From The Enlightenment to N-Lightenment

May 8, 2006 by Michael Buerger
Original link:  http://www.kurzweilai.net/from-the-enlightenment-to-n-lightenment

The criminal potentials inherent in molecular manufacturing include powerful new illegal drugs, mass murder via compromised assembly codes, and a “killer virus” crossing out of cyberspace into the physical realm. A criminal-justice futurist examines the possibilities.

On top of my physical desk sits a copy of Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, 1660-1886, Humphrey Jennings’ “imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution.” On my computer desktop are essays by the authors of this volume (and the previous one¹), the possible precursors of Pan-nano-daemonium: The Coming of the Micro-Machine.

In one of those essays, “The Need for Limits,” Chris Phoenix speaks of the Enlightenment in terms of a synergy: enhanced human productivity with machines, partially supporting a philosophical examination of the human condition. Though certainly that, the Enlightenment also was a watershed period when the economic foundations of the European economy changed, and the authority of Revealed Truth was forced to contend with the authority of Rational Thought and its practical cousin, Scientific Inquiry. The shifts in the economy created a massive transformation of social life, from agrarian to urban. The current era has parallels to all of these forces, movements already in play but not yet complete…and in some cases not fully articulated.

As a peripheral member of a futurists group² in my professional field (policing, and more broadly, criminal justice), I have noticed that futurists tend to be concerned with the end results of trends, the state of things ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. By contrast, I am more concerned with the collateral damage we may sustain in the process of getting to those future states from where we are now.

This essay approaches that interstitial state in four sections. The first section looks at the control of the technology; the second, for the criminal potentials inherent in it. Using the template of the Enlightenment, the third section looks at the darker channels of social transformation, particularly the impact on work and social worth. The fourth section draws an admittedly leap-of-faith parallel between the Enlightenment’s impact on religious authority, and technology’s impact upon the authority of economic capital and law.

Nanotechnology holds remarkable potential to change the world, but like most recent technologies, it emerges within a larger system of laws, codes of conduct, and social expectations developed for previous capacities. Those mechanisms will shape its emerging uses, possibly retarding or constraining the applications of the technology in undesirable ways. At issue is whether micro-level processing will be merely one more tool (and thus alter our lives incrementally), or a Promethean breakthrough that will alter human existence in profound ways. My interest, as one who stands outside the Halls of Science looking in, tends to center on the possibilities that I can understand from a layman’s perspective.

Trying to grasp in layman’s terms the implications of a new and only marginally understood technology leads to a search for analogies, framing the new in terms of the familiar (for good or ill).

Control

As a non-scientist, the most salient question for me is, “When do I get to play with the new toy?” Given the general limits of corporate use of nanotechnology, the first new toy that will become available to me most likely will be the desktop assembler, or personal nanofactory (PN).

The most knowledgeable members of CRN’s Global Task Force³ have engaged in a lengthy discussion about desktop manufacturing and its social consequences, and as of this writing, there seems to be a lack of consensus about the capacity, and thus the full impact, of PNs. If we accept the position of the optimists, and expect fully-capable devices to be available in the not-too-distant future, secondary questions arise: Will the devices be provided in fully-capable form (probably transformative), or will their functionality be curtailed in defense of the corporate profits to be derived from them? If the latter, how will control be maintained? Some answers are perhaps to be found in current trends, since the courts often look to historical analogs in dealing with new issues.

If we posit that desktop manufacturing becomes widely available, as seems inevitable, the dominant forces of the economy have two avenues of recourse to maintain control over the new technology for monetary benefit. The first will be the control of raw materials for molecular assembly, which appears to share the delivery profile of heating fuels in contemporary life. More important is the second area, already suggested by Phoenix: patents and copyrights.⁴

The development of nanotechnology is taking place within a corporate nest of ideas and resources (much like licensed computer software development), with some independent researchers and consortia operating on a freeware basis. Molecular assembly at any sort of commercial or individual level will require patterns to guide assembly, and these are likely to be controlled by patents. The majority of patents are almost certain to be controlled by corporate interests. Renewable user site licenses, comparable to commercial software packages, are the most likely form of retaining economic benefit for a corporate entity. One of the possible ways of maintaining economic control over site licenses would be some form of cyber-degradable program that self-destructs after a finite period, and must be renewed. For example, a user could download (or purchase on a one-use or renewable-use media platform) the code that would allow the manufacture of only a certain number of rolls of toilet paper by a personal nanofactory.

