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).

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 theoriesthe 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

thumb|[[Auguste Comte (1798–1857)]]

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.<!-- but also shaped public, scholarly, and scientific discourse surrounding the rising individualism and "population thinking". Sociocultural evolutionism attempted to formalise social thinking along scientific lines, with the added influence from the biological theory of evolution. If organisms could develop over time according to discernible, deterministic laws, then it seemed reasonable that societies could as well. Human society was compared to a biological organism, and social-science equivalents of concepts like variation, natural selection, and inheritance were introduced as factors bearing on the progress of societies. The idea of "progress" led to that of a fixed "stages" through which human societies develop, usually numbering threesavagery, barbarism, and civilizationbut sometimes many more. At that time, anthropology was rising as a new scientific discipline, separating itself from the traditional views of "primitive" cultures that were usually based on religious views.

Already in the 18th century, some authors began to theorize on the evolution of humans. Montesquieu (1689–1755) writes about the relationship laws have with climate in particular and with the environment in general, specifically how different climatic conditions cause certain characteristics to become common among different people. He likens the development of laws, the presence or absence of civil liberty, differences in morality, and the whole development of different cultures to the climate of the respective people, concluding that the environment determines whether and how a people farms the land, which determines the way their society is built and the way their culture is constituted, or, in Montesquieu's words, the "general spirit of a nation". Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) presents a conjectural stage-model of human sociocultural evolution: first, humans lived solitarily and only grouped when mating or raising children. Later, men and women lived together and shared childcare, thus building families, followed by tribes as the result of inter-family interactions, which lived in "the happiest and the most lasting epoch" of human history, before the corruption of civil society degenerated the species - again in a developmental stage-process.

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), Charles Darwin's grandfather, was an enormously influential natural philosopher, physiologist and poet whose remarkably insightful ideas included a statement of transformism and the interconnectedness of all forms of life. His works, which are enormously wide-ranging, also advance a theory of cultural transformation: his famous The Temple of Nature is subtitled 'the Origin of Society'. This work, rather than proposing in detail a strict transformation of humanity between different stages, instead dwells on Erasmus Darwin's evolutionary mechanism: Erasmus Darwin does not explain each stage one-by-one, trusting his theory of universal organic development, as articulated in the Zoonomia, to illustrate cultural development as well. Erasmus Darwin therefore flits with abandon through his chronology: Priestman notes that it jumps from the emergence of life onto land, the development of opposable thumbs, and the origin of sexual reproduction directly to modern historical events. In his final books, Knight then grapples with the French revolution and wealthy decadence. Confronted with these twin issues, Knight's theory ascribes progress to conflict: 'partial discord lends its aid, to tie the complex knots of general harmony'. Thus, Knight conceptualised a theory of history founded in inevitable racial conflict, with Greece representing 'freedom' and Egypt 'cold inactive stupor'.

Other than Erasmus Darwin, the other pre-eminent scientific text with a theory of cultural transformation was advanced by Robert Chambers (1802–1871). Chambers was a Scottish evolutionary thinker and philosopher who, though he was then and now perceived as scientifically inadequate and criticized by prominent contemporaries, is important because he was so widely read. There are records of everyone from Queen Victoria to individual dockworkers enjoying his Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), including future generations of scientists. That The Vestiges did not establish itself as the scientific cutting edge is precisely the point, since the Vestigess influence means it was both the concept of evolution the Victorian public was most likely to experience, and the scientific presupposition laid earliest in the minds of bright young scholars.

Chambers propounded a 'principle of development' whereby everything evolved by the same mechanism and towards higher order structure or meaning. In his theory, life advanced through different 'classes', and within each class animals began at the lowest form and then advanced to more complex forms in the same class. In short, the progress of animals was like the development of a foetus. More than just an indistinct analogy, this parallel between embryology and species development had the status of a genuine causal mechanism in Chambers' theory: more advanced species developed longer as embryos into all their complexity.

thumb|[[Herbert Spencer]]

In the mid-19th century, a "revolution in ideas about the antiquity of the human species" took place "which paralleled, but was to some extent independent of, the Darwinian revolution in biology." Especially in geology, archaeology, and anthropology, scholars began to compare "primitive" cultures to past societies and "saw their level of technology as parallel with that of Stone Age cultures, and thus used these peoples as models for the early stages of human evolution". A developmental model of the evolution of the mind, of culture, and of society was the result, paralleling the evolution of the human species: "Modern savages [sic] became, in effect, living fossils left behind by the march of progress, relics of the Paleolithic still lingering on into the present." Classical social evolutionism is most closely associated with the 19th-century writings of Auguste Comte and of Herbert Spencer (coiner of the phrase "survival of the fittest").

