Evolutionisms Of Society And Culture

The Evolution of Societies The year 2009 has been dubbed Darwin’s year. The theory of evolution has never been so popular, but it’s opponents — creationists and intelligent designers — are also as vociferous as ever. If creationists came from their bible classes, where did evolution come from? Evolution did not burst Athena-like from the forehead of Charles Darwin (1809 — 1882) in 1859. Besides holding off on publication for nearly twenty years, he himself traced evolutionary ideas to Aristotle and Empedocles. But closer to Darwin, his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731 — 1802) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 — 1829) both proposed hypotheses of the transmutation of species — something that was quite anathema to the prevailing literal protestant readings of the bible. Indeed the very term, evolution, did not arise among students of plants or animals (which the literalists held were created and fixed by God in the year 4004 BC), but rather among Enlightenment students of man and society. A closer reading of history shows that there was (and is) not one theory of evolution, but theories of evolution — and relatively few of them concerned with the biological world. Before the Enlightenment It is not well known, but already in the 14th century the North African Islamic scholar ibn Khaldun (1332 — 1406) put forward the view of societies as living organisms which experience birth, growth, maturity, decline and death due to universal causes. One of his most incisive analyses was that of the relationship between settled and nomadic societies, which shift and adapt, with nomads repeatedly conquering farming communities before being assimiliated and the new society in turn becoming plunder for the next wave of nomads. This cycle of nomad and peasant lasted for nearly three thousand years until the spread of rifling and standing armies broke the predominance of the horse in warfare. In his non-progressivist analysis ibn Khaldun was far ahead of

European thinkers by a good half-millennium. Meanwhile, most European thinkers maintained that man and his societies were in a state of decline from the golden age of the Garden of Eden. This also meshed with ancient Greek mythologies of ages of gold, silver and bronze followed ultimately by the mean age of iron, where all things are debased. It was only in the 18th century that progress began to seem so certain that theories of the decline of society began to be replaced by theories of evolution. However, these early theories of evolution used the term as a synonym for progress and development, not simply for gradual change from one form to another. This concept of progress still represents common usage of the term evolution. Evolution and Enlightenment Evolution in the sense of progress also helped Europeans make sense of the colonial world they were building through the Age of Discovery. In the 17th century Thomas Hobbes’ (1588 — 1679) view of man’s primeval condition as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is a good summary of the then prevalent view of the savage — i.e. non-European. All that was good in man was the result of the slow development out of this lowly state. This view, of the progression from brute to citizen, was almost universally held. But questions arose as to the how and why of progress. Why, in some lands, the people are progressive and civilized, while in others they are poor and brutish. Usually John Locke (1632 — 1704) is presented as the lighter counterpoint to Hobbes’ dark, brooding commentary on human nature. Locke presents man as tabula rasa, made what he is by environment. But in truth, at least on the field of evolution, both espouse the same progressivism. While Hobbes presents the state and law civilizing man, Locke views education as that power. Both are examples of that class of explanations dubbed environmentalist — where man’s environment effects his evolution. Usually the so-called biologist explanations are opposed to this position,

where differences among peoples are attributed to biological differences (often race and racism). The fact is neither of these positions have much to do with evolution in the modern sense of variation, selection and heredity, but an overview is nevertheless in order, to understand the common-sense progressivism that still informs much of our European thinking today. Giambattista Vico or Vigo (1668 — 1744) is best known for his Scienza Nuova (1725) where he argues that there exists a natural law of human social development, albeit informed by a divine providence, which repeats itself cyclically. This natural law sees each civilization moving through three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human. In the first age metaphor is the master trope of language, in the second metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudalism and monarchy, and finally, in the third age, irony is reflected in democracy. Although Vico’s ‘evolutionism’ is marked by three universal phases and natural law, it’s cultural, metaphysical emphasis is far from general Enlightenment trend, which was far more materialist and utilitarian. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689 — 1755) was a far more typical representative of Enlightenment evolutionism. His position was that the most important factor in the evolution of society and temperament was the climate. He is thus usually presented as an exemplary geographical determinist, indeed a meteorological determinist. This is a slight over-simplification, but it serves. Besides this climatic axis, he also discerned a second axis of cultural progress, introducing the famous three phases of savagery, barbarism and civilization. Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune (1727 — 1781) was another French enlightenmenteer. Better known for his economics theories, he also subscribed to the idea of universal, tri-phase sociocultural development in subsistence and rationality: hunting, pastoralism and agriculture. It seems that Turgot equated the quantity of people supported by a given area of land with the rationality of that socio-economic order. Nevertheless, he did not view hunters or pastoralists as inferior per se, merely not

