Encyclopedia
Sociocultural evolution is an umbrella term for theories of
cultural evolution and
social evolution, describing how
cultures and
societies have developed over time. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between
technologies, social structure, the values of a
society, and how and why they change with
time, they vary as to the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and social change.
Most 19th century and some 20th century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of
humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies are at different stages of social development. At present this thread is continued to some extent within the World System approach . Many of the more recent 20th-century approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea of directional change, or social progress. Most
archaeologists and cultural anthropologists work within the framework of modern theories of sociocultural evolution. Modern approaches to sociocultural evolution include neoevolutionism,
sociobiology, theory of modernization and theory of postindustrial society.
Overview
Virtually all
anthropologists and
sociologists assume that human beings have natural social tendencies and that particular human social behaviors have non-genetic causes and dynamics . Societies exist in complex social and biotic environments, and adapt themselves to these environments. It is thus inevitable that all societies change.
Specific theories of social or cultural evolution are usually meant to explain differences between coeval societies, by positing that different societies are at different stages of development. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between
technologies, social structure, or values of a
society, they vary as to the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and change.
Early sociocultural evolution theories—the theories of August Comte,
Herbert Spencer and
Lewis Henry Morgan—developed simultaneously but independently of
Charles Darwin's works and were popular from the late 19th century to the end of
World War I. These 19th-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a
primitive state and gradually become more
civilised over time, and equated the
culture and
technology of
Western civilisation with progress. Some forms of early sociocultural evolution theories have led to much criticised theories like
social Darwinism, and
scientific racism, used in the past 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. Most 20th-century approaches, such as multilineal evolution, however, focus on changes specific to individual societies. Moreover, they reject directional change . Most
archaeologists work within the framework of multilineal evolution. Other contemporary approaches to social change include neoevolutionism,
sociobiology,
theory of modernisation and theory of postindustrial society.
Classical social evolutionism
Development
The 14th century
Islamic scholar
Ibn Khaldun, considered by some to be the father of sociology, concluded that societies are living organisms that experience cyclic birth, growth, maturity, decline, and ultimately death due to universal causes several centuries before the
Western civilisation developed the science of sociology. Nonetheless, theories of social and cultural evolution were common in modern European thought. Prior to the 18th century, Europeans predominantly believed that societies on
Earth were in a state of decline. European society held up the world of
antiquity as a standard to aspire to, and
Ancient Greece and
Ancient Rome produced levels of technical accomplishment which Europeans of the
Middle Ages sought to emulate. At the same time,
Christianity taught that people lived in a debased world fundamentally inferior to the
Garden of Eden and
Heaven. During
The Age of Enlightenment, however, European self-confidence grew and the notion of progress became increasingly popular. It was during this period that what would later become known as "sociological and cultural evolution" would have its roots.
The Enlightenment thinkers often speculated that societies progressed through stages of increasing development and looked for the logic, order and the set of scientific truths that determined the course of
human history.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for example, argued that social development was an inevitable and determined process, similar to an acorn which has no choice but to become an oak tree. Likewise, it was assumed that societies start out primitive, perhaps in a
Hobbesian state of nature, and naturally progress toward something resembling industrial Europe.
While earlier authors such as
Michel de Montaigne discussed how societies change through time, it was truly the Scottish Enlightenment which proved key in the development of sociocultural evolution. After Scotland's
union with
England in 1707, several Scottish thinkers pondered what the relationship between progress and the 'decadence' brought about by increased trade with England and the affluence it produced. The result was a series of "conjectural histories". Authors such as
Adam Ferguson, John Millar, and
Adam Smith argued that all societies pass through a series of four stages: hunting and gathering, pastoralism and nomadism, agricultural, and finally a stage of commerce. These thinkers thus understood the changes Scotland was undergoing as a transition from an agricultural to a
mercantile society.
Philosophical concepts of progress developed as well during this period. In
France authors such as Claude Adrien Helvétius and other philosophes were influenced by this Scottish tradition. Later thinkers such as
Comte de Saint-Simon developed these ideas. August Comte in particular presented a coherent view of social progress and a new discipline to study it—
sociology. The founders of sociology spent decades attempting to define their new discipline. In the course of this effort they tried several highly divergent pathways, some suggested by methods and contents of other sciences, others invented outright by the imagination of the scholar.