Patents and the fundamental premises of intellectual property are already under challenge, but the challenges have been met with an equally strong legal response anchored in precedent. The courts have handed the reins of control over digital recordings of music to the star-making machinery behind the popular songs through conservative interpretation of intellectual property statutes. The huge profits to be made from licensing technological advancements for industry virtually assures that the field of nanotechnology will be similarly bound.

The most recent Promethean technology, file-sharing, theoretically stood to liberate music from the chains of capital. However, Napster, Kaaza, Grokster, and their lesser clones have lost the legal battles, and the technology has been co-opted by industry giants into new distribution-for-profit mechanisms. Corporations and universities alike write eminent domain over patents and patentable discoveries into their employment contracts, and genetic patterns and discoveries are subject to copyright. Unknown garage bands and the metaphorical garage workshops of independent researchers still can be found beyond the current reach of over-grasping capital, but only until they become good or useful enough to attract attention.

As new genetic “building block” discoveries and other chemical compounds are placed under patent, the copyright has become the new castle moat or the new dog in the manger (depending upon one’s perspective), intended to keep easily-duplicated “properties” under the control of their owners. Paradoxically, only those products deemed legitimate are defended by patents and lawsuits so vigorously; illegal products and contraband are not. Corporate interests have far deeper pockets and a true metric for measuring loss and injury. There is greater freedom in the illicit trades, where control of trafficked, harmful artifacts rests with hugely inefficient, underfunded, and understaffed public enforcement agencies.

The exponential explosion of child pornography (and its hate- and racial supremacy-based counterparts) over the Internet is a cautionary tale in its own right. Like the illicit drug trade in the physical world, neither child porn nor hate-mongering is impervious to law enforcement efforts, but the occasional victories of enforcement seem to have little long-term effect on the larger industry or movement. The underground distribution of molecular patterns for assembly might easily be accomplished by the same mechanisms, like the basic virus codes that any script-kiddie can download, tinker with, and release back into the wild.

While the first generation of personal nanofactories probably will come with a fixed number of pre-programmed patterns, market forces will demand versatility. Units will need a capacity to acquire new assembly patterns as they are developed, and there seem to be few options beyond what is now available for computer data. Patterns may be downloaded over hardwired or Wi-Fi networks, or be manually transferred by whatever media replace the current disk drives and flash memory sticks. Each format would spawn a black market of unknown proportions, and with the black markets come the accompanying risks of epidemic and pandemic consequences of criminal use.

Criminal Potentials

We should anticipate that a new drug industry will piggyback on the basic molecular assembly phenomenon, and the potential implications for the social fabric are enormous. One of the most desirable benefits of nanotechnology is that of precise targeting of therapeutic drugs; however, the same technology will have associated benefits for illegal pharmacopoeia. While the complexity of the patterns most likely will delay this until a second or third-level level of PN development, once the basic patterns for psychotropic drugs are understood and the assembly technology sufficiently enabled, individual drug manufacture is almost certain to become a social tsunami. There are strong analogies to the current methamphetamine epidemic: less than two decades ago, the manufacture of crystal methamphetamine required a well-equipped clandestine lab, a chemist, a criminal organization for protection and distribution. Today, meth is the new bathtub gin, easily made in any number of Rube Goldberg processes in basements, trailers, campers, garages, or pickup trucks.

Unlike methamphetamine, a micro-assembly drug manufacture process would need only the basic molecular components, not the more elaborate precursor chemicals (like pseudoephedrine) whose control is now part of our anti-drug strategy. That suggests a much greater availability, with corollary hazards of greater social experimentation and conceivably even poly-drug experimentation. The toxic byproducts of meth labs are threats to law enforcement agencies, the families of meth addicts, and neighborhoods. We do not yet know the degree to which micro-manufacture byproducts will be toxic, if at all.