as educated. The concept of the psychic unity of mankind is an interesting one. On the one hand, it is a useful concept — if the human species is biologically very unvaried then it makes sense that their psychological make-up is also relatively invariant. However, this concept has also been abused by those who proceeded to argue that biology is thus irrelevant to human behaviour, psychology and sociology. An obvious fallacy, but oft overlooked. From France to Scotland, where Adam Ferguson of Raith (1723 — 1816) would become known as the father of modern sociology. He makes a further step, whereby he connects the phases of development with distinct types of social and economic organization. He did not have many original contributions, but he made the tripartite order of savagery, barbarism and civilization, as well as concepts of property, individual and collective, matriarchy and patriarchy, more tightly and coherently linked in the modern imaginarium. He also emphasized that the moral valuation of primitives as inferior was a thing of our perspective, rather than their objective state. Following these economic determinists, John Millar of Glasgow (1735 — 1801) was another consistent techno-economic determinist, focusing on environment and viewing economics in many ways a function thereof. The type of economy would then influence both the people as a whole and as individuals. However, his geographic determinology was far more specific and precise than the broad-stroke tri-phase models of other protoanthropologists. Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715 — 1771), the French Swissman, was yet another advocate of education (or lack thereof) as the cause of difference of ability and temperament among individuals and peoples as a whole. His novelty was a more precise development of the biological element of human development, for he viewed man as possessed of an inborn biological apparatus consisting of basic needs such as hunger

and thirst, which customs would seek to sate. A position that links him more with Malinowski than Locke. He also attributed customs to techno-economic determinants, though he went too far in his relativism, stating that all customs, though strange, may be excused, for they are functional for their group. However, he directly denies the validity of broad geographic or climatic models of temperament. We may well ask - is this evolutionism? I say not, more a descriptive analysis of the effects of environment and technology on human society and behaviour. Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723 — 1789) held a more philosophical approach than the other proto-anthropologists. He is also probably better known for being one of the first publicly self-described atheists in Europe. Nevertheless, he was another one of those rich fellows affirming man as a work of nature and subject to the laws of nature. He would reconcile his extreme materialism with an acceptance of education and rationality as the only way for man to further and better himself. However, again I ask, where is the evolutionism? Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743 — 1794) was one of the more radical advocates of egalitarianism for all peoples, male and female, and synthesised Enlightenment evolutionism and philosophical anthropology. Starting from man’s position as a part of the natural order he felt that the predicability of man’s being and development was also a necessary consequence of the essential and constant natural laws. His evolutionism was based on a complex system of levels: 1. tribal society, 2. pastoral society, 3. agricultural society, 4. ancinet Greece (till Alexander the Great), 5. the advance of knowledge, 6. the decadence of knowledge, 7. the early advance of knowledge until the development of the printing press, 8. from the printing press to the freedom of philosophy and science from state control, 9. from Descartes to the French revolution. The level of development, so Condorcet says, rose constantly from one step to the next. However, this idiosyncratic system can hardly be called a theory of evolution, it is more akin to an ethnocentric synopsis and unsystematic categorisation of history.

Obviously different Enlightenment thinkers held different positions, but certain general conclusions can be abstracted from their works. First is the Enlightenment desacralization of man, putting the human into the natural world. Indeed, theirs is the invention of Homo sapiens. From this natural world they concluded that there must be natural laws guiding both our biological and our socio-cultural historical development. However, they often confuse the idea of a universal, unchanging law with actual, universal and unchanging results. Nevertheless, the predicability of the future (the future was generally viewed as European), was a central tenet of their unilinear conceptions. The law of evolution was also viewed as one law — one path of development. Rationality provided the basis for the evaluation of distinct phases and a general belief in the power of education was pervasive among the Enlightenment evolutioneers. We must remember, however, that our critique is often based on an oversimplification of their position, so we must be cautious not to fall for the straw-man fallacy in denying any validity to their views. Biology and Evolution Towards the end of the 18th century, with the growth of biological knowledge, the ideas about evolution formulated by the students of history piqued the interest of biologists as well. It began to seem obvious that God had not, in His infinite wisdom, created the heavens and the Earth, as the Bible put it. All was not still in the garden of Creation. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1689 — 1759) was a strong critic of the natural theologians, dismantling the concept of the creator in relation to biology, however his role in evolution and natural selection is disputed. He postulated the idea of pangenesis and traced phenotypic characters through lineages, foreshadowing genetics. Erasmus Darwin cited the earlier work of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714 — 1799) in his writing on evolution. The Lord Monboddo was a Scots scholar of linguistic

evolution. But their direct contribution to biological evolution was far less than that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was the first to create a truly coherent, even if erroneous, theory of organic evolution. He postulated two forces comprising evolution, one driving animals from simple to complex forms, and another adapting them to their local environments and differentiating them from each other. Simply put, the complexifying force and the adaptive force.

No matter how we look at it, the emphasis on natural laws and the Enlightenment ideas of social evolution, cross-fertilised the field of biology through the efforts of Lamarck. In 1859 Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 — 1913) finally spurred Charles Darwin into action with his paper on the ‘introduction’ of species. Darwin had has his general theory of the natural selection of species ready since at least 1838, but had felt it too contentious for publication without copious amounts of proof. Together they presented their very similar theories and the concept of evolution exploded into the public consciousness. Darwin’s theory of evolution was soon misapplied and transformed into such oddities as social Darwinism and scientific racism. Thus a misunderstanding of organic evolution quickly reinvigorated the debate on social and cultural evolution.

Back to Social and Cultural Evolution

Charles Darwin’s seminal work provided the impetus for scholars of all backgrounds to redouble efforts in the field of evolution — seeking to understand the processes of qualitative change that had occurred in the history of the Earth and humanity, which were turning out to be far longer than they had previously supposed. In 1856, just three years before The Origin, the first Neanderthal man remains were found in the Neander valley. People were becoming very interested in how and why the differences between the races and cultures, past and present, had come about. Evolution, it seemed, was the method to understand man. All kinds of typologies were

developed and different phases were all the rage for understanding how we went from primitive to civilized.

Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (1822 — 1888) was the author of Ancient Law (1861) in which he distinguished between human groups based on kinship, on blood, and those based on territory. Meanwhile, in Switzerland Johan Jacob Bachofen (1815 — 1887) published his work Das Mutterecht (1861) in the same year, where he put forward the hypothesis that in ancient societies women, not men, were dominant — the matriarchy / patriarchy dichotomy. In fact, he supposed that there were four phases, first Aphroditian hetairism or wild, communistic polyamory. This was followed by Demeteran matriarchy. The third phase was the Dionysian half-way house to patriarchy, and finally the patriarchal, ‘solar’ or Appolonian phase, which saw the emergence of modern civilisation. I think it is safe to say that most of this was wild speculation.

Another Englishman, Herbert Spencer (1820 — 1903), was perhaps most responsible for bringing evolution into popular sociological and anthropological thinking. He formulated a general law of evolution for sociology and ethics, but despite advocating Darwinism, he actually used Lamarckism, rather than natural selection. He postulated a tendency for all societies to change from a state of incoherent homogeneity to a state of coherent heterogeneity. On this bases he identified simple, compound, doubly compound and trebly compound types of human society. Another axis of evolution he identified was from military societies, where the individual is subordinate to the social whole, towards industrial societies with greater freedom for individuals. He viewed the endpoint of evolution as perfect man in a perfect society. He also coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and was responsible for the invention of social Darwinism, although his social Darwinism was rather less radical than is usually thought. However, he was no Darwinian. He always believed in progress and an

endpoint of evolution — universal evolutionary progress.

The Briton Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832 — 1917) wrote his Primitive Culture in 1871, where he studied the evolution of culture in general and religion in particular, as well as developed the first definition of culture. He is famous for his use of ‘survivals’ as a basis for demonstrating evolutionary sequences. He postulated that religion evolved from animism, through totemism and polytheism, until reaching its peak in monotheism.

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 — 1881) was perhaps the most influential social evolutionist and traced a gran narrative of humanity in his work Ancient Society (1877), where he traced out the three major ‘ethnical periods’ of savagery, barbarism and civilization. Essentially he postulated stages of technical development as the basis for the evolution of humans from primitive hunter-gatherers to complex agricultural civilizations. His emphasis on orderly classification may have detracted from his evolutionary emphasis, but his stance was nevertheless more nuanced than we often admit today. Nevertheless, his evolution remained guided by divine providence.

Two other fellows were responsible for yet another strand of evolutionary thinking, namely Friedrich Engels (1820 — 1895) and Karl Marx (1818 — 1883), who focused on economic modes of production as the basis of human development. These modes of productions unified forces of production (technological development) and relations of production (forms of ownership) and on this basis he identified four basic stages: primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. Adding an eschatological element, Marx asserted that capitalism would be followed by advanced capitalism, creating a worker’s heaven on Earth. Building on Marx’s work, Engels published The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), which basically merged Morgan’s theories with Marx’s, replacing primitive communism with savagery and

barbarism, and expanding the phase of civilization into Marx’s slavery, feudalism, capitalism triad.

However, the ascendancy of evolutionism in the social studies was short-lived. Problems of evidence, theory and methodology, as well the rise of historical particularism, meant that by the 1890s the cutting edge had moved well beyond, and most new thinkers viewed it as passé. The Boasian school objected to evolutionary theories on four basic counts: the use of the comparative method; the development of rigid schemes of unilinear evolution; inadequate recognition of the process of diffusion; and the illegitimate equation of evolution with progress. From a comparison of the social evolutionists with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the later neoDarwinian synthesis, it is quite obvious that none of the social evolutionists — except perhaps ibn Khaldun way back when — truly understood what natural selection meant, or even felt that was somehow necessary. Indeed, it seems almost as though they remained wedded to 18th century Enlightenment progressivism and deism, while adopting the new buzzword evolution, which was having such success in the natural sciences.

The Eclipse of Darwinism

This was a phrase used by Julian Huxley to describe the history of evolutionary thought from the 1880s to the 1920s. It was not that evolution as such was discarded, but the problem of its driving mechanism drove the search for alternatives to natural selection, with theistic evolution, neo-Lamarckism, orthogenesis and saltationism. I suppose a bit of recapitulation is in order. Natural selection holds that natural variation in a population means that some individuals will be more successful at reproduction than others, thus leading to change in the population over time. But how was this natural selection to take place? And would it not result in the averaging-out of difference over time, rather than the development of new species? Until the introduction of the

concept of genetics, mutation and the germ-line in the early 20th century, the theory of natural selection seemed too unlikely, too immoral and too slow to many thinkers. The alternatives all had much more in common with 19th century social evolutionism than Darwin’s idea of natural selection. Theistic evolution proposed that God intervened to guide the process. Scholars discarded this line of thinking by 1900, but it informed the work of Lewis Henry Morgan. Neo-Lamarckism held that the use or disuse of a particular organ by an organism would lead to changes that could be inherited by the next generation. Neo-Lamarckism was also closely tied to the idea of linear progress and the recapitulation theory of evolution. Very similar was the hypothesis of orthogenesis, which held that life had a tendency to change in a unilinear fashion towards ever-greater perfection. This was perhaps the closest theory to the position of the 19th century evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer. Finally, saltationism held that new species arise as a result of large mutations. Saltationism has something in common with most classical socio-cultural evolution too, namely the large phase changes postulated by the categorisation of societies into savage, barbarian and civilised. In the 1930s advances in genetics theory and field research eventually led to the modern evolutionary synthesis. This was further strengthened by the discovery of the structure of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. In the late 20th century further developments followed, but the basic structure of evolution through natural selection proved solid. Variation, selection, heredity. What happened in the social studies, meanwhile? The Socio-Evolutionary Revival — the Neoevolutionists The old, 19th century evolutionists generally assumed a teleological unfolding of potentialities, a rigid sequence of stages through which all societies must move and the denial of the possibility of regression. The corrective of Franz Boas was necessary to

move a morbid theory out of its doldrums, but the swing towards historical particularism and diffusionism was probably too strong. To deny that evolution occurs in societies is quite a radical statement, but then — social and cultural evolutionists used the term to mean progress, not adaptation. From the 1930s onwards a full-scale evolutionary revival began in branches of anthropology that remained interested in the universals of human experience. Vere Gordon Childe (1892 — 1957) was a philologist and archaeologist who led the way in this revival, emphasizing the broad technological changes characteristic of human prehistory. He coined the concepts of the neolithic revolution, when mankind first domesticated plants and animals, and the subsequent urban revolution, when people started living in towns for the first time. The urban revolution involved occupational specialization, cities, class divisions, and the state. The first anthropologist to focus once more on sociocultural evolution was Leslie Alvin White (1900 — 1975). He developed a similar version of evolutionism to Childe’s, insisting that evolutionary theories not try to explain specific sequences of historical change, but rather focus on the overall movement of human culture. He formulated a lawto explain the general evolution of culture, which stated that culture evolved in proportion to the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year and the efficiency with which that energy was utilised. Technological change was, again, the driving force in the evolution of culture. Julian Haynes Steward (1902 — 1972) was the third major figure in the revival and reacted against the general and simplified evolutionary conceptions of Childe and White, which he called universal evolution. He proposed multilinear evolution as an alternative, which concentrated not on the overall movement of history but on the different lines along which social evolution moved. He identified broad lines along which evolution radiated and that could not be ignored. Multilinear evolution was closely related to the concept of cultural ecology, which he viewed as deeply affected by