These developments took place in a wider context. The first process was
colonialism. Although
imperial powers settled most differences of opinion with their colonial subjects with force, increased awareness of non-Western peoples raised new questions for European scholars about the nature of society and culture. Similarly, effective administration required some degree of understanding of other cultures. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution allowed Europeans to organise their new knowledge in a way that reflected and justified their increasing political and economic domination of others: colonised people were less evolved, colonising people were more evolved. When the 17th-century English philosopher
Thomas Hobbes described primeval man as living in conditions in which there are "no arts, no letters, no society" and his life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", he was very much proclaiming a popular conception of the "savage." Everything that was good and civilised resulted from the slow development out of this lowly state. Even rationalistic philosophers like
Voltaire implicitly assumed that enlightenment gradually resulted in the upward progress of humankind.
The second process was the
Industrial Revolution and the rise of
capitalism which allowed and promoted continual revolutions in the means of production. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution reflected a belief that the changes in Europe wrought by the Industrial Revolution and capitalism were obvious improvements. Industrialisation, combined with the intense political change brought about by the
French Revolution,
U.S. Constitution and Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, which were paving the way for the
dominance of democracy, forced European thinkers to reconsider some of their assumptions about how society was organised.
Eventually, in the 19th century three great classical theories of social and historical change were created: the sociocultural evolutionism, the social cycle theory and the
Marxist historical materialism theory. Those theories had one common factor: they all agreed that the history of humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path, most likely that of the social progress. Thus, each past event is not only chronologically, but causally tied to the present and future events. Those theories postulated that by recreating the sequence of those events, sociology could discover the laws of history.
Sociocultural evolutionism and the idea of progress
While sociocultural evolutionists agree that the evolution-like process leads to social progress, classical social evolutionists have developed many different theories, known as theories of unilineal evolution. Sociocultural evolutionism was the prevailing theory of early sociocultural anthropology and social commentary, and is associated with scholars like August Comte,
Edward Burnett Tylor,
Lewis Henry Morgan, Benjamin Kidd, L.T. Hobhouse and
Herbert Spencer. Sociocultural evolutionism represented an attempt to formalise social thinking along scientific lines, later influenced by the biological theory of
evolution. If organisms could develop over time according to discernable, deterministic laws, then it seemed reasonable that societies could as well. They developed analogies between human society and the biological organism and introduced into sociological theory such biological concepts as variation,
natural selection, and inheritance—evolutionary factors resulting in the progress of societies through stages of savagery and barbarism to civilisation, by virtue of the
survival of the fittest. Together with the idea of progress there grew the notion of fixed "stages" through which human societies progress, usually numbering three—savagery, barbarism, and civilisation—but sometimes many more. The
Marquis de Condorcet listed 10 stages, or "epochs", the final one having started with the French Revolution, which was destined, in his eyes, to usher in the rights of man and the perfection of the human race. Some writers also perceived in the growth stages of each individual a recapitulation of these stages of society. Strange customs were thus accounted for on the assumption that they were throwbacks to earlier useful practices. This also marked the beginning of
anthropology as a scientific discipline and a departure from traditional religious views of "primitive" cultures.
The term "Classical Social Evolutionism" is most closely associated with the 19th-century writings of Auguste Comte,
Herbert Spencer and
William Graham Sumner. In many ways Spencer's theory of "cosmic evolution" has much more in common with the works of
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and August Comte than with contemporary works of
Charles Darwin. Spencer also developed and published his theories several years earlier than Darwin. In regard to social institutions, however, there is a good case that Spencer's writings might be classified as 'Social Evolutionism'. Although he wrote that societies over time progressed, and that progress was accomplished through competition, he stressed that the individual is the unit of analysis that evolves, that evolution takes place through natural selection and that it affects social as well as biological phenomenon. Nonetheless, the publication of Darwin's works proved a boon to the proponents of sociocultural evolution. The world of social science took the ideas of biological evolution as an attractive solution to similar questions regarding the origins and development of social behaviour and the idea of a society as an evolving organism was a biological analogy that is taken up by many anthropologists and sociologists even today.
Both Spencer and Comte view the society as a kind of organism subject to the process of growth—from simplicity to complexity, from chaos to order, from generalisation to specialisation, from flexibility to organisation. They agreed that the process of societies growth can be divided into certain stages, have their beginning and eventual end, and that this growth is in fact social progress—each newer, more evolved society is better. Thus progressivism became one of the basic ideas underlying the theory of sociocultural evolutionism.
