The Evolution of Societies

The year 2009 has been dubbed Darwin’s year. The theory of evolution has never
been so popular, but it’s opponents — creationists and intelligent designers — are also as
vociferous as ever. If creationists came from their bible classes, where did evolution
come from?

Evolution did not burst Athena-like from the forehead of Charles Darwin (1809 —
1882) in 1859. Besides holding off on publication for nearly twenty years, he himself
traced evolutionary ideas to Aristotle and Empedocles. But closer to Darwin, his own
grandfather Erasmus Darwin (1731 — 1802) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 — 1829)
both proposed hypotheses of the transmutation of species — something that was quite
anathema to the prevailing literal protestant readings of the bible. Indeed the very term,
evolution, did not arise among students of plants or animals (which the literalists held
were created and fixed by God in the year 4004 BC), but rather among Enlightenment
students of man and society. A closer reading of history shows that there was (and is)
not one theory of evolution, but theories of evolution — and relatively few of them
concerned with the biological world.

Before the Enlightenment

It is not well known, but already in the 14th century the North African Islamic
scholar ibn Khaldun (1332 — 1406) put forward the view of societies as living organisms
which experience birth, growth, maturity, decline and death due to universal causes.
One of his most incisive analyses was that of the relationship between settled and
nomadic societies, which shift and adapt, with nomads repeatedly conquering farming
communities before being assimiliated and the new society in turn becoming plunder
for the next wave of nomads. This cycle of nomad and peasant lasted for nearly three
thousand years until the spread of rifling and standing armies broke the predominance
of the horse in warfare. In his non-progressivist analysis ibn Khaldun was far ahead of
European thinkers by a good half-millennium.

Meanwhile, most European thinkers maintained that man and his societies were in
a state of decline from the golden age of the Garden of Eden. This also meshed with
ancient Greek mythologies of ages of gold, silver and bronze followed ultimately by the
mean age of iron, where all things are debased. It was only in the 18th century that
progress began to seem so certain that theories of the decline of society began to be
replaced by theories of evolution. However, these early theories of evolution used the
term as a synonym for progress and development, not simply for gradual change from
one form to another. This concept of progress still represents common usage of the term
evolution.

Evolution and Enlightenment

Evolution in the sense of progress also helped Europeans make sense of the
colonial world they were building through the Age of Discovery. In the 17th century
Thomas Hobbes’ (1588 — 1679) view of man’s primeval condition as “solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short” is a good summary of the then prevalent view of the savage —
i.e. non-European. All that was good in man was the result of the slow development out
of this lowly state. This view, of the progression from brute to citizen, was almost
universally held. But questions arose as to the how and why of progress. Why, in some
lands, the people are progressive and civilized, while in others they are poor and brutish.

Usually John Locke (1632 — 1704) is presented as the lighter counterpoint to

Hobbes’ dark, brooding commentary on human nature. Locke presents man as tabula
rasa, made what he is by environment. But in truth, at least on the field of evolution,
both espouse the same progressivism. While Hobbes presents the state and law
civilizing man, Locke views education as that power. Both are examples of that class of
explanations dubbed environmentalist — where man’s environment effects his
evolution. Usually the so-called biologist explanations are opposed to this position,
where differences among peoples are attributed to biological differences (often race and
racism). The fact is neither of these positions have much to do with evolution in the
modern sense of variation, selection and heredity, but an overview is nevertheless in
order, to understand the common-sense progressivism that still informs much of our
European thinking today.

Giambattista Vico or Vigo (1668 — 1744) is best known for his Scienza Nuova
(1725) where he argues that there exists a natural law of human social development,
albeit informed by a divine providence, which repeats itself cyclically. This natural law
sees each civilization moving through three ages: the divine, the heroic, and the human.
In the first age metaphor is the master trope of language, in the second metonymy and
synecdoche support the development of feudalism and monarchy, and finally, in the
third age, irony is reflected in democracy. Although Vico’s ‘evolutionism’ is marked by
three universal phases and natural law, it’s cultural, metaphysical emphasis is far from
general Enlightenment trend, which was far more materialist and utilitarian.

Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (1689 — 1755) was a far more typical
representative of Enlightenment evolutionism. His position was that the most important
factor in the evolution of society and temperament was the climate. He is thus usually
presented as an exemplary geographical determinist, indeed a meteorological
determinist. This is a slight over-simplification, but it serves. Besides this climatic axis,
he also discerned a second axis of cultural progress, introducing the famous three
phases of savagery, barbarism and civilization.

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune (1727 — 1781) was another French

enlightenmenteer. Better known for his economics theories, he also subscribed to the
idea of universal, tri-phase sociocultural development in subsistence and rationality:
hunting, pastoralism and agriculture. It seems that Turgot equated the quantity of
people supported by a given area of land with the rationality of that socio-economic
order. Nevertheless, he did not view hunters or pastoralists as inferior per se, merely not
as educated.

The concept of the psychic unity of mankind is an interesting one. On the one
hand, it is a useful concept — if the human species is biologically very unvaried then it
makes sense that their psychological make-up is also relatively invariant. However, this
concept has also been abused by those who proceeded to argue that biology is thus
irrelevant to human behaviour, psychology and sociology. An obvious fallacy, but oft
overlooked.

From France to Scotland, where Adam Ferguson of Raith (1723 — 1816) would
become known as the father of modern sociology. He makes a further step, whereby he
connects the phases of development with distinct types of social and economic
organization. He did not have many original contributions, but he made the tripartite
order of savagery, barbarism and civilization, as well as concepts of property, individual
and collective, matriarchy and patriarchy, more tightly and coherently linked in the
modern imaginarium. He also emphasized that the moral valuation of primitives as
inferior was a thing of our perspective, rather than their objective state.

Following these economic determinists, John Millar of Glasgow (1735 — 1801) was
another consistent techno-economic determinist, focusing on environment and viewing
economics in many ways a function thereof. The type of economy would then influence
both the people as a whole and as individuals. However, his geographic determinology
was far more specific and precise than the broad-stroke tri-phase models of other proto-
anthropologists.

Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715 — 1771), the French Swissman, was yet another
advocate of education (or lack thereof) as the cause of difference of ability and
temperament among individuals and peoples as a whole. His novelty was a more precise
development of the biological element of human development, for he viewed man as
possessed of an inborn biological apparatus consisting of basic needs such as hunger
and thirst, which customs would seek to sate. A position that links him more with
Malinowski than Locke. He also attributed customs to techno-economic determinants,
though he went too far in his relativism, stating that all customs, though strange, may be
excused, for they are functional for their group. However, he directly denies the validity
of broad geographic or climatic models of temperament. We may well ask - is this
evolutionism? I say not, more a descriptive analysis of the effects of environment and
technology on human society and behaviour.

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (1723 — 1789) held a more philosophical

approach than the other proto-anthropologists. He is also probably better known for
being one of the first publicly self-described atheists in Europe. Nevertheless, he was
another one of those rich fellows affirming man as a work of nature and subject to the
laws of nature. He would reconcile his extreme materialism with an acceptance of
education and rationality as the only way for man to further and better himself.
However, again I ask, where is the evolutionism?