Both Spencer and Comte view society as a kind of organism subject to the process of growthfrom simplicity to complexity, from chaos to order, from generalisation to specialisation, from flexibility to organisation.<!-- Moreover, he accepted that these conditions are "far less specific, far more modifiable, far more dependent on conditions that are variable": in short, that they are a messy biological process.

Though Spencer's theories transcended the label of 'stagism' and appreciate biological complexity, they still accepted a strongly fixed direction and morality to natural development. For Spencer, interference with the natural process of evolution was dangerous and had to be avoided at all costs. Such views were naturally coupled to the pressing political and economic questions of the time. Spencer clearly thought society's evolution brought about a racial hierarchy with Caucasians at the top and Africans at the bottom. Likewise, Spencer's evolutionary argument advanced a theory of statehood: "until spontaneously fulfilled a public want should not be fulfilled at all" sums up Spencer's notion about limited government and the free operation of market forces.

This is not to suggest that stagism was useless or entirely motivated by colonialism and racism. Stagist theories were first proposed in contexts where competing epistemologies were largely static views of the world. Hence "progress" had in some sense to be invented, conceptually: the idea that human society would move through stages was a triumphant invention. Moreover, stages were not always static entities. In Buffon's theories, for example, it was possible to regress between stages, and physiological changes were species' reversibly adapting to their environment rather than irreversibly transforming.

In addition to progressivism, economic analyses influenced classical social evolutionism. Adam Smith (1723–1790), who held a deeply evolutionary view of human society, identified the growth of freedom as the driving force in a process of stadial societal development. According to him, all societies pass successively through four stages: the earliest humans lived as hunter-gatherers, followed by pastoralists and nomads, after which society evolved to agriculturalists and ultimately reached the stage of commerce. With the strong emphasis on specialisation and the increased profits stemming from a division of labour, Smith's thinking also exerted some direct influence on Darwin himself. Both in Darwin's theory of the evolution of species and in Smith's accounts of political economy, competition between selfishly functioning units plays an important and even dominating rôle. Similarly occupied with economic concerns as Smith, Thomas R. Malthus (1766–1834) warned that given the strength of the sex drive inherent in all animals, Malthus argued, populations tend to grow geometrically, and population growth is only checked by the limitations of economic growth, which, if there would be growth at all, would quickly be outstripped by population growth, causing hunger, poverty, and misery. Far from being the consequences of economic structures or social orders, this "struggle for existence" is an inevitable natural law, so Malthus.

Auguste Comte, known as "the 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 a 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. Comte saw the science-valuing society as the highest, most developed type of human organization. followed Lamarck in his evolutionary thinking, in that he believed that humans do over time adapt to their surroundings. He differentiated between two phases of development as regards societies' internal regulation: The transition process from the military to industrial society is the outcome of steady evolutionary processes within the society.

thumb|[[Lewis H. Morgan]]

In his 1877 classic Ancient Societies, Lewis H. Morgan, an anthropologist whose ideas have had much impact on sociology, differentiated between three eras: savagery, barbarism and civilization, which are divided by technological inventions, like fire, bow, pottery in the savage era, domestication of animals, agriculture, metalworking in the barbarian era and alphabet and writing in the civilization era. Morgan's theories were popularized by Friedrich Engels, who based his famous work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State on them. He stressed that humans, driven by emotions, create goals for themselves and strive to realize them (most effectively with the modern scientific method) whereas there is no such intelligence and awareness guiding the non-human world. Ward did not think that evolutionary progress was inevitable and he feared the degeneration of societies and cultures, which he saw as very evident in the historical record. Ward also did not favor the radical reshaping of society as proposed by the supporters of the eugenics movement or by the followers of Karl Marx; like Comte, Ward believed that sociology was the most complex of the sciences and that true sociogenesis was impossible without considerable research and experimentation. Walter Bagehot (1872) applied selection and inheritance to the development of human political institutions. Samuel Alexander (1892) discusses the natural selection of moral principles in society. William James (1880) considered the 'natural selection' of ideas in learning and scientific development. In fact, he identified a 'remarkable parallel [...] between the facts of social evolution on the one hand, and of zoological evolution as expounded by Mr Darwin on the other'.

