Tag: Evolutionary Theory

Toward a Unified Evolutionary Theory of Culture

Christopher Pierce

Although scholars have long appreciated the fact that human cultures and societies evolve, there is yet little agreement on what a theory of cultural evolution should look like. Among anthropologists and other social scientists, a wide range of opinion exists regarding the appropriate features of a viable evolutionary approach to explaining sociocultural variation and change (e.g., Barton and Clark 1997; Boone and Smith 1998; Dennett 1995, 1998; Dunnell 1980, 1989; Durham 1991; Flinn 1997; Hallpike 1988; Lyman and O'Brien 1998; Maschner 1996a; Rindos 1985; Rosenberg 1994; Spencer 1997; Sperber 1996; Trigger 1998). Several schools of evolutionary thought have developed within the social sciences including sociocultural evolutionism, cultural selectionism, cultural transmissionism, coevolutionism, processualism, evolutionary archaeology, human evolutionary ecology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, cultural virus theory, and memetics. Although some of the differences among these evolutionary approaches are substantial, many points of disagreement are very subtle and difficult to follow.