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet (1743 — 1794) was
one of the more radical advocates of egalitarianism for all peoples, male and female, and
synthesised Enlightenment evolutionism and philosophical anthropology. Starting from
man’s position as a part of the natural order he felt that the predicability of man’s being
and development was also a necessary consequence of the essential and constant natural
laws. His evolutionism was based on a complex system of levels: 1. tribal society, 2.
pastoral society, 3. agricultural society, 4. ancinet Greece (till Alexander the Great), 5.
the advance of knowledge, 6. the decadence of knowledge, 7. the early advance of
knowledge until the development of the printing press, 8. from the printing press to the
freedom of philosophy and science from state control, 9. from Descartes to the French
revolution. The level of development, so Condorcet says, rose constantly from one step
to the next. However, this idiosyncratic system can hardly be called a theory of
evolution, it is more akin to an ethnocentric synopsis and unsystematic categorisation of
history.
 Obviously different Enlightenment thinkers held different positions, but certain
general conclusions can be abstracted from their works. First is the Enlightenment
desacralization of man, putting the human into the natural world. Indeed, theirs is the
invention of Homo sapiens. From this natural world they concluded that there must be
natural laws guiding both our biological and our socio-cultural historical development.
However, they often confuse the idea of a universal, unchanging law with actual,
universal and unchanging results. Nevertheless, the predicability of the future (the
future was generally viewed as European), was a central tenet of their unilinear
conceptions. The law of evolution was also viewed as one law — one path of
development. Rationality provided the basis for the evaluation of distinct phases and a
general belief in the power of education was pervasive among the Enlightenment
evolutioneers.

We must remember, however, that our critique is often based on an

oversimplification of their position, so we must be cautious not to fall for the straw-man
fallacy in denying any validity to their views.

Biology and Evolution

Towards the end of the 18th century, with the growth of biological knowledge, the
ideas about evolution formulated by the students of history piqued the interest of
biologists as well. It began to seem obvious that God had not, in His infinite wisdom,
created the heavens and the Earth, as the Bible put it. All was not still in the garden of
Creation. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1689 — 1759) was a strong critic of the
natural theologians, dismantling the concept of the creator in relation to biology,
however his role in evolution and natural selection is disputed. He postulated the idea of
pangenesis and traced phenotypic characters through lineages, foreshadowing genetics.
Erasmus Darwin cited the earlier work of James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714 — 1799)
in his writing on evolution. The Lord Monboddo was a Scots scholar of linguistic
evolution. But their direct contribution to biological evolution was far less than that of
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was the first to create a truly coherent, even if erroneous,
theory of organic evolution. He postulated two forces comprising evolution, one driving
animals from simple to complex forms, and another adapting them to their local
environments and differentiating them from each other. Simply put, the complexifying
force and the adaptive force.

No matter how we look at it, the emphasis on natural laws and the Enlightenment
ideas of social evolution, cross-fertilised the field of biology through the efforts of
Lamarck. In 1859 Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 — 1913) finally spurred Charles Darwin
into action with his paper on the ‘introduction’ of species. Darwin had has his general
theory of the natural selection of species ready since at least 1838, but had felt it too
contentious for publication without copious amounts of proof. Together they presented
their very similar theories and the concept of evolution exploded into the public
consciousness. Darwin’s theory of evolution was soon misapplied and transformed into
such oddities as social Darwinism and scientific racism. Thus a misunderstanding of
organic evolution quickly reinvigorated the debate on social and cultural evolution.

Back to Social and Cultural Evolution

Charles Darwin’s seminal work provided the impetus for scholars of all
backgrounds to redouble efforts in the field of evolution — seeking to understand the
processes of qualitative change that had occurred in the history of the Earth and
humanity, which were turning out to be far longer than they had previously supposed.
In 1856, just three years before The Origin, the first Neanderthal man remains were
found in the Neander valley. People were becoming very interested in how and why the
differences between the races and cultures, past and present, had come about.
Evolution, it seemed, was the method to understand man. All kinds of typologies were
developed and different phases were all the rage for understanding how we went from
primitive to civilized.

Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (1822 — 1888) was the author of Ancient Law
(1861) in which he distinguished between human groups based on kinship, on blood,
and those based on territory. Meanwhile, in Switzerland Johan Jacob Bachofen (1815 —
1887) published his work Das Mutterecht (1861) in the same year, where he put forward
the hypothesis that in ancient societies women, not men, were dominant — the
matriarchy / patriarchy dichotomy. In fact, he supposed that there were four phases,
first Aphroditian hetairism or wild, communistic polyamory. This was followed by
Demeteran matriarchy. The third phase was the Dionysian half-way house to patriarchy,
and finally the patriarchal, ‘solar’ or Appolonian phase, which saw the emergence of
modern civilisation. I think it is safe to say that most of this was wild speculation.