While these theories involved evolution applied to social questions, except for Darwin's group selection the theories reviewed above did not advance a precise understanding of how Darwin's mechanism extended and applied to cultures beyond a vague appeal to competition. Ritchie's Darwinism and Politics (1889) breaks this trend, holding that "language and social institutions make it possible to transmit experience

quite independently of the continuity of race." Hence Ritchie saw cultural evolution as a process that could operate independently of and on different scales to the evolution of species, and gave it precise underpinnings: he was 'extending its range', in his own words, to ideas, cultures and institutions.

Thorstein Veblen, around the same time, came to a similar insight: that humans evolve to their social environment, but their social environment in turn also evolves. Veblen's mechanism for human progress was the evolution of human intentionality: Veblen labelled men 'a creature of habit' and thought that habits were 'mentally digested' from those who influenced him.

Max Weber, disenchantment, and critical theory

thumb|right|Max Weber in 1917

Weber's major works in economic sociology and the sociology of religion dealt with the rationalization, secularisation, and so called "disenchantment" which he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity.

Modern theories

thumb|Composite image of the Earth at night in 2012, created by [[NASA and NOAA. The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated. Even more than 100 years after the invention of the electric light, most regions remain thinly populated or unlit.]]

In the 1920s and 1930s, Gordon Childe revolutionized the study of cultural evolutionism. He conducted a comprehensive pre-history account that provided scholars with evidence for African and Asian cultural transmission into Europe. He combated scientific racism by finding the tools and artifacts of the indigenous people from Africa and Asia and showed how they influenced the technology of European culture. Evidence from his excavations countered the idea of Aryan supremacy and superiority. Adopting "Kosinna's basic concept of the archaeological culture and his identification of such cultures as the remains of prehistoric peoples" and combining it with the detailed chronologies of European prehistory developed by Gustaf Oscar Montelius, Childe argued that each society needed to be delineated individually on the basis of constituent artefacts which were indicative of their practical and social function.

The anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service prepared an edited volume, Evolution and Culture, in which they attempted to synthesise White's and Steward's approaches.

