selection. In that case, a theory, like the
germ theory of disease, becomes more or less credible according to changes in the body of knowledge surrounding it.
One of the hallmarks of evolutionary epistemology is the notion that empirical testing alone does not justify the pragmatic value of scientific theories but rather that social and methodological processes select those theories with the closest "fit" to a given problem. The mere fact that a theory has survived the most rigorous empirical tests available does not, in the calculus of probability, predict its ability to survive future testing.
Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the ...
used
Newtonian physics as an example of a body of theories so thoroughly confirmed by testing as to be considered unassailable, but they were nevertheless improved on by
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein (14 March 187918 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is best known for developing the theory of relativity. Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence f ...
's bold insights into the nature of space-time. For the evolutionary epistemologist, all theories are true only provisionally, regardless of the degree of empirical testing they have survived.
Popper is considered by many to have given evolutionary epistemology its first comprehensive treatment, but Donald T. Campbell had coined the phrase in 1974.
Dual inheritance theory
Criticism and controversy
As a relatively new and growing scientific field, cultural evolution is undergoing much formative debate. Some of the prominent conversations are revolving around
universal Darwinism,
dual inheritance theory, and memetics.
More recently, cultural evolution has drawn conversations from multi-disciplinary sources with movement towards a unified view between the natural and social sciences. There remains some accusation of
biological reductionism, as opposed to cultural naturalism, and scientific efforts are often mistakenly associated with
Social Darwinism. However, some useful parallels between biological and social evolution still appear to be found.
Researchers Alberto Acerbi and Alex Mesoudi's criticism of Cultural Evolution lies in the ambiguity surrounding the analogy between cultural and
genetic evolution. They clarify the distinction between cultural selection (high-fidelity replication of traits) and cultural attraction (reconstruction of traits with lower fidelity). They argue that both mechanisms coexist in cultural evolution, making it essential to empirically determine their prevalence in different contexts, addressing confusion in the field.
Criticism of historic approaches to cultural evolution
Cultural evolution has been criticized over the past two centuries that it has advanced its development into the form it holds today. Morgan's theory of evolution implies that all cultures follow the same basic pattern. Human culture is not linear, different cultures develop in different directions and at differing paces, and it is not satisfactory or productive to assume cultures develop in the same way.
A further key critique of cultural evolutionism is what is known as "armchair anthropology". The name results from the fact that many of the anthropologists advancing theories had not seen first hand the cultures they were studying. The research and data collected was carried out by explorers and missionaries as opposed to the anthropologists themselves.
Edward Tylor was the epitome of that and did very little of his own research.
Cultural evolution is also criticized for being
ethnocentric; cultures are still seen as attempting to emulate western civilization. Under ethnocentricity, primitive societies are said to not yet be at the cultural levels of other Western societies.
Much of the criticism aimed at cultural evolution is focused on the unilinear approach to social change. Broadly speaking in the second half of the 20th century the criticisms of cultural evolution have been answered by the
multilinear theory. Ethnocentricity, for example, is more prevalent under the unilinear theory.
Some recent approaches, such as dual inheritance theory, make use of empirical methods including psychological and animal studies, field site research, and computational models.
Machine culture
With the advent of increasingly pervasive and capable artificial intelligence, Brinkmann et al. (2023)
argue that intelligent machines will increasingly shape cultural evolution by impacting the key Darwinian properties of culture (variation, transmission, and selection).
See also
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Notes
References
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* Fernlund, Kevin Jon. "The Great Battle of the Books between the Cultural Evolutionists and the Cultural Relativists, from the Beginning of Infinity to the End of History” in the ''Journal of Big History'' 4, 3 (2020): 6-30.
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Further reading
Early foundational books
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Modern review books
* Mesoudi, A. (2011). ''Cultural evolution: how Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences''. University of Chicago Press
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In evolutionary biology
* Jablonka, E., Lamb, M.J., (2014). ''Evolution in Four Dimensions, revised edition: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life''. MIT Press.
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High-profile empirical work
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Organisational memetics
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Evolutionary linguistics
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External links
* http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/
Cultural Evolution Society
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Sociocultural evolution theory