Illicit micro-manufacture may be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, effectively eliminating organized crime from the market may lessen the toxic effects of the war on drugs: the corruption involved with importation of drugs, and the violence of competing drug markets. At least potentially, even the criminogenic nature of drug dependency may be lessened: since the base materials would likely be the same as for legitimate micro-manufacture, it is less likely that a specialized, higher-priced supply chain would be necessary. The dynamics of that supply chain create additional crimes: violence among criminal enterprises competing for turf high, and both personal and property crime committed by addicts desperate to meet the dealer’s price. Absent the supply market, the cost of personally manufactured drugs would be cheaper, and the risks of their creation considerably lower in terms of legal discovery and interdiction. However, the potential free access to addictive and mind-altering substances will almost certainly exacerbate the social problems associated with the addictions and dependencies that result. The same delivery method could surreptitiously create markets for new designer drugs, addictive and involuntarily piggybacked on legitimately disseminated nanoproduct codes. The number of “what ifs” that need to be resolved before either scenario happens leave the possibilities within the realm of fiction for now, but if the analogies to the Internet hold true, they must be anticipated as a contingency.

Should we ever develop a drug-based cure for the addictions, of course, it might be to our collective advantage to attempt to disseminate it via whatever outlaw networks and mechanisms develop, the angelic counterpart to the demonic assault-by-micro-drugs of the original scenario. Therapeutic nano-rehab, even at the time of a medical crisis, may not be sufficient to stem the drug crisis, however. Involuntary detoxification has a poor history of neutralizing the psychological dependencies that drive post-sobriety returns to addictive substances. The “evil twin” of involuntary detoxification is involuntary addiction.

Lurking beyond therapeutic use is the possibility of totalitarian control using the same methods. The Promethean paradox that attends all new technologies is even more pronounced for those that escape Newtonian-level detection. Medical research is racing ahead in its understanding of neural processes, including the sites in the brain responsible for certain behaviors. As nanomedicine develops capacities for intervening in psychological dependencies or other maladies, it also develops the capacity for inducing mind control or other forms of incapacitation.

Downstream, there is also the potential for mass murder via compromised assembly codes. In the physical world, tainting a medicine with poison can only be done efficiently at the factory source, and even then must bypass or defeat stringent quality control measures. Any other corruption can take place only on a relatively small scale. The introduction of a virulent and unsuspected corruption of a drug assembly code is not so limited. It shares more in common with the computer virus than the Tylenol poisoner. Since black market codes originate and enter the data stream outside the domain of legitimate quality control measures, and the drug-using community is unlikely to give designer drug codes great scrutiny (at least in the initial rounds), “massassination” (mass assassination or “pharmaceutical cleansing”) via bogus codes is a distinct possibility in a networked distribution system. It would challenge both medical institutions and law enforcement agents. It is admittedly an outside possibility, requiring a rare combination of technological savvy and social alienation, but the world since September 2001 has been dealing with more and more “one in a bazillion” scenarios. Nothing should be taken off the table in terms of exploring, and preparing for, unpleasant misappropriation of technology.

To a certain degree, the massassination scenario depends upon the nature of the dissemination of manufacture codes. The most logical assumption is that distribution of product blueprints for desktop manufacturing will be done via the Internet or its successor entity. The current attempts to defeat music and film pirate copies would have serious analogs in any new process that challenged traditional sources of corporate and investment income, especially unrestricted use of molecular assembly technology. The Spy vs. Spy battle between corporate interests and hacktivism will doubtless continue in the nano- and micro-arenas as in cyberspace. Even if controls evolve another way, such as physical distribution of codes on one-use portable media like the flash memory stick, markets for stolen and counterfeit products will emerge, just as the current computer viruses and malware are piggybacked on the legitimate use of the Internet. Beating security encryptions to transform a one-use code into a version capable of electronic dissemination will be an instant challenge for the criminal and black-hat hacking communities.