Neoevolutionism

Neoevolutionism was the first in a series of modern multilineal evolution theories. It emerged in the 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 empirical evidence from areas of archaeology, palaeontology, and historiography and tries to eliminate any references to systems of values, be it moral or cultural, instead trying to remain objective and simply descriptive. echoing the earlier theory of Lewis Henry Morgan. He proposes a society's energy consumption as a measure of its advancement. Foucault argues these complex processes are interrelated, and difficult to study for a reason so those 'truths' cannot be toppled or disrupted. For Foucault, the many modern concepts and practices that attempt to uncover "the truth" about human beings (either psychologically, sexually, religiously or spiritually) actually create the very types of people they purport to discover. Requiring trained "specialists" and knowledge codes and know how, rigorous pursuit is "put off" or delayed which makes any kind of study not only a 'taboo' subject but deliberately ignored. He cites the concept of 'truth' within many human cultures and the ever flowing dynamics between truth, power, and knowledge as a resultant complex dynamics (Foucault uses the term regimes of truth) and how they flow with ease like water which make the concept of 'truth' impervious to any further rational investigation. Some of the West's most powerful social institutions are powerful for a reason, not because they exhibit powerful structures which inhibit investigation or it is illegal to investigate their historical foundation. It is the very notion of "legitimacy" Foucault cites as examples of "truth" which function as a "Foundationalism" claims to historical accuracy. Foucault argues, systems such as medicine, prisons, and religion, as well as groundbreaking works on more abstract theoretical issues of power are suspended or buried into oblivion. He cites as further examples the 'Scientific study' of population biology and population genetics as both examples of this kind of "Biopower" over the vast majority of the human population giving the new founded political population their 'politics' or polity. With the advent of biology and genetics teamed together as new scientific innovations notions of study of knowledge regarding truth belong to the realm of experts who will never divulge their secrets openly, while the bulk of the population do not know their own biology or genetics this is done for them by the experts. This functions as a truth ignorance mechanism: "where the "subjugated knowledge's", as those that have been both written out of history and submerged in it in a masked form produces what we now know as truth. He calls them "Knowledge's from below" and a "historical knowledge of struggles". Genealogy, Foucault suggests, is a way of getting at these knowledge's and struggles; "they are about the insurrection of knowledge's." Foucault tries to show with the added dimension of "Milieu" (derived from Newtonian mechanics) how this Milieu from the 17th century with the development of the biological and physical sciences managed to be interwoven into the political, social and biological relationship of men with the arrival of the concept Work placed upon the industrial population. Foucault uses the term Umwelt, borrowed from Jakob von Uexküll, meaning environment within. Technology, production, cartography the production of nation states and government making the efficiency of the body politic, law, heredity and consanguinegeniune. As symbolic symbol agents of power making the mass population having to sacrifice itself all in the name of the newly formed voting franchise we now call Democracy. However, this was all turned on its head (when the Medieval rulers were thrown out and replaced by a more exact apparatus now called the state) when the human sciences suddenly discovered: "The set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became an object of a political strategy and took on board the fundamental facts that humans were now a biological species."

Sociobiology

Sociobiology departs perhaps the furthest from classical social evolutionism. to calls for a radical restructuring of the respective disciplines on an evolutionary basis.

The current theory of evolution, the modern evolutionary synthesis (or neo-darwinism), explains that evolution of species occurs through a combination of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection and Gregor Mendel's theory of genetics as the basis for biological inheritance and mathematical population genetics. this has led even Wilson himself to revisit his claims and state his opposition to some elements of modern sociobiology.

Dual inheritance theory

Since the rise of evolutionary psychology, another school of thought, Dual Inheritance Theory, has emerged in the past 25 years that applies the mathematical standards of Population genetics to modeling the adaptive and selective principles of culture. This school of thought was pioneered by Robert Boyd at UCLA and Peter Richerson at UC Davis and expanded by William Wimsatt, among others. Boyd and Richerson's book, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985), was a highly mathematical description of cultural change, later published in a more accessible form in Not by Genes Alone (2004). In Boyd and Richerson's view, cultural evolution, operating on socially learned information, exists on a separate but co-evolutionary track from genetic evolution, and while the two are related, cultural evolution is more dynamic, rapid, and influential on human society than genetic evolution:

Dual Inheritance Theory has the benefit of providing unifying territory for a "nature and nurture" paradigm and accounts for more accurate phenomenon in evolutionary theory applied to culture, such as randomness effects (drift), concentration dependency, "fidelity" of evolving information systems, and lateral transmission through communication.

Theory of modernization

Theories of modernization are closely related to the dependency theory and development theory. Modernization Theories combine the previous theories of sociocultural evolution with practical experiences and empirical research, especially those from the era of decolonization. The theory states that:

  • Western countries are the most developed, and the rest of the world (mostly former colonies) is in the earlier stages of development, and will eventually reach the same level as the Western world. in this sense it can be argued that the carbon-based biosphere has generated a system (human society) capable of creating technology that will result in a comparable evolutionary

transition. "Digital information has reached a similar magnitude to information in the biosphere. It increases exponentially, exhibits high-fidelity replication, evolves through differential fitness, is expressed through artificial intelligence (AI), and has facility for virtually limitless recombination. Like previous evolutionary transitions, the potential symbiosis between biological and digital information will reach a critical point where these codes could compete via natural

selection. Alternatively, this fusion could create a higher-level superorganism employing a low-conflict division of labor in performing informational tasks...humans already embrace fusions of biology and technology. We spend most of our waking time communicating through digitally mediated channels, ...most transactions on the stock market are executed by automated trading algorithms, and our electric grids are in the hands of artificial intelligence. With one in three marriages in America beginning online, digital algorithms are also taking a role in human pair bonding and reproduction".

