Historical Development of Evolutionary Thought

In anthropology, as in any discipline, there is a continual ebb and flow of ideas. One theoretical orientation will arise and may grow in popularity until another is proposed in opposition to it. Often, one orientation will capitalize on those aspects of a problem that a previous orientation ignored or played down. Basically, the earliest anthropological concerns were with the nature of society: how humans came to associate with each other, and how and why societies changed through time.(Bernard). Among other theories evolutionism was the one which gives explanation over the issue of how society and culture changed through time. But Ideas about evolution took a long time to take hold because Throughout the Middle Ages, one predominant feature of the European worldview was that all aspects of nature, including all forms of life and their relationships to one another, never changed. it was generally accepted that all life on earth had been created by God exactly as it existed in the present, and this belief (that life-forms couldnt change) came to be known as fixity of species. To question the assumptions of fixity, especially publicly, was seen as a challenge to Gods perfection and could be considered heresy, a crime punishable by a nasty and potentially fiery death. The plan of the entire universe was seen as Gods design. In whats called the argument from design,

For Europeans, the discovery of the New World and circumnavigation of the globe in the fifteenth century (as a result of scientific revolution) overturned some very basic ideas, as Europeans began to explore the New World. These advances permitted investigations of natural phenomena and opened up entire new worlds for discoveries that had never before been imagined. For the first time, they were in frequent contact with people from societies radically different from their own. This exposure raised a host of philosophical problems. Were these other people human in the same way that Europeans were? Did their societies function according to brute natural law, or were they moral beings possessed of a free will? How were social differences to be explained? The explanations for social difference at that time were degeneration. From the Renaissance until the eighteenth century, the concept of degenerationism provided Europeans with a biblically based explanation of cultural diversity. In this view, prior to the
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destruction of the Tower of Babel, all people belonged to a single civilization. When God destroyed the Tower, creating differences in language and dispersing the people, however, some degenerated, losing their civilization and eventually becoming savages. Much of the European experience seemed to confirm degenerationism. For example, the recovery of texts and artifacts from ancient Greek and Roman civilizations seemed to show that these were far more advanced than those of later date. But degeneration theory no longer taken for granted to explain socio-cultural and biological diversity because Explorers' accounts of the flora and fauna of new lands challenged the biblical view of life, which had been based largely on the book of Genesis and the story of the flood. Naturalists were confronted with distributions and variations in plants and animals that could not be explained in biblical terms. Scholars also struggled to explain evidence of human antiquity that did not correspond to biblical chronologies. This evidence became more widely available in the early nineteenth century as large-scale, nationwide engineering projects, such as the construction of canal and railroad systems, exposed geological strata, fossils, and human artifacts to the study of naturalists and geologists. Scientists were confronted with questions such as the age of the earth and human creation. Now scholars began to shift their thought in the way that natural phenomena should be explained in natural laws. For example A French naturalist, Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon (17071788), recognized the dynamic relationship between the external environment and living forms. In his Natural History, first published in 1749, he emphasized that species could change. Buffon believed that when groups of organisms migrated to new areas, they gradually altered as a result of adapting to a somewhat different environment. Although Buffon rejected the idea that one species could give rise to another, his recognition of the external environment as an agent of change in species was extremely important because it gives room for theory of evolution.

Erasmus Darwin was also in his most famous work, he expressed his views that life had originated in the seas and that all species had descended from a common ancestor.

Even though Buffon and Erasmus Darwin believed that species could change, neither tried to explain how this could happen. The first person to do this was a French naturalist named Jean
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Baptiste Lamarck (17441829) who suggested a dynamic relationship between species and the environment such that if the external environment changed, an animals activity patterns would also change to accommodate the new circumstances. This would result in the decreased or increased use of certain body parts; consequently, those body parts would be modified. According to Lamarck, those parts that werent used would disappear over time. .

And finally it was Charles Darwin who briefly realized that Species were mutable (changeable), not fixed; and they evolved from other species through the mechanism of natural selection. As Darwins ideas became well known, their impact in the social sciences has been profound. Eighteenth and 19th -century thinkers accepted the idea of the progress of humankind within the framework of biological immutability; it was in the late nineteenth century that modern notions of social evolution became associated with ideas like mutual struggle or survival of the fittest.