August Comte, known as father of sociology, formulated the law of three stages: human development progresses from the
theological stage, in which nature was mythically conceived and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from supernatural beings, through
metaphysical stage in which nature was conceived of as a result of obscure forces and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from them until the final positive stage in which all abstract and obscure forces are discarded, and natural phenomena are explained by their constant relationship. This progress is forced through the development of human mind, and increasing application of thought, reasoning and logic to the understanding of the world.
Herbert Spencer, who believed that society was evolving toward increasing freedom for individuals; and so held that government intervention ought to be minimal in social and political life, differentiated between two phases of development, focusing is on the type of internal regulation within societies. Thus he differentiated between
military and
industrial societies. The earlier, more primitive military society has a goal of conquest and defence, is centralised, economically self-sufficient, collectivistic, puts the good of a group over the good of an individual, uses compulsion, force and repression, rewards loyalty, obedience and discipline. The industrial society has a goal of production and
trade, is decentralised, interconnected with other societies via economic relations, achieves its goals through voluntary cooperation and individual self-restraint, treats the good of individual as the highest value, regulates the social life via voluntary relations, values initiative, independence and innovation.
Regardless of how scholars of Spencer interpret his relation to Darwin, Spencer proved to be an incredibly popular figure in the 1870s, particularly in the
United States. Authors such as Edward Youmans,
William Graham Sumner,
John Fiske, John W. Burgess,
Lester Frank Ward,
Lewis H. Morgan and other thinkers of the
gilded age all developed similar theories of social evolutionism as a result of their exposure to Spencer as well as Darwin.
Lewis H. Morgan, an
anthropologist whose ideas have had much impact on sociology, in his 1877 classic
Ancient Societies differentiated between three eras: savagery, barbarism and
civilisation, which are divided by technological inventions, like
fire, bow,
pottery in savage era,
domestication of animals,
agriculture,
metalworking in barbarian era and
alphabet and
writing in civilisation era. Thus Morgan introduced a link between the social progress and
technological progress. Morgan viewed the technological progress as a force behind the social progress, and any social change—in social institutions, organisations or ideologies have their beginning in the change of technology. Morgan's theories were popularised by
Friedrich Engels, who based his famous work
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State on it. For Engels and other
Marxists, this theory was important as it supported their conviction that materialistic factors—economical and technological—are decisive in shaping the fate of humanity.
Emile Durkheim, another of the "fathers" of sociology, has developed a similar, dichotomal view of social progress. His key concept was social solidarity, as he defined the social evolution in terms of progressing from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity. In mechanical solidarity, people are self-sufficient, there is little integration and thus there is the need for use of force and repression to keep society together. In organic solidarity, people are much more integrated and interdependent and specialisation and cooperation is extensive. Progress from mechanical to organic solidarity is based first on
population growth and increasing
population density, second on increasing "morality density" and thirdly, on the increasing specialisation in workplace. To Durkheim, the most important factor in the social progress is the division of labour.
Anthropologists Sir E.B. Tylor in England and
Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States worked with data from
indigenous people, whom they claimed represented earlier stages of cultural evolution that gave insight into the process and progression of evolution of culture. Morgan would later have a significant influence on
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels, who developed a theory of sociocultural evolution in which the internal contradictions in society created a series of escalating stages that ended in a socialist society . Tylor and Morgan elaborated the theory of unilinear evolution, specifying criteria for categorising cultures according to their standing within a fixed system of growth of humanity as a whole and examining the modes and mechanisms of this growth. Theirs was often a concern with culture in general, not with individual cultures.
Their analysis of cross-cultural data was based on three assumptions:
- contemporary societies may be classified and ranked as more "primitive" or more "civilised";
- There are a determinate number of stages between "primitive" and "civilised" ,
- All societies progress through these stages in the same sequence, but at different rates.
Theorists usually measured progression in terms of increasing social complexity , or an increase in intellectual, theological, and aesthetic sophistication. These 19th-century ethnologists used these principles primarily to explain differences in religious beliefs and kinship terminologies among various societies.