The role of war in the development of states and societies

Particularly since the end of the Cold War, there has been a growing number of scholars in the social sciences and humanities who came to complement the more presentist neo-evolutionary research with studies into the more distant past and its human inhabitants. A key element in many of these analyses and theories is warfare, which Robert L. Carneiro called the "prime mover in the origin of the state". He theorizes that given the limited availability of natural resources, societies will compete against each other, with the losing group either moving out of the area now dominated by the victorious one, or, if the area is circumscribed by an ocean or a mountain range and re-settlement is thus impossible, will be either subjugated or killed. Thus, societies become larger and larger, but, facing the constant threat of extinction or assimilation, they were also forced to become more complex in their internal organisation both in order to remain competitive as well as to administer a growing territory and a larger population.

Carneiro's ideas have inspired great number of subsequent research into the role of war in the process of political, social, or cultural evolution. An example of this is Ian Morris who argues that given the right geographic conditions, war not only drove much of human culture by integrating societies and increasing material well-being, but paradoxically also made the world much less violent. Large-scale states, says Morris, evolved because only they provided enough stability both internally and externally to survive the constant conflicts which characterise the early history of smaller states, and the possibility of war will continue to force humans to invent and evolve. War drove human societies to adapt in a step-wise process, and each development in military technology either requires or leads to comparable developments in politics and society.

Many of the underlying assumptions of Morris's thinking can be traced back in some form or another not only to Carneiro but also to Jared Diamond, and particularly his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond, who explicitly opposes racist evolutionary tales, argues that the ultimate explanation of why different human development on different continents is the presence or absence of domesticable plants and animals as well as the fact that the east–west orientation of Eurasia made migration within similar climates much easier than the south–north orientation of Africa and the Americas. Nevertheless, he also stresses the importance of conflict and warfare as a proximate explanation for how Europeans managed to conquer much of the world, given how societies who fail to innovate will "tend to be eliminated by competing societies".

Similarly, Charles Tilly argues that what drove the political, social, and technological change which, after centuries of great variation with regard to states, lead to the European states ultimately all converging on the national state was coercion and warfare: "War wove the European network of national states, and preparation for war created the internal structures of states within it." He describes how war became more expensive and complex due to the introduction of gunpowder and large armies and thus required significantly large states in order to provide the capital and manpower to sustain these, which at the same time were forced to develop new means of extraction and administration.

However, Norman Yoffee has criticised such theorists who, based on general evolutionary frameworks, came to formulate theories of the origins of states and their evolution. He claimed that in no small part due to the prominence of neoevolutionary explanations which group different societies into groups in order to compare them and their progress both to themselves and to modern ethnographic examples, while focusing mostly on political systems and a despotic élite who held together a territorial state by force, "much of what has been said of the earliest states, both in the professional literature as well as in popular writings, is not only factually wrong but also is implausible in the logic of social evolutionary theory".

Neoevolutionism

Neoevolutionism is a social theory attempting to explain the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution while discarding some dogmas of the previous theories of social evolutionism. Neoevolutionism is concerned with long-term, evolutionary social change and with the regular patterns of development that may be seen in unrelated, widely separated cultures.

See also

  • Accelerating change
  • Biocultural evolution
  • Clash of Civilizations
  • Critical juncture theory
  • Cultural diversity
  • Cultural evolution
  • Cultural materialism
  • Cultural neuroscience
  • Cultural selection theory
  • Diffusion of innovations
  • Dual inheritance theory
  • Economic determinism
  • Edward Burnett Tylor
  • Evolutionary anthropology
  • Environmental racism
  • Extended order
  • Franz Boas
  • Futures studies
  • Historicism
  • Institutional memory
  • Julian Steward
  • Leslie White
  • Lewis Henry Morgan
  • Memetics
  • Moral progress
  • Neoevolutionism
  • Neuroculture
  • Origin of language
  • Origin of speech
  • Origins of society
  • Population dynamics
  • Punctuated equilibrium
  • Rationalization (sociology)
  • Raciolinguistics
  • Reformism
  • Social Darwinism
  • Social cycle theory
  • Social dynamics
  • Social implications of the theory of evolution
  • Societal collapse
  • Sociocultural system
  • Social progress
  • Symbolic culture
  • Technological evolution

References

Cited sources

  • Sztompka, Piotr (2002). Socjologia. Znak. .

