Evolutionism
Description
Ian Morris:
"Evolutionists are theorists
- who see some conceptual continuity between human history and biological evolution;
- who consider sociocultural evolution to be governed by identifiable mechanisms functioning somewhat like natural selection;
- who see these mechanisms as involving adaptation to the environment;
- who believe that the mechanisms operate on all societies regardless of time and space; and — usually, but not always —
- who recognize a series of overlapping but largely sequential stages of social/cultural evolution, from egalitarian foraging bands through hierarchical agricultural empires and pastoral tribes, to modern fossil-fuel-based nation-states "
(https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9j45z2s3)
More information
"The literature is enormous; I lean particularly on Boyd and Richerson 2005 and Mesoudi 2011, plus Trigger’s [1998] account of the field’s intellectual history:
- Boyd, Robert and Peter Richerson. 2005. Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Mesoudi, Alex.2011. Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture & Synthesize the Social Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Trigger, Bruce.1998. Sociocultural Evolution. Oxford: Blackwell