Another Englishman, Herbert Spencer (1820 — 1903), was perhaps most

responsible for bringing evolution into popular sociological and anthropological
thinking. He formulated a general law of evolution for sociology and ethics, but despite
advocating Darwinism, he actually used Lamarckism, rather than natural selection. He
postulated a tendency for all societies to change from a state of incoherent homogeneity
to a state of coherent heterogeneity. On this bases he identified simple, compound,
doubly compound and trebly compound types of human society. Another axis of
evolution he identified was from military societies, where the individual is subordinate
to the social whole, towards industrial societies with greater freedom for individuals. He
viewed the endpoint of evolution as perfect man in a perfect society. He also coined the
phrase “survival of the fittest” and was responsible for the invention of social
Darwinism, although his social Darwinism was rather less radical than is usually
thought. However, he was no Darwinian. He always believed in progress and an
endpoint of evolution — universal evolutionary progress.

The Briton Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (1832 — 1917) wrote his Primitive Culture in
1871, where he studied the evolution of culture in general and religion in particular, as
well as developed the first definition of culture. He is famous for his use of ‘survivals’ as
a basis for demonstrating evolutionary sequences. He postulated that religion evolved
from animism, through totemism and polytheism, until reaching its peak in
monotheism.

Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 — 1881) was perhaps the most influential social
evolutionist and traced a gran narrative of humanity in his work Ancient Society (1877),
where he traced out the three major ‘ethnical periods’ of savagery, barbarism and
civilization. Essentially he postulated stages of technical development as the basis for
the evolution of humans from primitive hunter-gatherers to complex agricultural
civilizations. His emphasis on orderly classification may have detracted from his
evolutionary emphasis, but his stance was nevertheless more nuanced than we often
admit today. Nevertheless, his evolution remained guided by divine providence.

Two other fellows were responsible for yet another strand of evolutionary thinking,
namely Friedrich Engels (1820 — 1895) and Karl Marx (1818 — 1883), who focused on
economic modes of production as the basis of human development. These modes of
productions unified forces of production (technological development) and relations of
production (forms of ownership) and on this basis he identified four basic stages:
primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. Adding an eschatological
element, Marx asserted that capitalism would be followed by advanced capitalism,
creating a worker’s heaven on Earth. Building on Marx’s work, Engels published The
Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), which basically merged
Morgan’s theories with Marx’s, replacing primitive communism with savagery and
barbarism, and expanding the phase of civilization into Marx’s slavery, feudalism,
capitalism triad.

However, the ascendancy of evolutionism in the social studies was short-lived.

Problems of evidence, theory and methodology, as well the rise of historical
particularism, meant that by the 1890s the cutting edge had moved well beyond, and
most new thinkers viewed it as passé. The Boasian school objected to evolutionary
theories on four basic counts: the use of the comparative method; the development of
rigid schemes of unilinear evolution; inadequate recognition of the process of diffusion;
and the illegitimate equation of evolution with progress. From a comparison of the
social evolutionists with Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the later neoDarwinian
synthesis, it is quite obvious that none of the social evolutionists — except perhaps ibn
Khaldun way back when — truly understood what natural selection meant, or even felt
that was somehow necessary. Indeed, it seems almost as though they remained wedded
to 18th century Enlightenment progressivism and deism, while adopting the new
buzzword evolution, which was having such success in the natural sciences.