Eventually, in the 19th century three major classical theories of social and historical change were created: socio-cultural evolutionism, the social cycle theory, and Marxist theory of
historical materialism. Those theories had a common factor: they all agreed that the history of

humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path, most likely that of 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.

Social Evolutionism/Social Darwinism Essentially, there are just four broad strands of social evolutionist thinking in anthropology: unilinear(classical social evolutionism), universal, and multilinear evolutionism, plus neoDarwinism. The first three have been gradualist approaches, and their labels come from Julian Steward (1955), a practitioner of multilinear evolutionism. Neo-Darwinism comes in different guises, from 1970s sociobiology and its aftermath to more recent approaches to the origin of symbolic culture. Except the first the remaining social evolutionism by any means considered as
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neo evolutionism. Therefore since neo evolutionism will be addressed in detail in the coming chapter, we intentionally give emphasis on unilinear(classical) social evolutionism.

Unilinear(classical) social evolutionism

Classical Socio cultural evolutionism was the prevailing theory of early sociocultural anthropology and social commentary, and is associated with scholars like Auguste Comte, Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer. Socio-cultural evolutionism attempted to formalize 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 resulting in the progress of societies. In the early years of anthropology, the prevailing view of anthropologists and other scholars was that culture generally develops (or evolves) in a uniform and progressive manner. They believed that, rather than deteriorating from a previously civilized condition; societies had started out primitive but were progressing toward a more advanced state. The Evolutionists, building from Darwins theory of evolution and natural selection, sought to track the development of culture through time. Just as species were thought to evolve into increasing complexity, so too were cultures thought to progress from a simple to complex states. It was thought that most societies pass through the same series of stages to arrive, ultimately, at a common end. Change was thought to originate from within the culture, so development was thought to be internally determined. The unilineal evolutionary perspective of the late nineteenth century revolves around several related themes. First, it was generally supposed that all societies evolved through the same stages and were progressing toward civilization. Victorian society represented civilization in its highest currently extant form but would be surpassed by future societies. Second, the whole perspective was rooted in the comparative method. In the nineteenth century the term comparative method referred to the belief that contemporary "primitive" cultures were like "living fossils," similar to
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early stages of current advanced cultures. As such, they were clues to cultural evolutionary development. One could study the evolutionary history of Western society by examining contemporary primitive societies. The validity of the comparative method rested on an acceptance of the concept of psychic unity. Simple and complex societies were comparable because human minds were believed to develop along the same lines. If the human mind worked the same way in all cultures, then it was assumed that unrelated societies would develop in a parallel fashion. In general to account for cultural variation early evolutionists postulated that different contemporary societies were at different stages of evolution. According to this view, the simpler peoples of the day had not yet reached higher stages. And to account for cultural similarities early evolutionist believed there was a kind of psychic unity among all peoples that explained parallel evolutionary sequences in different cultural traditions. In other words, because of the basic similarities common to all peoples, different societies often find the same solutions to the same problems independently.

Leading proponents of Evolutionary Theory Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)

