Theory Of Cultural Evolution Research Articles

Outline of a Framework for a Theory of Cultural Evolution

Cultural traditions (including languages) are transmitted across generations through learning by individuals in interaction with other members of the social groups to which they belong. Such groups are analogous to biological demes whose genetic heritage is transmitted across generations by the procreative interactions of their members. Cultural traditions and human biological demes coevolve like symbionts in mutual interdependency. There are many parallel processes, outlined here, in biological and cultural evolution. Basic in the content of cultures are understandings about the conduct of activities as the units of coordinated purposeful social behavior that provide the contexts for the emergence, maintenance, and modification of cultural traditions. Students of culture have yet to set necessary standards for controlled, systematic ethnographic research of a kind that will provide the database needed for a developed theory of cultural evolution.

Can Evolutionary Theory Explain Nationalist Violence? Czecho Slovak and Bosnian Illustrations

Abstract. This study tests whether evolutionary theory can explain the outbreak of ethnic conflict. Microlevel hypotheses of cultural evolutionary theory are developed and applied to the peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia and the violent collapse of Bosnia‐Hercegovina. The more traditional social science approaches of Donald Horowitz and David Laitin are presented as a comparative base to assess the relative explanatory power of evolutionary theory. It is found that in conjunction with Horowitz's and Laitin's work, evolutionary theory can make sense of some patterns of ethnic conflict. However, its central weakness is linking proximate triggering mechanisms of nationalist violence to biological foundations. Without a convincing connection between microlevel propositions and survival and reproductive imperatives, evolutionary theory fails to offer a unique and credible explanation of nationalist violence.

Hayek contra Pangloss on Evolutionary Systems

Some analysts have criticized Friedrich Hayek's theory of cultural evolution for implying that the rules, customs, norms, and institutions that emerge from the evolutionary process are necessarily efficient or desirable in all cases. This charge is unfounded. The present article defends Hayek versus his critics in two ways: First, it restates Hayek's own objections to the idea that cultural evolution produces optimal outcomes. Second, it shows, through an analogy with biological evolution, that Hayek's theory need not imply any such conclusion. Contrary to a widely held misconception, biological evolution does not produce organisms that are perfectly adapted to their habitats; insofar as cultural evolution shares common features with biological evolution, cultural evolution may be expected to display similar types of suboptimality or mal-adaptation. Insights from the theory of biological evolution also help to illuminate some areas of controversy with regard to Hayek's theory of cultural evolution, including: Hayek's advocacy of gradual change; the question of what selective forces drive the process of cultural evolution; and the alleged conflict between group selectionism and methodological individualism.

The Practice of Belief

Recent developments in cultural theory apply the metaphor of haunting to explore traditional ways of knowing that have been displaced in academic discourse by the prevalence of science and reason but have remained viable aspects of daily life. In this article, I discuss the significance of folklore scholarship to this endeavor. I trace the relationship between this displacement of alternatives to Enlightenment principles and the creation and development of the discipline of folklore. I suggest that combining the study of performance with the study of traditional belief provides a theoretical and methodological framework within which to examine the practice of believing as a way of knowing that articulates the point of intersection of an individual, a group, a text, and an abstract concept.

Legal Design and the Evolution of Commercial Norms

The Uniform Commercial Code determines the content of most commercial law default rules by incorporating common merchant practices. The success of this incorporation strategy depends on the likely efficiency of evolved commercial practices. In this Article, I use the best available theory of cultural evolution to analyze how and why commercial practices evolve. This analysis confirms that the incorporation strategy is far superior to a system in which lawmakers rely predominantly on individual analysis and experimentation to design commercial law. But the analysis also demonstrates that common commercial practices, and the laws incorporating them, are unlikely to be optimal, in the sense that they cannot be improved at any cost. There is good reason, then, to explore supplemental strategies for enhancing the efficiency of individual commercial practices on a selected basis. The viability of such strategies will depend on their costs and likely success in improving on commercial practice.

The Idealised Native Speaker, Reified Ethnicities, and Classroom Realities

TESOL practice in the schooling sector in England has implicitly assumed that ESL students are linguistic and social outsiders and that there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between ethnicity and language. This perspective has tended to conceptualise L2 learners as a linguistically diverse group (from non-English-speaking backgrounds) but with similar language learning needs. However, demographic and social changes in the past 30 years have rendered such assumptions inadequate and misleading, particularly in multiethnic urban areas. In this article we seek to (a) offer an alternative account of the classroom realities in contemporary multilingual schools where the linguistic profiles and language learning needs of ESL students are not easily understood in terms of fixed concepts of ethnicity and language; (b) draw on recent developments in cultural theory to clarify the shifting and changing relationship among ethnicity, social identity, and language use in the context of postcolonial diaspora; and (c) question the pedagogical relevance of the notion of native speaker and propose that instead TESOL professionals should be concerned with questions about language expertise, language inheritance, and language affiliation.

Cultural evolution and the variable phenotype

It is common in attempts to extend the theory of evolution to culture to generalize from the causal basis of biological evolution, so that evolutionary theory becomes the theory of copying processes. Generalizing from the formal dynamics of evolution allows greater leeway in what kinds of things cultural entities can be, if they are to evolve. By understanding the phenomenon of cultural transmission in terms of coordinated phenotypic variability, we can have a theory of cultural evolution which allows us to avoid the various difficulties with the elaboration of informational entities such as the cultural “replicator”, or meme. Such an account is a boon to the project of evolutionary epistemology since it confirms the presumption in favor of the general adaptiveness of culture, illuminating rather than obscuring the inherent intimacy of our relationship to (e.g.) our ideas.

The noble savage and the global village: Cultural evolution in new age and neo‐pagan THOUGHT

This article examines some of the assumptions underlying cultural evolution and such concepts as the Noble Savage and the Golden Age. Looking briefly at the influence and inference of these ideas in the past, their use and appearance in certain aspects of contemporary Pagan and New Age thought are then explored. The notion of the Noble Savage has recurred in various guises since at least classical times, and people have looked longingly to a lost Golden Age in history, myth or religion throughout recorded history. The theory of cultural evolution has had ramifications for both concepts, while in some respects seeming inimical to them. Now aspects of these three ideas are having spiritual implications for a large number of people. Examining the connections between them and contemporary religiosity can therefore provide useful insights towards our understanding of the present phenomena.

Archaeological Systematics and Cultural Evolution: Retrieving the Honour of Culture History

This article attempts to show how archaeological systematics can be predicated on evolutionary theory, and to determine what kind of theories of cultural evolution would be best suited to provide a theoretical framework for archaeological classification. Appropriate Darwinian models of cultural evolution are briefly outlined. This is followed by a discussion of biological taxonomy and its relation to evolutionary theory. Binford's processualist 'new systematics' and culture-historical space-time systematics are then examined from a Darwinian culture-evolutionary perspective. Despite its explicitly evolutionist rhetoric, processual archaeology is found to be fundamentally non-evolutionary. However, elements from culture-historical space-time systematics can be used in the construction of a framework for archaeological systematics informed by Darwinian cultural-evolutionary theory, in a manner similar to the way species-level classification in biology is informed by biological evolutionary theory.

Human Agency, Biased Transmission, and the Cultural Evolution of Chiefly Authority

The dynamics of individual power-seeking and factional competition generate considerable leadership variability in uncentralized societies. A key issue is how the "sequential hierarchy" (in Johnson's terms) of achieved leadership is transformed into the "simultaneous hierarchy" of permanently institutionalized chiefly authority. An evolutionary perspective is needed, but one that takes into account the creative force of human agency as well as the structural constraints of cultural institutions, in line with Giddens's theory of structuration. It is suggested that key portions of Boyd and Richerson's dual inheritance theory of cultural evolution are consistent with a balanced consideration of agency and structure. Of particular relevance to chiefdom development is their concept of indirectly biased transmission. Archaeological cases from Mexico and Venezuela are examined in view of these considerations.

Knowledge, values, and the social order in Hayek's oeuvre

The epistemological basis of Hayek's moral and political philosophy is outlined. The Vienna of Austrian Economics, of Logical Empiricism, and its main critic Popper, form the background. Popper's methodology of research has been generalized to Evolutionary Epistemology. The concept of spontaneous order is central to Hayek's theory of cultural evolution. Attention is drawn to parallels with synergetics—how order emerges out of chaos. Property breeds order, but not the other way round. The market is logically and, hence, historically prior to any proto-state authority. Hayek's key questions are: How to use knowledge?, and How to elicit it? Existing dispersed (local) knowledge constitutes an epistemic resource, a sort of wealth. Knowledge is elicited in the market process, be it a commercial market or the “market of ideas.” The competitive market functions as a discovery and selection mechanism. The only viable way of co-locating relevant knowledge and decision rights is vesting decision responsibility in the owners of knowledge through the free, private market. The so-called “socialist calculation debate” is a spin-off of this insight. In the evolution of humankind, two rule systems have evolved: the moral system that stabilizes the face-to-face group and the system of abstract rules that makes possible social life in the large, anonymous society. Hayek's philosophy of the free society is based upon these theories, including his descriptive ethics. Apparently, in the long run, a free society cannot survive without a deontic moral system. This article argues that Hayek's philosophy is completed and enriched by Jasay's seminal work.

Coevolution: genes, culture, and human diversity

Charles Darwin's On the Origins of Species had two principal goals: to show that species had not been separately created and to show that natural selection had been the main force behind their proliferation and descent from common ancestors. In Coevolution, the author proposes a powerful new theory of cultural evolution--that is, of the descent with modification of the shared conceptual systems we call cultures--that is parallel in many ways to Darwin's theory of organic evolution. The author suggests that a process of cultural selection, or preservation by preference, driven chiefly by choice or imposition depending on the circumstances, has been the main but not exclusive force of cultural change. He shows that this process gives rise to five major patterns or in which cultural change is at odds with genetic change. Each of the five modes is discussed in some detail and its existence confirmed through one or more case studies chosen for their heuristic value, the robustness of their data, and their broader implications. But Coevolution predicts not simply the existence of the five modes of gene-culture relations; it also predicts their relative importance in the ongoing dynamics of cultural change in particular cases. The case studies themselves are lucid and innovative reexaminations of an array of oft-pondered anthropological topics--plural marriage, sickle-cell anemia, basic color terms, adult lactose absorption, incest taboos, headhunting, and cannibalism. In a general case, the author's goal is to demonstrate that an evolutionary analysis of both genes and culture has much to contribute to our understanding of human diversity, particularly behavioral diversity, and thus to the resolution of age-old questions about nature and nurture, genes and culture.

The Relevance of Recent German Historical Writing for Theories of Cultural Evolution

Of late there has been a return to the consideration of basic concepts such as temporal structures, process, crisis and revolution within the guild of historians in Germany. The basic premise of this paper is that any evolutionary theory of culture should take account not only of the proven methods of historical research but should also consider the explanatory paradigms enunciated by historians in their attempts to explain the myriads of events constituting the history of man.

Hayek's Theory of Cultural Evolution:An Evaluation in the Light of Vanberg's Critique

The application of evolutionary ideas to socioeconomic systems has been an increasingly prominent theme in the work of Friedrich Hayek, and the motif has become dominant in his recent book (Hayek, 1988). In an earlier issue of this journal, Viktor Vanberg (1986) raises two substantive criticisms of Friedrich Hayek' theory of cultural evolution that invoke some important questions concerning use of the evolutionary analogy in social science.

Introduction to F.a. Hayek's Theory of Cultural Evolution: Market and Cultural Processes as Spontaneous Orders

Introduction to F.a. Hayek's Theory of Cultural Evolution: Market and Cultural Processes as Spontaneous Orders

The Theory of Spontaneous Order and Cultural Evolution in the Social Theory of F.A. Hayek

The Theory of Spontaneous Order and Cultural Evolution in the Social Theory of F.A. Hayek

Individuals and the evolution of biological and cultural systems

Recently, it has been suggested that anthropologists could more effectively build scientific theories of cultural evolution by reference to biology rather than social science. In this way, the evolution of cultures might be more usefully viewed as an anolog to the evolution of species. In systematic biology, however, the nature of species continues to be the subject of a long-standing duality of thought. This duality is analogous to the longstanding conflict in anthropology over the nature of culture. We argue, by analogy to Michael Ghiselin’s work on species, that a culture is an individual, not a class, and that cultures, like other individual entities, evolve. This view is highly concordant with concepts of culture formulated in earlier decades of this century. It has also been the philosophical orientation of American archaeology for approximately the last 25 years. We conclude that both biology and anthropology have an equal potential of contributing to a general evolutionary theory.

Cultural Survivals Theory and Traditional Customs: An Examination of the Effects of Privileging on the Form and Perception of Some English Calendar Customs

AbstractCultural survivals theory is a development of the theory of cultural evolution proposed by E. B. Tylor. From his work on ‘primitive’ societies, Tyler put forward the theory that all cultures evolve in relatively fixed sequences through stages of savagery and barbarism to civilization. Residual expressive culture from early stages of the progression was proposed as ‘surviving’ into the civilized era in the form of traditional songs, games, narratives, and customs. The universality of cultural development, which is posited as underlying the survivals thesis, renders the expressive culture of one culture and period open to interpretation through data drawn from other social groups in different geographical areas and temporal periods, thus forming the basis of the comparative method in folkloristics, anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences.