Lester Frank Ward developed Spencer's theory but unlike Spencer, who considered the evolution to be general process applicable to the entire world, physical and sociological, Ward differentiated sociological evolution from biological evolution. He stressed that humans create goals for themselves and strive to realise them, whereas there is no such intelligence and awareness guiding the non-human world, which develops more or less at random. He created a hierarchy of evolution processes. First, there is cosmogenesis, creation and evolution of the world. Then, after life develops, there is biogenesis. Development of humanity leads to anthropogenesis, which is influenced by the human mind. Finally, when
society develops, so does sociogenesis, which is the science of shaping the society to fit with various political, cultural and ideological goals.
Edward Burnett Tylor, pioneer of
anthropology, focused on the
evolution of culture worldwide, noting that culture is an important part of every society and that it is also subject to the process of evolution. He believed that societies were at different stages of cultural development and that the purpose of anthropology was to reconstruct the evolution of culture, from primitive beginnings to the modern state.
Ferdinand Tönnies describes the evolution as the development from informal society, where people have many liberties and there are few laws and obligations, to modern, formal rational society, dominated by traditions and laws and are restricted from acting as they wish. He also notes that there is a tendency of standardisation and unification, when all smaller societies are absorbed into the single, large, modern society. Thus Tönnies can be said to describe part of the process known today as the
globalisation. Tönnies was also one of the first sociologists to claim that the evolution of society is not necessarily going in the right direction, that the social progress is not perfect, and it can even be called a regress as the newer, more evolved societies are obtained only after paying a high cost, resulting in decreasing satisfaction of individuals making up that society. Tönnies' work became the foundation of neoevolutionism.
Although not usually counted as a sociocultural evolutionist,
Max Weber's theory of tripartite classification of authority can be viewed as an evolutionary theory as well. Weber distinguishes three ideal types of political leadership, domination and authority:
charismatic domination , traditional domination and legal domination . He also notes that legal domination is the most advanced, and that societies evolve from having mostly traditional and charismatic authorities to mostly rational and legal ones.
Critique and impact on modern theories
The early 20th century inaugurated a period of systematic critical examination, and rejection of the sweeping generalisations of the unilineal theories of sociocultural evolution. Cultural anthropologists such as
Franz Boas, and his students like
Ruth Benedict and
Margaret Mead, typically regarded as the leader of anthropology's rejection of classical social evolutionism, used sophisticated ethnography and more rigorous empirical methods to argue that Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan's theories were speculative and systematically misrepresented ethnographic data. Theories regarding "stages" of evolution were especially criticised as illusions. Additionally, they rejected the distinction between "primitive" and "civilised" , pointing out that so-called primitive contemporary societies have just as much history, and were just as evolved, as so-called civilised societies. They therefore argued that any attempt to use this theory to reconstruct the histories of non-literate peoples is entirely speculative and unscientific. They observed that the postulated progression, which typically ended with a stage of civilisation identical to that of modern Europe, is ethnocentric. They also pointed out that the theory assumes that societies are clearly bounded and distinct, when in fact cultural traits and forms often cross social boundaries and diffuse among many different societies . Boas introduced the culture history approach, which concentrated on fieldwork among native peoples to identify actual cultural and historical processes rather than speculative stages of growth. This "culture history" approach dominated American anthropology for the first half of the 20th century and so influenced anthropology elsewhere that high-level generalisation and "systems building" became far less common than in the past.
Later critics observed that this assumption of firmly bounded societies was proposed precisely at the time when European powers were colonising non-Western societies, and was thus self-serving. Many anthropologists and social theorists now consider unilineal cultural and social evolution a Western myth seldom based on solid empirical grounds. Critical theorists argue that notions of social evolution are simply justifications for power by the elites of society. Finally, the devastating World Wars that occurred between 1914 and 1945 crippled Europe's self-confidence. After millions of deaths, genocide, and the destruction of Europe's industrial infrastructure, the idea of progress seemed dubious at best.
Thus modern sociocultural evolutionism rejects most of classical social evolutionism due to various theoretical problems:
- The theory was deeply ethnocentric—it makes heavy value judgements on different societies; with Western civilisation seen as the most valuable.
- It assumed all cultures follow the same path or progression and have the same goals.
- It equated civilisation with material culture
- It equated evolution with progress or fitness is a phrase [i] which is a shorthand for a concept relating to competition f ...
, based on deep misunderstandings of evolutionary theory. - It is greatly contradicted by evidence. Many supposedly primitive societies are arguably more peaceful and equitable/democratic than many modern societies, and tend to be healthier with regard to diet and ecology.