Spencer was interested in evolution as a general phenomenon, and he applied his evolutionary approach to many fields of study. Garbarino (1977:21) calls him a "philosopher of universal evolution" because Spencer considered evolution to be one of the fundamental natural processes in the universe. His ideas had enormous impact in Britain and the United States, not only on anthropology and sociology but on literature, politics, and popular culture as well (Carneiro 1967). Spencer believed that evolution was progressive and that evolutionary change was from simple to more complex states. He argued that evolutionary progress occurred because life was a struggle for survival in which only those with superior skills and traits succeeded. Spencer claims that societies were not supernaturally manufactured but evolved through a natural process of growth, which he illustrates with examples from the social changes in English society caused by industrialization. For Spencer, social evolution was driven by competition among people, through which the best suited to survive were selected. Spencer believed that the end
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result of social evolution would be the elimination of social problems and the perfection of society. Following this line of thought, he coined the phrase "survival of the fittest." His ideas, popularized largely by others as social darwinism, were often used to justify the American and English class systems and colonial political system. Believing that social evolution followed natural laws, Spencer writes that rulers rule because it is a reflection of the "national will." Social inequality was ordained by nature in Spencer's view, and movements opposing this inequality were therefore doomed to failure Spencer is also famous for his organic analogy. As illustrated in his book, "The Social Organism," Spencer compared human societies to biological organisms. He used this analogy to link biological and social evolution, implying both followed the same processes and direction. He writes that societies are like organisms in three ways: (1) they grow from small groups to large aggregations; (2) they grow from simple to complex structures; and (3) they grow from a collection of independent units to an organism composed of interdependent parts. The second and third points are particularly important to his theory and were incorporated into most of the evolutionary theories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Durkheim, for example, used the idea of directional movement from simplicity to complexity and relational movement from independence to interdependence in his formulation of the differences between mechanical and organic solidarity. This suggested that social evolution could be studied in the same fashion that one studied biological evolution. Spencer's organic analogy was profoundly influential because it implied that a society was composed of an interconnected set of organs. If this was the case, these organs could be accurately identified and their role and function in maintaining society described. These ideas, in various forms, set the agenda for much of anthropology in the century following the publication of "The Social Organism." Spencer belief that social evolution was progressive. Those societies that are large, complex, and integrated are more evolved than those that are not. Industrialized Europe was, in his view, the best society that evolution had thus far created. Spencer says that the forms of society are, in part, deter-mined by the surrounding physical circumstances. He is using the general evolutionary concept of the influence of environment on selection here, but his application of the idea to human societies provided a grounding that Julian Steward and the cultural ecologists used almost a century later.
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It is true that Spencer argued, on one hand, that state welfare, education, and public health programs were contrary to the laws of nature and should be avoided because they slowed the evolutionary process that was weeding out the unfit members of society. On the other hand, he also argued against the military, the Church of England, and the perquisites of the landowning class. Despite the use of theories like his to justify colonial conquest, Spencer himself was an adamant opponent of British imperialism who criticized his nation for "picking quarrels with native races and taking possession of their lands" (quoted in Carneiro 1967:xlvi).

Two other nineteenth-century anthropologists interested in the evolution of culture as a general human phenomenon were the American Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) and the Englishman Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). Drawing upon Enlightenment thought, Darwins work, and new cross-cultural, historical, and archaeological evidence, these theorists developed rival schemes of overall social and cultural progress, as well as the origins of different institutions such as religion, marriage, and the family.

Edward B. Tylor (1832-1917) Edward B. Tylor disagreed with the contention of some early nineteenth century French and English writers, led by Comte Joseph de Maistre, that groups such as the American Indians and other indigenous peoples were examples of cultural degeneration. He believed that peoples in different locations were equally capable of developing and progressing through the stages. Primitive groups had reached their position by learning and not by unlearning (Tylor 2006:36). Tylor maintained that culture evolved from the simple to the complex, and that all societies passed through the three basic stages of development suggested by Montesquieu: from savagery through barbarism to civilization. "Progress, therefore, was possible for all.

To account for cultural variation, Tylor and other early evolutionists postulated that different contemporary societies were at different stages of evolution. According to this view, the "simpler" peoples of the day had not yet reached "higher" stages. Thus, simpler contemporary
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societies were thought to resemble ancient societies. In more advanced societies one could see proof of cultural evolution through the presence of what Tylor called survivals - traces of earlier customs that survive in present-day cultures. The making of pottery is an example of a survival in the sense used by Tylor. Earlier peoples made their cooking pots out of clay; today we generally make them out of metal because it is more durable, but we still prefer dishes made out of clay.

Tylor believed that there was a kind of psychic unity among all peoples that explained parallel evolutionary sequences in different cultural traditions. In other words, because of the basic similarities in the mental framework of all peoples, different societies often find the same solutions to the same problems independently. But, Tylor also noted that cultural traits may spread from one society to another by simple diffusion - the borrowing by one culture of a trait belonging to another as the result of contact between the two.