Bibliography

  • The Philosophy of Positivism
  • Robert Carneiro, Evolutionism in Cultural Anthropology: A Critical History. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 2003.
  • Jared Diamond, The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?, Penguin Books, 2012 ().
  • Evans-Pritchard, Sir Edward, A History of Anthropological Thought, 1981, Basic Books, Inc., New York.
  • Graber, Robert B., A Scientific Model of Social and Cultural Evolution, 1995, Thomas Jefferson University Press, Kirksville, MO.
  • Harris, Marvin, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture, 1968, Thomas Y. Crowell, New York.
  • Hatch, Elvin, Theories of Man and Culture, 1973, Columbia University Press, New York.
  • Hays, H. R., From Ape to Angel: An Informal History of Social Anthropology, 1965, Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
  • Johnson, Allen W. and Earle, Timothy, The Evolution of Human Societies: From Foraging Group to Agrarian State, 1987, Stanford University Press.
  • Kaplan, David and Manners, Robert, Culture Theory, 1972, Waveland Press, Inc., Prospect Heights, Illinois.
  • Kuklick, Henrika, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945, 1991, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  • McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009, Yale University Press, US and London.
  • Mesoudi, A. (2007). Using the methods of experimental social psychology to study cultural evolution. Journal of Social, Evolutionary & Cultural Psychology, 1(2), 35–58. Full text
  • Mesoudi, A. Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences, 2011, University of Chicago Press,
  • Morgan, John Henry, In the Beginning: The Paleolithic Origins of Religious Consciousness 2007 Cloverdale Books, South Bend.
  • Raoul Naroll and William T. Divale. 1976. Natural Selection in Cultural Evolution: Warfare versus Peaceful Diffusion. American Ethnologist 3: 97–128.
  • Segal, Daniel (2000) Western Civ" and the Staging of History in American Higher Education The American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 3 (Jun., 2000), pp.&nbsp;770–805
  • Seymour-Smith, Charlotte, Macmillan Dictionary of Anthropology, 1986, Macmillan, New York.
  • Stocking Jr., George W., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, 1968, The Free Press, New York.
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  • Trigger, Bruce, Sociocultural Evolution: Calculation and Contingency (New Perspectives on the Past), Blackwell Publishers, 1998,
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  • Ovcharov D. A. (2024), The problem of the social and natural in man in foreign philosophical thought of the second half of the XX – early XXI centuries: historical and philosophical analytical review, Bulletin of Vyatka State University, No. 2 (152) (2024), pp.&nbsp;74-80, .

Readings from an evolutionary anthropological perspective

  • Two special issues on the evolution of culture:
  • Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews Volume 12, Issue 2, Pages 57–108 (April 2003)
  • The evolution of culture: New perspectives and evidence (p 57–60) Charles H. Janson, Eric A. Smith
  • Making space for traditions (p 61–70) Dorothy Fragaszy
  • Traditions in monkeys (p 71–81) Susan Perry, Joseph H. Manson
  • Is culture a golden barrier between human and chimpanzee? (p 82–91) Christophe Boesch
  • Cultural panthropology (p 92–105) Andrew Whiten, Victoria Horner, Sarah Marshall-Pescini
  • The fossil record – Human and nonhuman (p 106–108) Eric Delson
  • Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews Volume 12, Issue 3, Pages 109–159 (2003)
  • On stony ground: Lithic technology, human evolution, and the emergence of culture (p 109–122) Robert Foley, Marta Mirazón Lahr
  • The evolution of cultural evolution (p 123–135) Joseph Henrich, Richard McElreath
  • The adaptive nature of culture (p 136–149) Michael S. Alvard
  • Do animals have culture? (p 150–159) Kevin N. Laland, William Hoppitt
  • Sociocultural evolution on Principia Cybernetica Web
  • Classical Sociological Theory: Comte and Spencer
  • Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends