Read any history book, and chances are you’ll encounter presumptions, explicit or implicit, about something called “cultural evolution”. Historians have long felt that historical events were taking place within the framework of some kind of process or processes which should be described using terminology borrowed from the biological sciences. Societies, we are told, “evolve” in the same sense that equus “evolved’ from eohippus.
But societies are not biological organisms, and they are not species. Moreover, the term “society” does not correspond to any real thing with which either organism or species form credible analogies. Organic evolution is not an apt, or relevant analogy to apply to human cultures. Those who seek to describe human history as a parallel to biological evolution are profoundly misunderstanding both.
A species is defined, biologically, as the sum total of individual organisms which are sufficiently close, genetically, to be able to successfully reproduce. While there may be practical difficulties in determining how and where this limiting factor applies in given cases (these are called “species problems” in biology), all cases are ultimately supposed to be determined by the same test, in the same frame of reference. In this sense, “species” is a reasonably objective and consistent concept in biology. When we say that Odobenus rosmarus [Walrus] is a species and that Acer saccharum [Sugar Maple] is a species, we are defining each by the same standards.
The terms “society” and “culture”, however, are not defined by any regular and consistent principle. They do not refer to anything that is agreed upon by historians, and when historians talk about “cultural evolution”, they could be referring to almost any arbitrary conglomeration of individual human beings, reified into a hypothetical identity. They may be applying their hypothetical template to whoever happens to be in some arbitrarily defined geographical area, or to some people who speak the same language, or to people who are subject to a particular set of laws, or to people who are related by putative kinship, or who are mobile but traveling together, or any nebulous assembly of these elements. There is no agreed upon principle defining a society or a culture. The subdivisions of the human race being discussed are not made by any coherent principle, and there is no consistent test or value involved. This alone makes talking about “cultural evolution” nothing more than a vague analogy to biological evolution, and a dubious one, at that.
The biological term “evolution” refers to the emergence of new species by the process of natural selection. It is understandable that, from a casual exposure to this concept, there might arise some confusion as to just what is happening. It’s easy to misinterpret references to the “evolution of species” to mean that a species, as a whole unit comprising numerous individuals, undergoes a collective transformation, as if all giraffes, at one period having short necks, simultaneously begat giraffes with long necks. This is not what biologists mean when they say that a species evolves. In fact, what happens is that all the individuals in a new species are the descendants a single individual, which mutation has differentiated and isolated from its co-specifics. Other individuals either leave no progeny, or continue with their own life histories. The new species is not a transformation of them. Biologists understand that the whole species of equus did not evolve from the whole species of eohippus, but from one single individual eohippus. Natural selection is a process that acts on individual organisms. It’s actions are reflected on the level of species, and on the ecology as a whole, by the presence, absence, occupation of ecological niches, and numbers of individuals, but the process of natural selection does not act directly upon species as collectivities.
Once this is clearly understood, then it becomes obvious that biological evolution is not an apt metaphor for anything that happens in human history. Frankish Society did not “evolve” because one Roman Citizen in Gaul was born with a mutation that made her different enough from other Gauls that all her descendants became a different species, Franks, who ultimately occupied the same ecological niche as Roman Gauls. The changes that took place in that area, over time, are not in any way analogous to the process of natural selection operating on organisms to create differential speciation.
The full breadth of this misunderstanding is visible when historians talk about “stages” in social evolution. The idea of “stages” in history long predates our knowledge of biological evolution. It was, in fact, a well established convention in Antiquity, and in Medieval European theology, Among many medieval thinkers, eschatology and prophecy combined with the idea of a threefold progression of ages —an “Age of Lead” , an “Age of Silver” and an “Age of Gold” — to divide time into blocks, each with its own enigmatic essence, and separated by transformational events. Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135 – March 30, 1202) espoused an elaborate system of this sort. In the nineteenth century, this kind of thinking, based largely on symbolism, tautology, and magic, rather than on the study of history, was perpetuated, with little change, by Hegel and Marx, and all their sad derivatives.
Somehow, this mystical attitude became stapled to popular misunderstandings of biological evolution. But the misunderstandings were profound, and the resultant notion of cultural evolution bore little relation to what biologists were discovering. Darwin’s insight was that the statistical process of natural selection could account for the process of speciation, thus solving one of the two key puzzles that confronted biologists. The other key puzzle, how characteristics and mutations transferred from one generation to the next, was solved by Gregor Mendel. Together, these two insights form the basis of our understanding of biological evolution. Both have become considerably elaborated and refined, so that they are now described in terms that sound quite different from those employed by Darwin and Mendel. But Mendel’s genetics is still embedded inside our current understanding of the genetic code, and Darwin’s principle of natural selection is still embedded in modern discussions of “punctuated equilibrium”, and so forth. None of this science is dependent on describing a fixed sequence of “stages”, none of it involves teleological thinking, and none of it is applicable to arbitrary groups analogous to human societies. Even some theoretical attempts to describe “group selection”, in certain contexts, are not thus applicable. However, since popular misunderstandings of biological evolution in the Victorian era confused speciation with a succession of “stages”, historical pseudo-evolution became primarily preoccupied with supposed stages built into the history of societies.
What seems to have happened to historians is that they garbled traditional, pre-scientific notions of historical stages and destinies with popular misunderstandings of biology, and concluded that history could be understood as a process that was analogous to biological evolution. As often happens with misused analogies, its users quickly forgot that they had introduced it as an analogy, and proceeded to behave as if they actually were engaged in a scientific search for a process of “social evolution” that is as objectively real as what biologists mean when they say “evolution”. This error was perpetuated by committing to a special terminology borrowed from biology, and appearing to mimic its scientific precision. Soon the question ceased to be “how should we best describe historical events?” and became “how do we describe the process of social evolution?”. The validity of the template and terminology was accepted without debate.
Because the analogy is inappropriate, any serious examination of actual historical events very quickly deviates from the hypothetical processes imagined by any theory of social evolution. In recent years, there have been a number of scholars who have confronted these inconsistencies with various strategies. Some, like Igor Diakonoff, responded by creating more baroquely convoluted versions of traditional social evolutionary schemes, adding more “stages”, and qualifying their directionality, just as pre-Copernicans added more epicycles and retrograde motions to their heliocentric scheme. Others, like the current generation of American archaeologists, who have been confronted with the amazing variety of cultural configurations in the New World, sought to create “dual-processional” evolutionary models, “action-oriented” models, and other attempts to make the analogy more sensible. Some of these scholars have a better scientific grasp of what biological evolution actually is, and they have been the ones most troubled by the confusing nature of the idea of cultural evolution. Robert McCormick Adams seems to be a jaguar pacing in a cage, testing the strength of the bars every little while. Kent V. Flannery, a highly respected scholar, has written that “biological evolution is an imperfect analogy for social evolution”, but his own theoretical framework reveals that he has not taken all the necessary steps to put an end to the confusion. He has taken the first necessary step, which is to remember that the concept of “cultural evolution” is nothing but an analogy. He has proceeded half-way through the next necessary step, which is to recognize that it is not an apt analogy. But he has not yet taken the third necessary step, which is to recognize that the analogy is not only inapt, but completely irrelevant, and that history and society need not be, and indeed should not be described in terms of any kind of analogy to biological evolution at all. We do not need new and subtler techniques to bark up the wrong tree.… we need to change trees.
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