To sum up E. B. Tylor was a contemporary of Morgan and probably the leading English anthropologist of the nineteenth century. In his principal work, Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor outlined two ideas for which he is remembered today. First, he argued that one could reconstruct earlier stages of cultural evolution by studying "survivals." Tylor believed that virtually everything in contemporary society that did not have a function he understood was a survival from a previous stage of cultural evolution. Therefore, one could learn something about past stages of a society's development through the study of these cultural leftovers. His second idea concerned the evolution of religion, Tylor's special interest and the subject of the second volume of Primitive Culture. He postulated that the most basic concept underlying the invention of religion was animism. He outlined a developmental sequence for religion that began with animism, evolved into polytheism, and finally progressed into what he viewed as the highest form of religious belief, enlightened monotheism.

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-81)

Another nineteenth-century proponent of uniform and progressive cultural evolution was Lewis Henry Morgan. In his best-known work, Ancient Society, Morgan divided the evolution of
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human culture into the same three basic stages Tylor had suggested (savagery, barbarism, and civilization). But he also subdivided savagery and barbarism into upper, middle, and lower segments (Morgan 1877: 5-6), providing contemporary examples of each of these three stages. Each stage was distinguished by a technological development and had a correlate in patterns of subsistence, marriage, family, and political organization.

Morgan distinguished these stages of development in terms of technological achievement, and thus each had its identifying benchmarks. Middle savagery was marked by the acquisition of a fish diet and the discovery of fire; upper savagery by the bow and arrow; lower barbarism by pottery; middle barbarism by animal domestication and irrigated agriculture; upper barbarism by the manufacture of iron; and civilization by the phonetic alphabet (Morgan 1877: chapter 1). For Morgan, the cultural features distinguishing these various stages arose from a "few primary germs of thought"- germs that had emerged while humans were still savages and that later developed into the "principle institutions of mankind.

Morgan postulated that the stages of technological development were associated with a sequence of different cultural patterns. For example, he speculated that the family evolved through six stages. Human society began as a "horde living in promiscuity," with no sexual prohibitions and no real family structure. In the next stage a group of brothers was married to a group of sisters and brother-sister mating was permitted. In the third stage, group marriage was practiced, but brothers and sisters were not allowed to mate. The fourth stage, which supposedly evolved during barbarism, was characterized by a loosely paired male and female who lived with other people. In the next stage husband-dominant families arose in which the husband could have more than one wife simultaneously. Finally, the stage of civilization was distinguished by the monogamous family, with just one wife and one husband who were relatively equal in status. In general although their works reached toward the same end, the evolutionary theorists each had very different ideas and foci for their studies. Differing from Morgan and Tylor, Sir James Frazer focused on the evolution of religion and viewed the progress of society or culture from the viewpoint of the evolution of psychological or mental systems. Among the other evolutionary
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theorists who put forth schemes of development of society, including different religious, kinship, and legal institution were Maine, McLellan, and Bachofen.

Johann Jacob Bachofen (1815-1887). He was Swiss lawyer and classicist who developed a theory of the evolution of kinship systems. He postulated that primitive promiscuity was first characterized by matriarchy and later by patrilineality. This later stage of patrilineality was developed in relation to Bachofen's theory of the development of private property and the want of man to pass this on to their children. Bachofen's postulation of a patrilianeal stage following a matrilineal stage was agreed upon by Morgan (Seymour- Smith 1986:21).

Sir James George Frazer (1854 - 1873). Educated at Cambridge, he was considered to be the last of the British classical evolutionists. Frazer was an encyclopedic collector of data (although he never did any fieldwork), publishing dozens of volumes including the popular work The Golden Bough. Frazer summed up this study of magic and religion by stating that "magic came first in men's minds, then religion, then science, each giving way slowly and incompletely to the other (Hays 1965:127)." First published in two volumes and later expanded to twelve, Frazer's ideas from The Golden Bough were widely accepted. Frazer went on to study the value of superstition in the evolution of culture saying that it strengthened the respect for private property, strengthened the respect for marriage, and contributed to the stricter observance of the rules of sexual morality.

