ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2011
Mode and tempo in the evolution of socio-political organization: reconciling 'Darwinian' and 'Spencerian' evolutionary approaches in anthropology.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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20 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Innovation and social transmission in experimental micro-societies: exploring the scope of cumulative culture in young children.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- The extension of biology through culture.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2017Article
- A Phylogenetic Comparative Study of Bantu Kinship Terminology Finds Limited Support for Its Co-Evolution with Social Organisation.PloS one · 2016Article
- A Life-Cycle Model of Human Social Groups Produces a U-Shaped Distribution in Group Size.PloS one · 2015Article
- The co-evolution of language and emotions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2012Review
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- The rebirth of kinship: evolutionary and quantitative approaches in the revitalization of a dying field.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2011Article
- The scope of culture in chimpanzees, humans and ancestral apes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Review
- Culture evolves.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
- How copying affects the amount, evenness and persistence of cultural knowledge: insights from the social learning strategies tournament.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
- The evolution of the diversity of cultures.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2011Article
- Evolution of initiation rites during the Austronesian dispersal.Science progressArticle
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Abstract
Traditional investigations of the evolution of human social and political institutions trace their ancestry back to nineteenth century social scientists such as Herbert Spencer, and have concentrated on the increase in socio-political complexity over time. More recent studies of cultural evolution have been explicitly informed by Darwinian evolutionary theory and focus on the transmission of cultural traits between individuals. These two approaches to investigating cultural change are often seen as incompatible. However, we argue that many of the defining features and assumptions of 'Spencerian' cultural evolutionary theory represent testable hypotheses that can and should be tackled within a broader 'Darwinian' framework. In this paper we apply phylogenetic comparative techniques to data from Austronesian-speaking societies of Island South-East Asia and the Pacific to test hypotheses about the mode and tempo of human socio-political evolution. We find support for three ideas often associated with Spencerian cultural evolutionary theory: (i) political organization has evolved through a regular sequence of forms, (ii) increases in hierarchical political complexity have been more common than decreases, and (iii) political organization has co-evolved with the wider presence of hereditary social stratification.
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