There are some differences, though. While the viruses and Trojan horses that hector cyberspace have consequences ranging from irritating (the Blue Screen of Death) to life-changing (severe financial crises resulting from identity theft), it is only at the most extreme range that they could be considered life-threatening. Identity theft that labels an innocent citizen as a dangerous criminal has some potential for creating life-threatening situations, but most of the jeopardy is financial or social. Viruses and worms may take down a network or three, or transform the World Wide Web into the World Wide Wait with deleterious consequences for commerce, but they do not directly assault the networks’ users. A corrupted, mislabeled, or maliciously designed micro-manufacture code could “break the fourth wall,” crossing out of cyberspace into the physical realm.

The closest parallel in the physical world, the batch of bad heroin that kills users in clusters, does not really provide an accurate analog for a malicious assembly code incident. Relatively few seek heroin under any circumstances, and no one but the most desperate heroin addict would seek out bad heroin (as has happened in some isolated cases). The first “killer virus” loose in whatever network provides product codes for PNs will affect hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocents, whether it comes as a terrorist strike or an unintended consequence of a hacking adventure. No one will have to seek it: once in the wild, it will arrive unbidden in the In Box.

Defenses to such a scenario potentially exist, but security measures are one of the most attractive fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. Like contemporary Internet defenses, and the laws passed to outlaw new designer drugs, defensive maneuvers almost always stimulate new offensive attacks. Any combination of zeros and ones, in any transportation medium, can be hijacked and compromised: the track record of Internet security does not bode well for the free and easy commercial transfer of assembly codes for the molecules-up creation of products.

Social

During the Industrial Revolution in England, improved agricultural efficiencies accelerated the process of enclosure, dislocating the rural population no longer needed for raising and harvesting crops. Simultaneous improvements in the production of iron and steel, in weaving, and other areas began to transform cottage industries into factory-based industries, and urbanization rapidly changed the face of the country. The nature of trade shifted from one-off mercantile ventures and royal charters to stable capital for long-term ventures. Factory industries supplanted cottage industries, local artisans, and craft guilds, but the concentration of work in brick-and-mortar containers still left some out of work: the notorious “surplus labor” that kept wages low. The expansion of the new manufacturing base managed to absorb surplus labor for some time, until the advent of widespread robotics in the second half of the twentieth century.

A robust generation of personal nanofactories may very well bifurcate commerce into those items that can be manufactured at home and those which still must be purchased through the familiar retail supply chains. While a certain amount of jobs will be created around the transportation of raw materials for PNs, they will be paltry in comparison to the jobs the devices displace in manufacture, transport, and sales. Globalization has already imposed a certain amount of social dislocation in the manufacturing sectors; a maturing nanotechnology could very well trigger a long-term social dislocation not seen since the English migration from the newly-enclosed farmlands to the new factories of the Industrial Revolution.

The need for human labor seems to be diminishing at an accelerated rate inverse to Ray Kurzweil’s description⁵ of the advance of technology. The shift from human muscle to animal muscle took millennia; from animal to human-guided mechanical, centuries; from human-guided to robotic, decades; and the emergence of computer-directed manufacture seems measured in years if not months. Human society, however, still is anchored in a near-medieval paradigm where social worth is measured by the type and extent of work one engages in. The pecking order of work starts at the menial and dirty level, maids and animal rendering and manual labor (the province of illegal immigrants and paroled convicts) comparable to carrying the hod. The next step up is the marginally cleaner and less taxing “service economy” of McJobs, which jousts with the decline of blue-collar union-affiliated manufacturing jobs for the next higher rung (salaries and benefits alone give the advantage to unionized jobs, regardless of the decades-long decline in union membership, though the recent perturbations in the airline and automobile industries in particular, and corporate pension plans generally, leave even that in doubt). Above that are the traditional white-collar jobs, but the new aristocracy—sharply defined by the accelerating concentration of wealth in at least American society—is comprised of those who “let their money work for them,” the investing class, the owners of the means of production.