Sir John Lubbock (1834-1914; Lord Avebury). Botanist and antiquarian who was a staunch pupil of Darwin. He observed that there was a range of variation of stone implements from more to less crude and that deposits that lay beneath upper deposits seemed older. He coined the terms Paleolithic and Neolithic. The title of Lubbock's book, Prehistoric Times: As Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Customs of Modern Savages illustrates the evolutionists analogies to "stone age contemporaries." This work also countered the degenerationist views in stating "It is common opinion that savages are, as a general rule, only miserable remnants of nations once more civilized; but although there are some well established cases of national decay, there is no scientific evidence which would justify us in asserting that this is generally the case (Hays

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1965:51-52)." Lubbock also contributed a gradual evolution of religion, seen in five stages: atheism, nature worship (totemism), shamanism, idolatry, and monotheism.

Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (1822-1888). English jurist and social theorist who focused on the development of legal systems as the key to social evolution. His scheme traces society from systems based on kinship to those based on territoriality, and from status to contract and from civil to criminal law. Maine argued that the most primitive societies were patriarchal. This view contrasted with the believers in the primacy of primitive promiscuity and matriarchy. Maine also contrasted with other evolutionists in that he was not a proponent of unilinear evolution (Seymour-Smith 1986:175- 176).

John F. McLellan (1827-1881). Scottish lawyer who was inspired by ethnographic accounts of bride capture. From this he built a theory of the evolution of marriage. Like others, including Bachofen, McLellan postulated an original period of primitive promiscuity followed by matriarchy. His argument began with primitive peoples practicing female infanticide because women did not hunt to support the group. The shortage of women that followed was resolved by the practice of bride capture and fraternal polyandry. These then gave rise to patrilineal descent. McLellan, in his Primitive Marriage, coined the terms exogamy and endogamy (SeymourSmith 1986:185-186).

To sum up It is important to note that all of the early evolutionary schemes were unilineal. Unilineal evolution refers to the idea that there is a set sequence of stages that all groups will pass through at some point, although progress through these stages will vary. Groups, both past and present, that are at the same level or stage of development were considered nearly identical. Thus a contemporary "primitive"group could be taken as a representative of an earlier stage of development of more advanced types.

The evolutionist program can be more or less summed up in this segment of Tylors Primitive Culture which notes: "The condition of culture among the various societies of mankindis a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action. On the one hand, the uniformity which so largely
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pervades civilization may be ascribed, in great measure, to the uniform action of uniform causes; while on the other hand its various grades may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history, and about to do its proper part in shaping the history of the future (Tylor 1871:1:1)."

Methodology The Comparative Method All theorists of the latter half of the nineteenth century proposed to fill the gaps in the available knowledge of universal history largely by means of a special and much-debated procedure known as the "comparative method." The basis for this method was the belief that sociocultural systems observable in the present bear differential degrees of resemblance to extinct cultures. The life of certain contemporary societies closely resembled what life must have been like during the Paleolithic, Neolithic, or early state-organized societies.

To apply the comparative method, the varieties of contemporary institutions are arranged in a sequence of increasing antiquity. This is achieved through an essentially logical, deductive operation. The implicit assumption is that the older forms are the simpler forms.