The Eclipse of Darwinism

This was a phrase used by Julian Huxley to describe the history of evolutionary
thought from the 1880s to the 1920s. It was not that evolution as such was discarded,
but the problem of its driving mechanism drove the search for alternatives to natural
selection, with theistic evolution, neo-Lamarckism, orthogenesis and saltationism. I
suppose a bit of recapitulation is in order. Natural selection holds that natural variation
in a population means that some individuals will be more successful at reproduction
than others, thus leading to change in the population over time. But how was this
natural selection to take place? And would it not result in the averaging-out of difference
over time, rather than the development of new species? Until the introduction of the
concept of genetics, mutation and the germ-line in the early 20th century, the theory of
natural selection seemed too unlikely, too immoral and too slow to many thinkers.

The alternatives all had much more in common with 19th century social
evolutionism than Darwin’s idea of natural selection. Theistic evolution proposed that
God intervened to guide the process. Scholars discarded this line of thinking by 1900,
but it informed the work of Lewis Henry Morgan. Neo-Lamarckism held that the use or
disuse of a particular organ by an organism would lead to changes that could be
inherited by the next generation. Neo-Lamarckism was also closely tied to the idea of
linear progress and the recapitulation theory of evolution. Very similar was the
hypothesis of orthogenesis, which held that life had a tendency to change in a unilinear
fashion towards ever-greater perfection. This was perhaps the closest theory to the
position of the 19th century evolutionists such as Herbert Spencer. Finally, saltationism
held that new species arise as a result of large mutations. Saltationism has something in
common with most classical socio-cultural evolution too, namely the large phase
changes postulated by the categorisation of societies into savage, barbarian and
civilised.

In the 1930s advances in genetics theory and field research eventually led to the
modern evolutionary synthesis. This was further strengthened by the discovery of the
structure of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. In the late 20th
century further developments followed, but the basic structure of evolution through
natural selection proved solid. Variation, selection, heredity. What happened in the
social studies, meanwhile?

The Socio-Evolutionary Revival — the Neoevolutionists

The old, 19th century evolutionists generally assumed a teleological unfolding of

potentialities, a rigid sequence of stages through which all societies must move and the
denial of the possibility of regression. The corrective of Franz Boas was necessary to
move a morbid theory out of its doldrums, but the swing towards historical
particularism and diffusionism was probably too strong. To deny that evolution occurs
in societies is quite a radical statement, but then — social and cultural evolutionists used
the term to mean progress, not adaptation. From the 1930s onwards a full-scale
evolutionary revival began in branches of anthropology that remained interested in the
universals of human experience.

Vere Gordon Childe (1892 — 1957) was a philologist and archaeologist who led the
way in this revival, emphasizing the broad technological changes characteristic of
human prehistory. He coined the concepts of the neolithic revolution, when mankind
first domesticated plants and animals, and the subsequent urban revolution, when
people started living in towns for the first time. The urban revolution involved
occupational specialization, cities, class divisions, and the state.

The first anthropologist to focus once more on sociocultural evolution was Leslie
Alvin White (1900 — 1975). He developed a similar version of evolutionism to Childe’s,
insisting that evolutionary theories not try to explain specific sequences of historical
change, but rather focus on the overall movement of human culture. He formulated a
lawto explain the general evolution of culture, which stated that culture evolved in
proportion to the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year and the efficiency with
which that energy was utilised. Technological change was, again, the driving force in the
evolution of culture.

Julian Haynes Steward (1902 — 1972) was the third major figure in the revival and
reacted against the general and simplified evolutionary conceptions of Childe and
White, which he called universal evolution. He proposed multilinear evolution as an
alternative, which concentrated not on the overall movement of history but on the
different lines along which social evolution moved. He identified broad lines along
which evolution radiated and that could not be ignored. Multilinear evolution was
closely related to the concept of cultural ecology, which he viewed as deeply affected by
environment.

Marshall David Sahlins (1930) and Elman R. Service tried to combine the views of
White and Steward in Evolution and Culture (1960), distinguishing between general
and specific evolution. The general evolution of human culture is characterized by
growing complexity and unilinearity — in this it is not much different from the 19th
century evolutionary typologies. However, when one studies how hunter-gatherer
societies evolved multidirectionality looms large.