Because social evolution was posited as a scientific theory, it was often used to support unjust and often
racist social practices—particularly
colonialism,
slavery, and the unequal economic conditions present within industrialised
Europe.
Social Darwinism is especially criticised, as it led to some philosophies used by the
Nazis.
Modern theories
When the critique of classical social evolutionism became widely accepted, modern anthropological and sociological approaches changed to reflect their responses to the critique of their predecessor. Modern theories are careful to avoid unsourced, ethnocentric speculation, comparisons, or value judgements; more or less regarding individual societies as existing within their own historical contexts. These conditions provided the context for new theories such as cultural relativism and multilineal evolution.
In 1941 anthropologist Robert Redfield wrote about a shift from 'folk society' to 'urban society'. By the 1940s cultural anthropologists such as
Leslie White and Julian Steward sought to revive an evolutionary model on a more scientific basis, and succeeded in establishing an approach known as the neoevolutionism. White rejected the opposition between "primitive" and "modern" societies but did argue that societies could be distinguished based on the amount of energy they harnessed, and that increased energy allowed for greater social differentiation . Steward on the other hand rejected the 19th-century notion of progress, and instead called attention to the Darwinian notion of "adaptation", arguing that all societies had to adapt to their environment in some way.
The anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service wrote a book,
Evolution and Culture, in which they attempted to synthesise White's and Steward's approaches. Other anthropologists, building on or responding to work by White and Steward, developed theories of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology. The most prominent examples are Peter Vayda and Roy Rappaport. By the late 1950s, students of Steward such as Eric Wolf and
Sidney Mintz turned away from cultural ecology to
Marxism, World Systems Theory, Dependency theory and
Marvin Harris's Cultural materialism.
Today most anthropologists continue to reject 19th-century notions of progress and the three original assumptions of unilineal evolution. Following Steward, they take seriously the relationship between a culture and its environment in attempts to explain different aspects of a culture. But most modern cultural anthropologists have adopted a general systems approach, examining cultures as emergent systems and argue that one must consider the whole social environment, which includes political and economic relations among cultures. There are still others who continue to reject the entirety of the evolutionary thinking and look instead at historical contingencies, contacts with other cultures, and the operation of cultural symbol systems. As a result, the simplistic notion of "cultural evolution" has grown less useful and given way to an entire series of more nuanced approaches to the relationship of culture and environment. In the area of development studies, authors such as
Amartya Sen have developed an understanding of "development" and 'human flourishing' that also question more simplistic notions of progress, while retaining much of their original inspiration.
Neoevolutionism
Neoevolutionism is the first theory of the series of modern multilineal evolution theories. It emerged in 1930s and extensively developed in the period following the
Second World War and was incorporated into both
anthropology and
sociology in the 1960s. It bases its theories on the empirical evidences from areas of
archaeology,
palaeontology and historiography and tries to eliminate any references to system of values, be it moral or cultural, instead trying to remain objective and simply descriptive.
While 19th-century evolutionism explained how culture develops by giving general principles of its evolutionary process, it was dismissed by the Historical Particularists as unscientific in the early 20th century. It was the neoevolutionary thinkers who brought back evolutionary thought and developed it to be acceptable to contemporary anthropology.
The neoevolutionism discards many ideas of classical social evolutionism, namely that of social progress, so dominant in previous sociology evolution-related theories. Then neoevolutionism discards the determinism argument and introduces probability, arguing that accidents and free will have much impact on the process of social evolution. It also supports the counterfactual history—asking "what if" and considering different possible path that social evolution may taken, and thus allows for the fact that various cultures may develop in different ways, some skipping entire stages others have passed through. The neoevolutionism stresses the importance of empirical evidence. While 19th-century evolutionism used value judgment and assumptions for interpreting data, neoevolutionism relied on measurable information for analysing the process of sociocultural evolution.
Leslie White, author of
The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome , attempted to create a theory explaining the entire history of humanity. The most important factor in his theory is
technology:
Social systems are determined by technological systems, wrote White in his book , echoing the earlier theory of
Lewis Henry Morgan. As measure of society advancement, he proposed the measure of a society's
energy consumption. He differentiates between five stages of human development. In first, people use energy of their own muscles. In second, they use energy of
domesticated animals. In third, they use the energy of plants . In fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas. In fifth, they harness the nuclear energy. White introduced a formulae, P=E*T, where E is a measure of energy consumed, and T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilising the energy. This theory is similar to Russian astronomer
Nikolai Kardashev's later theory of the
Kardashev scale.
