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The core idea of cultural evolution is that cultural change constitutes an evolutionary process that shares fundamental similarities with – but also differs in key ways from – genetic evolution. Humans and other cultural species are the joint product of both our genetic and cultural inheritances. To understand exactly what we mean by ...
Because cultural change has the potential to occur faster than genetic adaptation, dynamics of niche construction that are driven by cultural traits play a prominent role in human evolution; yet, only in recent decades has cultural evolution begun to be explicitly incorporated into human evolutionary ecology . Studies that pioneered this approach showed how it can provide insight into the ...
Jun 2, 2021 · Summary: Researchers found that culture helps humans adapt to their environment and overcome challenges better and faster than genetics. Tim Waring and Zach Wood found that humans are experiencing ...
- Overview
- Unilinear theory
cultural evolution, the development of one or more cultures from simpler to more complex forms. In the 18th and 19th centuries the subject was viewed as a unilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of human behaviour as a whole. It has since been understood as a multilinear phenomenon that describes the evolution of individual cultures or societies (or of given parts of a culture or society).
Unilinear cultural evolution was an important concept in the emerging field of anthropology during the 18th and 19th centuries but fell out of favour in the early 20th century. Scholars began to propagate theories of multilinear cultural evolution in the 1930s, and these neoevolutionist perspectives continue, in various forms, to frame much of the research undertaken in physical anthropology and archaeology, the branches of anthropology that focus on change over time.
The Age of Discovery introduced 15th- and 16th-century Europeans to a wide variety of “primitive” cultures. Almost immediately, European intellectuals began efforts to explain how and why the human condition had come to be so diverse. Although the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes was very much mistaken when he described indigenous peoples as living in conditions in which there were “no arts, no letters, no society” and experiencing life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” his description encapsulates the era’s popular conception of the “savage.” Ignoring or unaware of a variety of facts—many indigenous peoples enjoyed a much better standard of living than European peasants, for instance—Hobbes and other scholars posited that everything that was good and civilized resulted from the slow development away from this “lowly” state and toward the “higher” state represented by the cultures of Europe. Even rationalistic philosophers such as Voltaire implicitly assumed that the “upward” progress of humankind was part of the natural order.
This Enlightenment notion that there was, in fact, a “natural order” derived from the philosophers of ancient Greece, who had described the world as comprising a Great Chain of Being—a view in which the world is seen as complete, orderly, and susceptible to systematic analysis. As a result, scholarship during the Enlightenment emphasized categorization and soon produced various typologies that described a series of fixed stages of cultural evolution.
Most focused on three major stages, but some posited many more categories. For instance, in his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (1795; Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind), the Marquis de Condorcet listed 10 stages, or “epochs,” of cultural evolution. He posited that the final epoch had begun with the French Revolution and was destined to usher in universal human rights and the perfection of the human race. The Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgenson Thomsen is widely acknowledged as the first scholar to have based such a typology on firm data rather than speculation. In Ledetraad til nordisk Oldkyndighed (1836; A Guide to Northern Antiquities), he categorized ancient European societies on the basis of their tools, calling the developmental stages the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages.
In the later 19th century, theories of cultural evolution were enormously influenced by the wide acceptance of the theory of biological evolution put forward by Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species (1859). Social scientists found that the framework suggested by biological evolution offered an attractive solution to their questions regarding the origins and development of social behaviour. Indeed, the idea of a society as an evolving organism was a biological analogy that was taken up by many anthropologists and sociologists and that persisted in some quarters even into the 20th century.
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Dec 23, 2007 · Cultural Evolution. First published Sun Dec 23, 2007; substantive revision Mon May 22, 2023. Researchers in the field of cultural evolutionary theory pursue an eclectic program of investigation that lies at the intersection of cognitive science, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. “Cultural Evolutionary Theory”, as we understand it here ...
Aug 28, 2020 · In 1981, the two published a landmark book, Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach, paving the way for the new field of quantitative cultural evolutionary theory. Their book laid out a framework for how the transmission of nongenetic, socially learned traits across individuals and groups can impact human diversity in ways ...
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Macroevolution concerns the large-scale and long-term events in evolutionary history. Important questions include why humans evolved so recently in the history of life, why culture is so important in our evolution, and why the agricultural subsistence systems that support our current massive numbers started to evolve only about 11,000 y ago.
