Aristotle thought that development of cultural form (such as poetry) stops when it reaches its maturity.
James Gleick quotes a 1873 essay in
''Harper's New Monthly Magazine'': "By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage over indirect, words of precise meaning the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere in disadvantage." Cultural evolution, in the Darwinian sense of variation and selective inheritance, could be said to trace back to Darwin himself. Darwin argued for both customs (1874 p. 239) and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language. Darwin's ideas, along with those of such as
Comte (1798-1857) and
Quetelet (1796-1874), influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Hodgson and Knudsen single out
David George Ritchie (1853-1903) and
Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), crediting the former with anticipating both dual inheritance theory and universal Darwinism. Despite the stereotypical image of
social Darwinism that developed later in the century, neither Ritchie nor Veblen were on the political right. The early years of the 20th century and particularly the period of
World War I (1914 to 1918) saw biological concepts and metaphors shunned by most social sciences. Even uttering the word
evolution carried "serious risk to one's intellectual reputation". Darwinian ideas were also in decline following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, but figures such as
Fisher,
Haldane, and
Wright revived them, developing the first population genetic models and (as it became known) the
"modern synthesis". Cultural evolutionary concepts, or even metaphors, revived more slowly. If there were one influential individual in the revival it was probably
Donald T. Campbell. In 1960 he drew on Wright to draw a parallel between genetic evolution and the "blind variation and selective retention" of creative ideas; work that developed into a full theory of "socio-cultural evolution" in 1965 (a work that includes references to other works in the then current revival of interest in the field). Campbell (1965 26) was clear that he perceived cultural evolution not as an analogy "from organic evolution per se, but rather from a general model for quasiteleological processes for which organic evolution is but one instance". Others pursued more specific analogies notably the anthropologist F. T. (Ted) Cloak who argued in 1975 for the existence of learnt cultural instructions (cultural corpuscles or i-culture) resulting in material artefacts (m-culture) such as wheels. The argument thereby introduced as to whether cultural evolution requires neurological instructions continues to the present day .
Unilinear theory In the 19th century cultural evolution was thought to follow a unilineal pattern whereby all cultures progressively develop over time. The underlying assumption was that Cultural Evolution itself led to the growth and development of civilization.
Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century declared
indigenous culture to have "no arts, no letters, no society" and he described facing life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He, like other scholars of his time, reasoned that everything positive and esteemed resulted from the slow development away from this poor lowly state of being.
Leslie A. White focused on the idea that different cultures had differing amounts of 'energy', White argued that with greater energy societies could possess greater levels of social differentiation. He rejected separation of modern societies from primitive societies. In contrast, Steward argued, much like Darwin's theory of evolution, that culture adapts to its surroundings. 'Evolution and Culture' by Sahlins and Service is an attempt to condense the views of White and Steward into a universal theory of multilinear evolution.
Memetics Richard Dawkins' 1976 book
The Selfish Gene proposed the concept of the "
meme", which is analogous to that of the gene. A meme is an idea-replicator that can reproduce itself, by jumping from mind to mind via the process of one human learning from another via imitation. Along with the "virus of the mind" image, the meme might be thought of as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.), which spreads among the individuals of a population. The variation and selection in the copying process enables Darwinian evolution among memeplexes and therefore is a candidate for a mechanism of cultural evolution. As memes are "selfish" in that they are "interested" only in their own success, they could well be in conflict with their biological host's genetic interests. Consequently, a "meme's eye" view might account for certain evolved cultural traits, such as suicide terrorism, that are successful at spreading the meme of martyrdom, but fatal to their hosts and often other people.
Evolutionary epistemology "Evolutionary epistemology" can also refer to a theory that applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human knowledge and argues that units of knowledge themselves, particularly scientific theories, evolve according to selection. In that case, a theory, like the
germ theory of disease, becomes more or less credible according to changes in the body of knowledge surrounding it. One of the hallmarks of evolutionary epistemology is the notion that empirical testing alone does not justify the pragmatic value of scientific theories but rather that social and methodological processes select those theories with the closest "fit" to a given problem. The mere fact that a theory has survived the most rigorous empirical tests available does not, in the calculus of probability, predict its ability to survive future testing.
Karl Popper used
Newtonian physics as an example of a body of theories so thoroughly confirmed by testing as to be considered unassailable, but they were nevertheless improved on by
Albert Einstein's bold insights into the nature of space-time. For the evolutionary epistemologist, all theories are true only provisionally, regardless of the degree of empirical testing they have survived. Many consider that Popper gave evolutionary epistemology its first comprehensive treatment, but Donald T. Campbell had coined the phrase in 1974.
Dual inheritance theory == Criticism and controversy ==