Accomplishments: The early evolutionists represented the first efforts to establish a scientific discipline of anthropology (although this effort was greatly hampered by the climate of supernatural explanations, a paucity of reliable empirical materials, and their engagement in "armchair speculation"). They aided in the development of the foundations of an organized discipline where none had existed before. They left us a legacy of at least three basic assumptions which have become an integral part of anthropological thought and research methodology: The dictum that cultural phenomena are to be studied in naturalistic fashion the premise of the "psychic unity of mankind," i.e., that cultural differences between groups are not due to differences in psychobiological equipment but to differences in sociocultural experience; and
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 the use of the comparative method as a surrogate for the experimental and laboratory techniques of the physical sciences (Kaplan 1972: 42-43). Criticisms: The following are some of the major criticism ascribed to 19th century evolutionary theory Morgan believed that family units became progressively smaller and more self-contained as human society developed. However, his postulated sequence for the evolution of the family is not supported by the enormous amount of ethnographic data that has been collected since his time. For example, no recent society that Morgan would call savage indulges in group marriage or allows brother-sister mating. The great weakness of this method lay in the evaluation of evidence plucked out of context, and in the fact that much of the material, at a time when there were almost no trained field workers, came from amateur observers. The evolutionism of Tylor, Morgan, and others of the nineteenth century is largely rejected today largely because their theories cannot satisfactorily account for cultural variation - why, for instance, some societies today are in "upper savagery" and others in "civilization. Another weakness in the early evolutionists theories is that they cannot explain why some societies have regressed or even become extinct. Also, although other societies may have progressed to "civilization," some of them have not passed through all the stages. Thus, early evolutionist theory cannot explain the details of cultural evolution and variation/degeneration as anthropology now knows them. One consequence of Spencer's work was the popularization of a point of view called social darwinism. Social darwinists interpreted natural selection to mean that if evolution was progress and only the fittest survived, then it was the right of Western powers to dominate those who were less technologically advanced. According to this line of reasoning, the domination of one society by an-other proved its superiority and its advanced level of fitness. Conquest of an inferior society by a superior one was the result of the action of natural law and hence was not only moral but imperative. This was a convenient philosophy for the rapidly expanding European powers and was used to

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justify their imperialism, colonialism, and racism. In the United States, social darwinism was invoked as a justification for free enterprise capitalism. Explain history and social change teleological than causal model Have a strong endogenous bias i.e they look at evolutionary events as occurring entirely within societies and fail to consider the role of various external influence like diffusionism and political conquest Finally, one of the most common criticisms leveled at the nineteenth century evolutionists is that they were highly ethnocentric - they assumed that Victorian England, or its equivalent, represented the highest level of development for mankind.

The decline of evolutionism The beginning of the twentieth century brought the end of evolutionisms reign in cultural anthropology. "[The] unilineal evolutionary schemes [of these theorists] fell into disfavor in the 20th century, partly as a result of the constant controversy between evolutionist and diffusionist theories and partly because of the newly accumulating evidence about the diversity of specific sociocultural systems which made it impossible to sustain the largely "armchair" speculations of these early theorists (Seymour-Smith 1986:106).

Its leading opponent was Franz Boas, whose main disagreement with the evolutionists involved their assumption that universal laws governed all human culture. Boas argued that these nineteenth-century individuals lacked sufficient data to formulate many useful generalizations. Thus historicism and, later, functionalism were reactions to nineteenth century social evolutionism.

Although evolutionary thinking was strongly critcized during this period, we should not asume that it was absent. Indeed it was embraced by such prominent sociologist like sumner,parson in the 1920s . but evolutionary thinking had acquired a bad reputation among many of the intelectual leasders of anthropology and sociology. Nevertheless, evolutionism survived. The first stirrings of revival came in the 1930s in the hands of V.gordon child. He argued that history revealed few patterns if we studied it in minute detail if we stand back and views it from a wider perspective, patterns reveal themselves. Child was followed in by 1940s by two other would be revivalists, Leslie white and Julian steward

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Even though evolutionism has lost its significance in the beginning of 20th century, its legacy has been paramount. Marx and Engles view of social change was influenced by the readings of ancient society which is the writing of morgan. Neoevolutionism is also one versions of evolutionism. Hence we can conclude that there is a resurgence of evolutionary thinking in recent theories and evolutionism is not completely disappeared.
Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his frequent co-author Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) are far better known for their contributions to other disciplines-in particular, economic and political theory-than for their studies in anthropology. Primarily their work focused on the historical development of capitalism. Although they were not anthropologists, their ideas are critical to anthropology and have been the subject of much debate among anthropologists. Marx and Engels viewed social change as an evolutionary process marked by revolution in which new levels of social, political, and economic development were achieved through class struggle. They viewed history as a sequence of evolutionary stages, each marked by a unique mode of production. Just as unilineal evolutionary theorists traced the social evolution of humans from savagery to civilization, Marx and Engels saw the history of Europe in terms of the transition from feudalism, to capitalism, and on to communism-which they believed was the next inevitable step in this process.

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