Antropologia kulturowa i społeczna

The central concept of anthropology as a humanistic discipline is that of culture. The use of "culture", although operative since the Ancient era, derives mainly from social evolutionism and Kuiturgeschichte of the XIX century. The turning point in the development of cultural (social) anthropology was the work of an Englishman, E. B. lyior. Since his "Primitive Culture" (London 1871) it became possible to speak of culture in general and of particular cultures. It is difficult to settle upon a single definition of this complex term. A.L. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn analysed 168 definitions of culture. These appeared, as judged by general emphasis, to fall into six major groups: 1) enumeratively descriptive, 2) historical, 3) normative, 4) psychological, 5) structural, 6) genetic. The term "cultural anthropology" is more widely used in the United States whereas in Britain the term "social anthropology" is predominant. In Central Europe, particularly in German-speaking countries, the term "anthropology" has been reserved for biological aspects of man’s life. The study of cultural dimension of man’s existence appears under the label of ethnology (the theoretical and generalizing aspect) and ethnography (the descriptive aspect). This pattern has been followed, by and large, by Polish scientific community. However, there is too much overlap to warrant keeping apart "cultural" from "social" anthropology. The subject matter of the discipline is essentially two-dimensional, being always both "cultural" and "social". All human behaviour is influnced by cultural standards, and conversely culture itself is essentially social, in its transmission and distribution among the members of a society. Many anthropologists therefore either speak of social and cultural anthropology jointly or fuse them into a single term "sociocultural anthropology". In the growth of the discipline, one can discern several theoretical orientations. 1) Evolutionism - the application of the general theory of evolution to cultural phenomena as distinguished from biological or physical phenomena. Cultural evolution is conceived as a continuous and usually accumulative process, by which cultural phenomena undergo change, one form or stage succeeding another. 2) Diffusion ism - a term to refer to all the orderly processes which produce cultural similarities in various societies other than invention. The concept of the Kulturkreis, coined by the German culture-historical school, has proved to be most influential and representative for this school of thought. 3) Historicism - the emphasis on historically created diversities, leaving to psychology the exploration of common human nature. Every aspect of culture must be considered in the total context in which it occurred. F. Boas was a leading exponent of this way of viewing anthropology. 4) Culture and personality approach - the stress laid upon the interaction between culture and personality formation. Culture exists only in human personalities; motives, emotions and values are institutionalized in culture. 5) Functionalism - the explanation of anthropological facts by the part which they play within the integral system of culture and by the manner in which they are related to each other. Functionalism, propounded by B. Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, became the theoretical foundation of the British social anthropology with its emphasis on organization and social structure. 6) Structuralism - a thesis of fundamental constancy of structural, unconscious equipment of man (its main representative is C. Lévi-Strauss). In order to reach the structure of socio-cultural reality, a process of symbolization (converting facts into signs) is required. 7) Ncocvoluliotiism - an attempt to revive, refine and test the theory of cultural evolution, particularly with regard to its unilinear or multilinear character. Within this orientation the interdisciplinary discussion is being held on the interaction between biology and culture. Human evolution is considered the history of feedback relationship between organism and behaviour. Human behaviour can best be described as biocultural behaviour. Man is viewed more and more in a holistic way. The emergence of anthropology tout court, an integrated science of man, is a logical consequence of this stance.

Carl Sauer and Cultural Evolution

Abstract Time and change are basic concepts in Carl Sauer's cultural geography: how he used time and conceived change is the subject of this paper. I interpret his historical method in the context of reaction against turn-of-the-century theories of unilinear and providential cultural evolution in favor of cultural historical approaches. The roots of Sauer's anti-evolutionism are found in his early rejection of environmental determinism for an empiricist chorology of material culture traits and in his connection with contemporary anthropology. Anti-evolutionism, and an empiricist, chorological approach to geography are also characteristic of Sauer's mature work on culture change. A comparison of his geographical practice with evolutionary thinking suggests that his emphasis on material expressions of culture as objects of study encouraged genetic explanations of the products of culture change rather than theoretical explanations of evolutionary processes.