Sociocultural evolution

Most of the 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches to socioculture aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies have reached different stages of social development. The most comprehensive attempt to develop a general theory of social evolution centering on the development of sociocultural systems, the work of Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), operated on a scale which included a theory of world history. Another attempt, on a less systematic scale, originated from the 1970s with the world-systems approach of Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019) and his followers.


More recent approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea that cultures differ primarily according to how far each one has moved along some presumed linear scale of social progress. Most modern archaeologists and cultural anthropologists work within the frameworks of neoevolutionism, sociobiology, and modernization theory.

Introduction[edit]

Anthropologists and sociologists often assume that human beings have natural social tendencies but that particular human social behaviours have non-genetic causes and dynamics (i.e. people learn them in a social environment and through social interaction).


Societies exist in complex social environments (for example: with differing natural resources and constraints) and adapt themselves to these environments. It is thus inevitable that all societies change.


Specific theories of social or cultural evolution often attempt to explain differences between coeval societies by positing that different societies have reached different stages of development. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between technologies, social structure or the values of a society, they vary as to the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and change.


While the history of evolutionary thinking with regard to humans can be traced back at least to Aristotle and other Greek philosophers, early sociocultural-evolution theories  – the ideas of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881)  – developed simultaneously with, but independently of, the work of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and were popular from late in the 19th century to the end of World War I. The 19th-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilized over time; they equated the culture and technology of Western civilization with progress. Some forms of early sociocultural-evolution theories (mainly unilineal ones) have led to much-criticised theories like social Darwinism and scientific racism, sometimes used in the past by European imperial powers to justify existing policies of colonialism and slavery and to justify new policies such as eugenics.^[3]


Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a single entity. However, most 20th-century approaches, such as multilineal evolution, focused on changes specific to individual societies. Moreover, they rejected directional change (i.e. orthogenetic, teleological or progressive change). Most archaeologists work within the framework of multilineal evolution. Other contemporary approaches to social change include neoevolutionism, sociobiology, dual inheritance theory, modernisation theory and postindustrial theory.


In his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins wrote that "there are some examples of cultural evolution in birds and monkeys, but ... it is our own species that really shows what cultural evolution can do".^[4]