Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as the "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. This theoretical framework uses concepts like cultural variants, transmission mechanisms, and selective pressures to model how ideas, behaviors, and technologies spread and change over time, enabling rapid adaptation beyond purely genetic means.
Anthropologists originally developed the idea of cultural evolution, historically also known as sociocultural evolution, in the 19th century, stemming from Charles Darwin's research on evolution. 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, theorists believed that social change resulted from biological adaptations. However, anthropologists now commonly accept that social changes arise from a combination of social, environmental, and biological influences, as viewed from a nature vs nurture framework.
Joseph Henrich credits cultural evolution with vast and sweeping influence: For over a million years, the products of cumulative cultural evolution our complex technologies, languages, and institutions have driven our genetic evolution, shaping not only our digestive systems, teeth, feet, and shoulders but also our brains and psychology.
There have been a number of different approaches to the study of cultural evolution, including dual inheritance theory, sociocultural evolution, memetics, 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. There has been a convergence of the cluster of related theories towards seeing cultural evolution as a unified discipline in its own right. The evolutionary origins of human cultural evolution remain debated, including when cumulative forms of culture first emerged in the hominin lineage and how early archaeological evidence should be interpreted. The evolution of the human capacity for cultural evolution is therefore a distinct research question that can be investigated through archaeology together with comparative approaches to humans and other primates.
History
Aristotle thought that development of cultural form (such as poetry) stops when it reaches its maturity. James Gleick quotes a 1873 essay in Harper's New Monthly Magazine: "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."The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, 2012, p. 174
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. Darwin argued for both customs (1874 p. 239) and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language.Price, I. (2012b) Organizational Ecologies and Declared Realities, In K. Alexander and I. Price (eds.) Managing Organizational Ecologies: Space, Management and Organization. New York, Routledge, 11-22.
Darwin's ideas, along with those of such as Comte (1798-1857) and Quetelet (1796-1874), influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Hodgson and KnudsenHodgson, G.M. and Knudsen, T. (2010). Darwin's Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. single out David George Ritchie (1853-1903) and Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), 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 the period of World War I (1914 to 1918) 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 figures such as Fisher, Haldane, and Wright revived them, developing 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 developed into a full theory of "socio-cultural evolution" in 1965Campbell, 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 1975Cloak, F. T. (1975). "Is a Cultural Ethology Possible?". Human Ecology 3(3) 161–182. for the existence of learnt cultural instructions (cultural corpuscles or i-culture) resulting in material artefacts (m-culture) such as wheels.Cloak, F. T. (1968). "Cultural Darwinism: Natural selection of the spoked wheel" 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 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. 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 and Western Europe. 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", 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