Work is devalued in other ways: in the symbolic change of language in which employees are now called “associates,” with a presumed stake in the corporate success that is not mirrored anywhere in the reward system; in the stock market rewarding corporate actions that trim the workforce; and in the precipitous erosion of industry-sponsored pensions. Human labor has been, or is in the process of being, effectively decoupled from the part of the economy that is valued. The long-term consequences of this are by no means clear, but the advent of a personal –nanofactories will not necessarily create a widespread leisure class.

Another of the volumes on my physical desktop is William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. It deals with the “left behind” problem of those under a double burden of low social status and of being dependent upon jobs in industries that have moved elsewhere (to Alabama, to Mexico, or to China). While the analogy to a nanotechnology shift need not be exact, Wilson’s depictions and analyses offer a powerful warning we may need to confront within a generation: what are the social consequences when there are no alternative employment outlets for surplus labor? American history of the 20^th century holds small hope that our social attitudes will change rapidly: the unemployed, underemployed, and “idle” always have been despised for not somehow rising above the crushing weight of social and economic forces beyond their control. Revolution traditionally has been pointless or counterproductive, and Cite Soliel endures in its multiple forms around the globe despite the potential and promises of globalization, the Green Revolution, and countless other advances.

It is tempting to suggest that nano-communes, with internal self-sufficiency that leaven the worst effects of industrial-era unemployment, will free the human spirit for more cerebral endeavors. Futures are almost never equally distributed when they arrive, and Utopian dreams of that kind have a history of being measured in months rather than decades or eras. It is difficult to envision the rise of a labor movement comparable to those of nineteenth-century Britain and the United States; it is almost easier to predict the widespread distribution of limited-capacity PNs as a form of social welfare (and social placation of the underclass).

Larger questions arise out of this potential for increased social marginality. The income gap between rich and poor has been widening for more than two decades. Globalization has transformed the American economy, and the household economy has suffered as a result. The degree to which nanotechnology, the Internet, and other technologies accelerate or buffer the social decoupling of work and status is still an undiscovered country. If the cumulative effect is acceleration, we need to anticipate the range of human adaptations that will follow. If one no longer is attached in any meaningful way to an economy and the political ideology that supports it, how long can that authority hold one’s allegiance? And what are the alternatives if the allegiance cannot otherwise be reinforced?

Authority

Although it is a commonplace to think of religious worship as timeless, it actually undergoes periodic major shifts, often triggered by secular events. In the first century of the Common Era, the nature of revelation itself was transformed from the direct presence of a transcendent deity to the interpretation of a written Scripture. For Jews, the destruction of the Holy of Holies in the Second Temple ended the traditional direct contact of the High Priests. For Christians, the sudden absence of their Messiah from the streets of Jerusalem transformed the Judaic concept of messianic return into an entirely new understanding the relationship between human beings and their Creator.

The struggle for primacy between the Catholic Church and secular governments began soon after Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire. It continued through the Investiture Controversy of the Middle Ages, and was the decisive factor in the success of the Reformation. However, the waning of the dominance of religion was a process begun centuries earlier by resistance (“heresy”) within the Church itself, beginning with the Great Schism of the Eastern Orthodox traditions. The purification movements that created monastic orders within the Church presaged the later coming of the Reformation, which relocated purifying reform outside the Church and ended the sole authority of Rome to arbitrate Christian salvation. The secular challenges arising from the Enlightenment remain at play in the contemporary questions of Church and State, Science and Belief, and authority to define human relations. Increasing secularity jousts with the rise of fundamentalism and of sects, undermining traditional “mainstream” churches.

Whether the maturing of nanotechnology will impact the continuing struggle of religious authority is unclear. The potential is there, certainly, as the manipulation of matter at the molecular level comes perilously close to “playing God,” especially where it might affect what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and cybernetic enhancements pose imminent challenges to the religious understandings of “human,” and nanotechnology bids to play a major role within each of those technologies. Public discourse in areas where the definitions of “life” are most contended are fueled as much by symbolism and metaphor as by science; misapprehensions and misunderstandings about nanotechnology may well be fuel for new battlefronts in what has been dubbed “the culture wars.”

