Very popular, among young people today, are backpacks.

This popularity puts students in a

good position to appreciate how anthropology, as a new science, was defended long ago by
Edward B. Tylor. (If any one person deserves recognition as the founder of anthropology, it is
he.) With so many other subjects to study, why, he asked, should students be burdened with
yet another? Well, he answered, a backpack adds yet more weight to be carried; but it more
than pays for itself by making everything else so easy to carry! Just so, he suggested,
anthropology more than pays for itself by "pulling things together," thereby making the
educational load not harder but easier to bear (Tylor 1909 [orig. 1881]:v).

Anthropology, in the United States, has four subfields: biological, archaeological, cultural,
and linguistic. Together they comprise the "study of humanity." Anthropology's diversity,
which makes it so integrative for students, makes it rather confusing to the public. ("You're an
anthropologist? So where have you been digging?")

Largest of the four subfields, in number of anthropologists specializing in it, is cultural

anthropology. People have followed different ways of life in different times and places;
making sense of this diversity is the central task of cultural anthropology. Its key concept is
culture itself. Tylor gave us the most famous definition. Culture, he wrote, is "that complex
whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities
and habits acquired by man as a member of society" (Tylor 1924 [orig. 1871]:1). Cultural
evolutionism is a theoretical approach that seeks to describe and explain long-term processes
of culture change. To do this it draws on all subfields.

Cultural evolutionism's great early achievement was the defeat of degenerationism. According
to this theory, human culture had originated at a fairly "high" level, after which some cultures
"degenerated" to "lower" levels while others "rose" to yet "higher" ones. Foremost among
scholars putting degenerationism to rest was Edward B. Tylor himself. Using his extensive
knowledge of the anthropological evidence that already had accumulated by around 1865,
Tylor showed that "high" cultures quite certainly had originated in a state resembling that of
the "low" cultures still observable in some parts of the world; and that there was no evidence
that any of the latter had come into being by "degeneration" from a "higher" condition of
culture (Tylor 1964 [orig. 1865]).

Science does not claim to give absolute certainty. Evidence, however, overwhelmingly favors
the conclusion that up until only ten or fifteen thousand years ago all humans had lived from
the beginning in small, nomadic bands that survived by hunting and gathering the wild food
sources around them. In view of the ingenuity and durability of foraging culture,
anthropologists no longer call it "low," our own culture "high"; but looking past the
ethnocentric terminology, we can see that the conclusion drawn by Tylor and others has been
reinforced by all subsequent findings. Social evolution surely began everywhere with very
small societies; and culture has been transformed in those times and places where, for reasons
still being vigorously investigated, societies grew into villages, chiefdoms, nations, and
empires. Though degenerationism had been motivated by religion (especially the story of the
Tower of Babel in the Book of Genesis), it did have testable implications; therefore it could
be--and was--rejected through the application of reason to empirical evidence. The defeat of
degenerationism was a great step in science.

Despite this early victory, cultural evolutionism's scientific progress has been slow. Variables
are difficult to define, let alone to measure exactly; there are no laboratories in which to
conduct experiments. Without accomplishments as impressive as those of physics, chemistry,
or biology, cultural evolutionists need to have faith in the ability of science to illuminate
much that remains, for the time being, shrouded in obscurity. Truly eloquent was Edward B.
Tylor's expression of such optimism:

Not merely as a matter of curious research, but as an important practical guide to the
understanding of the present and the shaping of the future, the investigation of the early
development of civilization must be pushed on zealously. Every possible avenue of
knowledge must be explored, every door tried to see if it is open. No kind of evidence need be
left untouched on the score of remoteness or complexity, of minuteness or triviality. The
tendency of modern enquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere,
it is everywhere. To despair of what a conscientious collection and study of facts may lead to,
and to declare any problem insoluble because difficult and far off, is distinctly to be on the
wrong side in science; and he who will choose a hopeless task may set himself to discover the
limits of discovery. [Tylor 1924 (orig. 1871):24]