Societal Neo-Evolutionism

Discussion

Thomas Currie:

"In seeking to examine the long-term history of social change this endeavor is located squarely within the tradition of cultural evolution in anthropology and archaeology (also known as neo-evolutionism; Carneiro 2003). This approach argues that human societies have tended to increase in complexity over time, with societies going through broadly similar sequences of change. It should be noted that the intellectual lineage of this evolutionary approach can be traced back to Herbert Spencer rather than Charles Darwin (Currie and Mace, 2011). Social evolutionary theory has gone in and out of fashion over the years, and has received criticisms of varying degrees of validity. Morris’s aim is to construct a measure of social development, which he defines as “social groups’ abilities to master their physical and intellectual environments and get things done in the world” (p. 3). In seeking to boil down the evolution of human societies to a single measure, this approach follows most closely that of the anthropologist Leslie White. White proposed that the defining feature of human social evolution was the ability of societies to harness and utilize increasing amounts of energy over time (White, 1959). Therefore, the social development index used here includes a measure of energy capture as one of its contributing variables. Morris’s approach also owes a debt to researchers such as Raoul Naroll and Rober Carneiro who developed indices of social development using cross-cultural data. While noting their importance, Morris claims that his index improves on these earlier efforts. These are issues to which I will return later.

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A criticism often leveled at traditional social evolutionary theory is that it merely offers descriptions of the pattern of change, rather than saying anything much about the process by which this change has occurred (Shennan, 2008). In many ways, the same criticism can be made of the procedure Morris has followed. In fact, collapsing everything into a single measure gets rid of important information that could indeed be used to address questions of process. Crucially, although the data presented here clearly show that social development goes through the roof as a consequence of the industrial revolution, the approach taken does not allow us to assess competing explanations about why this occurred, or what role institutions or other aspects of culture played in this process (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012; Ferguson, 2012). In general, approaches to investigating cultural evolution which derive more directly from evolutionary biology and ecology, with their focus on developing formal statistical and mathematical models of social and cultural change, offer a broader perspective with which to address these questions (Mesoudi, 2011; Spencer and Redmond, 2001; Turchin, 2003). While sometimes seen as incompatible (Dunnell, 1980; Lyman and O'Brien, 1998), in previous work I have demonstrated how these Spencerian and Darwinian approaches can be reconciled (Currie and Mace, 2011). None of this is to say that the index developed here is without merit. It does indeed serve the intended purpose of clarifying the relative development of East and West over the long-term of human history. Morris does not conduct any statistical tests in this work but it is possible to see how such an index could be employed in further analyses that formally tested various hypotheses about human social evolution. This would be particularly valuable if it was extended to other regions of the world, too. Approaches that retain information about the individual traits and combine them with statistical analyses that reveal the relationships between different variables and the order in which they change would also be more powerful in addressing questions about social evolutionary processes "

(https://escholarship.org/content/qt1gm3v3cp/qt1gm3v3cp.pdf)