Sociocultural evolutionism: An untried theory†

The author argues that sociocultural evolutionism has never been an evolutionary theory in the sense in which that model is employed in the life sciences, but that instead it sought natural sequential laws of history or employed an analogy with a developing organism rather than with phylogenetic change. Biology, on the other hand, in embracing polythetic or cluster as opposed to Aristotelian classification, implicitly abandoned this approach only to recover it in theoretical population genetics. Biology today remains a bifurcated science with lawful change occurring within gene pools and abrupt historically specific transitions occurring between them. It is argued that this example holds many lessons for the social sciences and that a truly evolutionary model contains solutions to the diffusionist, Boasian, functionalist and conflict critiques of classical sociocultural evolutionism. Some of the kinds of evidence which would be relevant for the verification of such a theory are discussed and it is concluded that biology may be important for the social sciences not because of the reductionist hopes of sociobiology proper but because of the example it provides in how to describe and theorize about an historical process.