History
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, it was written: "By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the good over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the service over indirect, words of precise meaning the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere in disadvantage".
Cultural evolution, in the Darwinian sense of variation and selective inheritance, could be said to trace back to Darwin himself. He argued for both customs 1874 p. 239 and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language.
Darwin's ideas, along with those of such(a) as Comte and Quetelet, influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the unhurried nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hodgson and Knudsen single out David George Ritchie and Thorstein Veblen, crediting the former with anticipating both dual inheritance concepts and universal Darwinism. Despite the stereotypical conviction 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 number one World War 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 coming after or as a written of. the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics but were revived, particularly by Fisher, Haldane and Wright, who developed the number one population genetic models and as it became call the innovative 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 extend to a parallel between genetic evolution and the "blind variation and selective retention" of creative ideas; work that was developed into a full theory of "socio-cultural evolution" in 1965 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 non as an analogy "from organic evolution per se, but rather from a general framework for quasiteleological processes for which organic evolution is but one instance".
Others pursued more particular analogies notably the anthropologist F. T. Ted Cloak who argued in 1975 for the existence of learnt cultural instructions cultural corpuscles or i-culture resulting in the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object artefacts m-culture such(a) as wheels. The parametric quantity thereby submission as to whether cultural evolution requires neurological instructions retains to the shown day[].
In the 19th century cultural evolution was thought to adopt a unilineal sample whereby any cultures progressively setting over time. The underlying assumption was that Cultural Evolution itself led to the growth and coding 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 behind development away from this poor lowly state of being.
Under the theory of unilinear Cultural Evolution, all societies and cultures build 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 section where civilization develops hierarchies. The concept behind unilinear theory is that theaccumulation 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 family 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 examine that was to follow.
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 numerous 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.
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 remain 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.
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, sample of behaviour, etc., which spreads among the individuals of a population. The variation and selection in the copying process provides 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 clash with their biological host's genetic interests. Consequently, a "meme's eye" view might account forevolved cultural traits, such as suicide terrorism, that are successful at spreading meme of martyrdom, but fatal to their hosts and often other people.
"Evolutionary epistemology" can also refer to a theory that applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human cognition and argues that units of knowledge themselves, particularly scientific theories, evolve according to selection. In that case, a theory, like the germ theory of disease, becomes more or less credible according to reshape in the body of knowledge surrounding it.
One of the hallmarks of evolutionary epistemology is the notion that empirical testing alone does not justify the pragmatic value of scientific theories but rather that social and methodological processesthose theories with the closest "fit" to a given problem. The mere fact that a theory has survived the almost rigorous empirical tests usable does not, in the calculus of probability, predict its ability to represent future testing. Karl Popper used Newtonian physics as an example of a body of theories so thoroughly confirmed by testing as to be considered unassailable but were nevertheless overturned by Albert Einstein's bold insights into the nature of space-time. For the evolutionary epistemologist, all theories are true only provisionally, regardless of the degree of empirical testing they have survived.
Popper is considered by many to have given evolutionary epistemology its first comprehensive treatment, bur Donald T. Campbell had coined the phrase in 1974.