Robert Leonard Carneiro (1927) argues that there is no contradiction between

unilinear and multilinear evolution, for a specific institution could be the result of
different developments. He posits conflict deriving from population pressure, as well as
warfare, contributing to the development of more complex political systems in areas
that are environmentally circumscribed. Complexity thus tends to follow from the
competition among societies for limited resources.

Marvin Harris (1927 — 2001) turned the common technologist argument on its
head, arguing that people are by nature conservative and avoid change if possible.
Instead, he saw population pressure and environmental degradation as the force driving
social and technological evolution — people must work harder and develop new
techniques to keep their standard of living from falling. However, this produces yet
more degradation, resulting in more intensification.

In general, modern evolutionist approaches emphasise flexible typologies that give

to history a certain open-ended quality, and most likewise see social continuity and
regression as important social phenomena that, like evolution, cry out for explanation.
However, although adaptation has become an important concept, progressivism is still
the norm among most anthropologists. Despite this, there is no inherent association
between evolutionary and progressivist views, as Marvin Harris shows. Social evolution
often seems to represent a continuous struggle between humans and nature in which
humans run faster and faster just to try to stay in the same place. Much like Alice
through the looking glass.

Sociobiology

Sociobiology departed radically from classical social evolutionism, focusing instead

on natural selection and organic evolution. It was often unfairly criticised by
anthropology, because it sought to explain universal human behaviours and phenomena
on the basis of a common biological evolutionary heritage. In fact the arguments used
were often of the straw-man type, misrepresenting the ideas of sociobiology. Neither
Sociobiology nor its later development of evolutionary psychology deal with the
evolution of cultures or societies, but rather with the evolution of individuals first and
foremost.

An interesting theory that has developed out of sociobiology is memetics, which

studies the development of culture through the propagation of memes — units of
imitation — through human brains and artifacts. It is quite a radical approach, which
does away with the human individual as a subject of research, focusing instead on the
constituents of culture themselves. In this theory culture is composed of parasites that
sustain themselves on our ability to think.

Conclusion

I think it is obvious that humanity has changed over time in qualitative ways,
which is what evolution seeks to explain. Looking back, a trend can be discerned.
Humans have become more numerous, our societies have become larger and more
complex, even as the number of effectively independent societies has decreased. We
cannot say whether the course our history has taken was necessary, indeed, it is doubtful
that there is a necessary direction to our evolution. To say whether we are progressing
and where we are progressing is also completely outside the scope of a theory of social
evolution.
What can be said is that there is incredible variation in human social and cultural
arrangements, a pronounced creativity in the human species that promotes innovation,
as well as a process of selection, whereby those practices that are more adaptive to the
natural and social environments tend to be retained more easily than maladaptive ones.
It also seems likely, as recent studies show, that human populations must be sufficiently
large and dense to maintain technology, skills and culture, as evidenced by the stop-start
nature of cultural beginnings from around 100,000 to 40,000 BC. We find evidence of
this in the example of the Tasmanian islanders who lost the skill of making fire and
boats in the thousands of years they were isolated from the rest of Australia by rising
waters after the end of the last Ice Age.
Trends towards complexity can be explained by various factors, including
competition among human groups, population and environmental pressures,
environmental degradation, technological factors and cultural factors. However, a plot
of our past development is more universal history than a predictive theory. All that we
can conclude is that we will continue to adapt, radiate and adjust our social and cultural
forms in ways that we will consider useful, but that will also have unexpected
consequences.
It is precisely the chaotic complexity of the systems in which we are enmeshed that
makes the idea of reasoned adaptation to adversity so helpless. Every adaptation of ours
throw up new problems, every new technology has chaotic repercussions. Our social
development is buffeted by the butterflies of chaos, and the idea of progress as somehow
ordained is ridiculous. We bootstrap ourselves to greater complexity by the skin of our
teeth and it will take all our ingenuity to remain here long, without killing ourselves or
our environment.