During the Reformation, the monolithic authority of the Church of Rome was transformed into a limited number of Protestant denominations. The existence of each one allowed anyone to resist the Authority of the Catholic Church, and beyond that, the authority of any other church. (The earliest attempt to incorporate a denial of secular authority, under the banner of “No Bishops, No Barons,” was ruthlessly suppressed by secular forces, whose worldly enforcement had more immediate clout than the afterlife of religion.) The transformation of monolithic Authority into micro-authority created a market for allegiances. The old concept of rules defined and enforced by a monopolistic Church—enforced by excommunication, the denial of sacraments, and the resulting condemnation to an infernal afterlife—gave way to a free market of ideas and selection of, rather than submission to, authority that continues to this day. Catholic priests who wish to marry may find refuge in the Anglican communion. Protestant churches may fracture over rules of control and worship, and denominations may enter schism over ecclesiastical matters, as witness the current strain in the Anglican communion over the issue of gay bishops and clergy, and the social acceptance of homosexuality. Other issues less anchored in scriptural interpretation, like finances, may also trigger the sundering of ways for a congregation.

Using this as an analogy for secular considerations, it is an interesting exercise in speculation to consider whether nanotechnology generally, and desktop manufacturing in particular, will lead to nano-communes that eventually decouple individuals from the larger economy and the political system so closely tied to it. Such communities would be the natural descendants of the self-sufficient medieval monastic orders, the utopian communities of the mid-1800s, and the communes of the 1960s and beyond. Unlike their predecessors, they could be “off the grid” in important ways, but not necessarily withdrawn from the larger society.

In other realms, there is some additional promise in the potential for using nanotechnology as a recycling outlet. Molecular disassembly as a precursor to molecular assembly may be a completely different set of technological difficulties, and raises a series of questions about disposal of nonessential elements. The Newtonian-world vision of a methane burnoff is impractical at the molecular level, and the state of byproduct disposal is unclear at this point. If unwanted matter can be converted to energy, and stored for use, nanotechnology could change the nature of both recycling and of power. If each household ran on a “green power” combination of solar energy and molecular conversions, entire industries might be transformed. It stretches the imagination a bit to think that factories could be powered with wind, solar, and nano power, so the traditional power industries might not disappear, but important sectors might achieve relative independence from them.

At the same time, the intellectual property forces would still work to bind nano­based anything to the existing corporate world. If nano goes “into the wild,” via bootleg or Robin Hood dissemination, it could weaken the corporate hold, inspire a widespread law enforcement crackdown on piracy, or dissolve society into above-ground and Morlock-like subcultures that coexist because they have little reason to compete. In any of these scenarios, nanotechnology by itself is not an actor: it is a tool of other interests, and its impacts are dampened or enhanced by the decisions of social engineering and politics. But if the end result is the alienation of large masses of citizens from the engines of the economy and the icons of government, the costs and secondary developments will be far ranging.

Nanotechnology has its own limits. A host of major decisions in the social realm will not be changed to any great degree by nanotechnology. It will not protect the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge (indeed, if natural gas is the first and basic fuel for desktop manufacturing, it may exacerbate the pressures on the ANWR), nor will it stop the denuding of the Amazon rain forest. It will not eliminate prejudice, nor resolve the multiple questions of authority and Authority that attend the modern estate of humankind. We can predict safely that when this particular future of mature nanotechnology arrives, it will not be equally distributed, and may easily be a weapon of social dominance rather than the delivery vehicle of social equity. Even the utopian visions of Gene Roddenberry included a period of troubled dystopia, which Alvin Toffler captured in Future Shock: “the premature arrival of the future… the imposition of a new culture on an old one” that results in “human beings…. increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal with their environments.”

