Evolution, Cultural

Concepts of Cultural Evolution: The Evolutionist Paradigm

Ideas about the evolution of human culture were formulated for the first time at the end of the 19th century as a logical application of evolutionism to a peculiar branch of cognitive philosophy that was based in turn on an idea of development (mostly progressive in its character) of human beings and human culture over time.

Early ideas about cultural evolution as the essence of human history were expressed by Edward Burnett Tylor in 1865 in his Researches Into the Early History of Mankind, in which basic postulates of further understanding of this phenomenon in ethnology, cultural, and social anthropology were expressed. According to Tylor, in all parts of the world, human culture gradually evolves from its savage stage through barbarism toward civilization; cultural differences among different peoples can be explained by the fact that these groups represent different stages of cultural evolution and have no racial or any other implication. Cultural achievements (innovations) could be invented by the cultural group itself or inherited from previous generations; alternatively, they could be also adopted from neighbors.

In a series of subsequent scientific works (Primitive Culture, 1871; Anthropology, 1881) Tylor improved his understanding of cultural evolution as an immanent process of gradual development that is identical with cultural progress and inevitably means steady perfection of certain cultural phenomena over time. Notwithstanding differences with the so-called degeneration theory of Joseph de Maistre, widely popular at that time, Tylor did not totally exclude the possibility of regressive changes in human culture caused by historical and natural catastrophes.

Based on his own original definition of the historical and social essence of culture taken as a general anthropological concept, Tylor provided numerous examples of so-called evolutionary rows, in frames of which particular genres of cultural phenomena and artifacts were arranged in certain sequences, beginning with their simplest form up to contemporary highly developed versions. The “doctrine of survivals,” or living cultural fossils (archaic cultural elements preserved from one stage of cultural evolution into the next), was another instrument applied by Tylor to prove that changes of culture through time were progressive and gradual.

An original understanding of cultural evolution as a cyclic process was proposed by another early evolutionist, Adolf Bastian. He interpreted the history of humankind as a continuous round of events that were altered only when new challenges (“irritants”) provoked a new turn in the evolutionary process. The more isolated a group is in its life cycle, the more unalterable its culture is, thus providing few chances for evolution. According to Bastian, the deeper the connection certain collectives have with their geographic habitat, the weaker the evolutionary prospects are for their culture.

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