environment. Marshall David Sahlins (1930) and Elman R. Service tried to combine the views of White and Steward in Evolution and Culture (1960), distinguishing between general and specific evolution. The general evolution of human culture is characterized by growing complexity and unilinearity — in this it is not much different from the 19th century evolutionary typologies. However, when one studies how hunter-gatherer societies evolved multidirectionality looms large. Robert Leonard Carneiro (1927) argues that there is no contradiction between unilinear and multilinear evolution, for a specific institution could be the result of different developments. He posits conflict deriving from population pressure, as well as warfare, contributing to the development of more complex political systems in areas that are environmentally circumscribed. Complexity thus tends to follow from the competition among societies for limited resources. Marvin Harris (1927 — 2001) turned the common technologist argument on its head, arguing that people are by nature conservative and avoid change if possible. Instead, he saw population pressure and environmental degradation as the force driving social and technological evolution — people must work harder and develop new techniques to keep their standard of living from falling. However, this produces yet more degradation, resulting in more intensification. In general, modern evolutionist approaches emphasise flexible typologies that give to history a certain open-ended quality, and most likewise see social continuity and regression as important social phenomena that, like evolution, cry out for explanation. However, although adaptation has become an important concept, progressivism is still the norm among most anthropologists. Despite this, there is no inherent association between evolutionary and progressivist views, as Marvin Harris shows. Social evolution often seems to represent a continuous struggle between humans and nature in which

humans run faster and faster just to try to stay in the same place. Much like Alice through the looking glass. Sociobiology Sociobiology departed radically from classical social evolutionism, focusing instead on natural selection and organic evolution. It was often unfairly criticised by anthropology, because it sought to explain universal human behaviours and phenomena on the basis of a common biological evolutionary heritage. In fact the arguments used were often of the straw-man type, misrepresenting the ideas of sociobiology. Neither Sociobiology nor its later development of evolutionary psychology deal with the evolution of cultures or societies, but rather with the evolution of individuals first and foremost. An interesting theory that has developed out of sociobiology is memetics, which studies the development of culture through the propagation of memes — units of imitation — through human brains and artifacts. It is quite a radical approach, which does away with the human individual as a subject of research, focusing instead on the constituents of culture themselves. In this theory culture is composed of parasites that sustain themselves on our ability to think. Conclusion I think it is obvious that humanity has changed over time in qualitative ways, which is what evolution seeks to explain. Looking back, a trend can be discerned. Humans have become more numerous, our societies have become larger and more complex, even as the number of effectively independent societies has decreased. We cannot say whether the course our history has taken was necessary, indeed, it is doubtful that there is a necessary direction to our evolution. To say whether we are progressing and where we are progressing is also completely outside the scope of a theory of social

evolution. What can be said is that there is incredible variation in human social and cultural arrangements, a pronounced creativity in the human species that promotes innovation, as well as a process of selection, whereby those practices that are more adaptive to the natural and social environments tend to be retained more easily than maladaptive ones. It also seems likely, as recent studies show, that human populations must be sufficiently large and dense to maintain technology, skills and culture, as evidenced by the stop-start nature of cultural beginnings from around 100,000 to 40,000 BC. We find evidence of this in the example of the Tasmanian islanders who lost the skill of making fire and boats in the thousands of years they were isolated from the rest of Australia by rising waters after the end of the last Ice Age. Trends towards complexity can be explained by various factors, including competition among human groups, population and environmental pressures, environmental degradation, technological factors and cultural factors. However, a plot of our past development is more universal history than a predictive theory. All that we can conclude is that we will continue to adapt, radiate and adjust our social and cultural forms in ways that we will consider useful, but that will also have unexpected consequences. It is precisely the chaotic complexity of the systems in which we are enmeshed that makes the idea of reasoned adaptation to adversity so helpless. Every adaptation of ours throw up new problems, every new technology has chaotic repercussions. Our social development is buffeted by the butterflies of chaos, and the idea of progress as somehow ordained is ridiculous. We bootstrap ourselves to greater complexity by the skin of our teeth and it will take all our ingenuity to remain here long, without killing ourselves or our environment.