Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or social evolution are theories of cultural evolution that describe how societies and culture change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure that is qualitatively different from the ancestral form". Evolutionary sociology and biosociology are subfields of sociology. Evolutionary sociology refers to scholarship examining the interaction between human evolved traits and predispositions with social and material environments. Biosociology refers to scholarship examining the interaction between biomarkers (genes, hormones, polygenic scores, etc.) and social and material environments. This distinction roughly follows the classical distinction between “ultimate” and “proximate” causes. Ultimate or evolutionary causation focuses on the reasons a trait evolved and its adaptive functionality, and the role of evolved traits in social behavior is the focus of evolutionary sociology. Biosociology, by contrast, has a proximate focus, emphasizing mechanisms driving behaviors via hormonal, (epi-)genetic, neural, or other physiological pathways. 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,and modernization theory, on one hand, and particularist approaches, on the other.
Introduction 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. 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, 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".
Stadial theory
Eventually, in the 19th century three major classical theories of social and historical change emerged:
sociocultural evolutionism the social cycle theory the Marxist theory of historical materialism. These theories had a common factor: they all agreed that the history of humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path, most likely that of social progress. Thus, each past event is not only chronologically, but causally tied to present and future events. The theories postulated that by recreating the sequence of those events, sociology could discover the "laws" of history.
Sociocultural evolutionism and the idea of progress
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