Julian Steward, author of
Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution , created the theory of "multilinear" evolution which examined the way in which societies adapted to their environment. This approach was more nuanced than White's theory of "unilinear evolution." Steward on the other hand rejected the 19th-century notion of progress, and instead called attention to the Darwinian notion of "adaptation", arguing that all societies had to adapt to their environment in some way. He argued that different adaptations could be studied through the examination of the specific resources a society exploited, the technology the society relied on to exploit these resources, and the organisation of human labour. He further argued that different environments and technologies would require different kinds of adaptations, and that as the resource base or technology changed, so too would a culture. In other words, cultures do not change according to some inner logic, but rather in terms of a changing relationship with a changing environment. Cultures would therefore not pass through the same stages in the same order as they changed—rather, they would change in varying ways and directions. He called his theory "multilineal evolution". He questioned the possibility of creation of a social theory encompassing the entire evolution of humanity; however, he argued that anthropologists are not limited to description of specific existing cultures. He believed it is possible to create theories analysing typical common culture, representative of specific eras or regions. As the decisive factors determining the development of given culture he pointed to technology and economics, and noted there are secondary factors, like political system, ideologies and religion. All those factors push the evolution of given society in several directions at the same time; thus, this is the multilinearity of his theory of evolution.
Marshall Sahlins, author of
Evolution and Culture , divided the evolution of societies into 'general' and 'specific'. General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organisation and adaptiveness to environment. However, as the various cultures are not isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their qualities . This leads cultures to develop in different ways , as various elements are introduced to them in different combinations and on different stages of evolution.
Gerhard Lenski in his
Power and Prestige and
Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology he expands on the works of
Leslie White and
Lewis Henry Morgan. He views the
technological progress as the most basic factor in the evolution of societies and cultures. Unlike White, who defined technology as the ability to create and utilise
energy, Lenski focuses on information—its amount and uses. The more information and knowledge a given society has, the more advanced it is. He distinguished four stages of human development, based on the advances in the
history of communication. In the first stage, information is passed by
genes. In the second, when humans gain sentience, they can learn and pass information through by experience. In the third, the humans start using signs and develop logic. In the fourth, they can create
symbols, develop
language and
writing. Advancements in the technology of communication translates into advancements in the economic system and political system, distribution of goods, social inequality and other spheres of social life. He also differentiates societies based on their level of technology, communication and economy: hunters and gatherers, simple agricultural, advanced agricultural, industrial special .
Talcott Parsons, author of
Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives and
The System of Modern Societies divided evolution into four subprocesses: division, which creates functional subsystems from the main system; adaptation, where those systems evolve into more efficient versions; inclusion of elements previously excluded from the given systems; and generalisation of values, increasing the legitimisation of the ever more complex system. He shows those processes on 3 stages of evolution: primitive, archaic and modern. Archaic societies have the knowledge of
writing, while modern have the knowledge of
law. Parsons viewed the
Western civilisation as the pinnacle of modern societies, and out of all western cultures he declared
United States as the most dynamic developed.
Sociobiology
Sociobiology departs perhaps the furthest from the classical social evolutionism. It was introduced by Edward Wilson in his 1975 book
and followed his adaptation of biological theory
neo-Darwinism to the field of social sciences. Wilson pioneered the attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviours such as altruism,
aggression, and nurturance. In doing so, Wilson sparked one of the greatest scientific controversies of the 20th century.
Sociobiologists have argued for a dual inheritance theory, which posits that humans are products of both biological evolution and sociocultural evolution, each subject to their own selective mechanisms and forms of transmission . This approach focuses on both the mechanisms of cultural transmission and the selective pressures that influence cultural change. This version of sociocultural evolution shares little in common with the stadial evolutionary models of the early and mid-20th century. This approach has been embraced by many
psychologists and some cultural anthropologists, but very few physical anthropologists.
Neo-Darwinism, also known as the
modern evolutionary synthesis, generally denotes the combination of
Charles Darwin's theory of the
evolution of species by
natural selection,
Gregor Mendel 