Which leaves me almost where I began: What do I make of this nanotechnology thing? I suspect it will be very much like its predecessors, a potentially transformative technology that will be bound on the bed of Procrustes of the older social and economic systems that midwifed it. Because of that, it has considerable potential to be more Pandora’s Box than Holy Grail in the early going. Assuming that its byproducts do not poison the groundwater or become an airborne grey goo, it will almost have to achieve an outlaw status (or its more egalitarian potential championed by those who will be deemed outlaws) before it reaches a socially transformative cusp. In the near term, whether I buy it in a store or make it with my nanofactory, I will still have to pay for toilet paper.

Michael Buerger, an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Bowling Green State University and a former police officer, is a member of the Futures Working Group, a collaboration between the FBI and the Society of Police Futurists International. His broad interests mainly concern the impact of large-scale social changes and reactions to them.

¹ Nanotechnology Perceptions: A Review of Ultraprecision Engineering and Nanotechnology (Collegium Basilea, Basel, Switzerland), Volume 2, Number 1a

² The Futures Working Group, a collaboration between the FBI and the Society of Police Futurists International (http://www.policefuturists.org/futures/fwg.htm)

³ Global Task Force on Implications and Policy (http://www.crnano.org/CTF.htm), organized by the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology

⁴ “The Need For Limits” (http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-need-for-limits)

⁵ The Singularity is Near (http://singularity.com/)

Guns, Germs, and Steel

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Cover of the first edition, featuring the painting Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru by John Everett Millais
Author	Jared Diamond
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Geography, social evolution, ethnology, cultural diffusion
Published	1997 (W. W. Norton)
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback), audio CD, audio cassette, audio download
Pages	480 pages (1st edition, hardcover)
ISBN	0-393-03891-2 (1st edition, hardcover)
OCLC	35792200
Dewey Decimal	303.4 21
LC Class	HM206 .D48 1997
Preceded by	Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality
Followed by	Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (also titled Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years) is a 1997 transdisciplinary non-fiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, Guns, Germs, and Steel won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate primarily in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures (for example, by facilitating commerce and trade between different cultures) and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.

Synopsis

The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic superiority of Europeans. Yali asked, using the local term "cargo" for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" (p. 14)

Diamond realized the same question seemed to apply elsewhere: "People of Eurasian origin ... dominate ... the world in wealth and power." Other peoples, after having thrown off colonial domination, still lag in wealth and power. Still others, he says, "have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists." (p. 15)

The peoples of other continents (sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. He believes this is due to these societies' technologic and immunologic advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last Ice Age.

Title

The book's title is a reference to the means by which farm-based societies conquered populations of other areas and maintained dominance, despite sometimes being vastly outnumbered – superior weapons provided immediate military superiority (guns); Eurasian diseases weakened and reduced local populations, who had no immunity, making it easier to maintain control over them (germs); and durable means of transport (steel) enabled imperialism.

Diamond argues geographic, climatic and environmental characteristics which favored early development of stable agricultural societies ultimately led to immunity to diseases endemic in agricultural animals and the development of powerful, organized states capable of dominating others.

Outline of theory

Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions.

The first step towards civilization is the move from nomadic hunter-gatherer to rooted agrarian society. Several conditions are necessary for this transition to occur: access to high-carbohydrate vegetation that endures storage; a climate dry enough to allow storage; and access to animals docile enough for domestication and versatile enough to survive captivity. Control of crops and livestock leads to food surpluses. Surpluses free people to specialize in activities other than sustenance and support population growth. The combination of specialization and population growth leads to the accumulation of social and technologic innovations which build on each other. Large societies develop ruling classes and supporting bureaucracies, which in turn lead to the organization of nation-states and empires.^[2]

Although agriculture arose in several parts of the world, Eurasia gained an early advantage due to the greater availability of suitable plant and animal species for domestication. In particular, Eurasia has barley, two varieties of wheat, and three protein-rich pulses for food; flax for textiles; and goats, sheep, and cattle. Eurasian grains were richer in protein, easier to sow, and easier to store than American maize or tropical bananas.

As early Western Asian civilizations began to trade, they found additional useful animals in adjacent territories, most notably horses and donkeys for use in transport. Diamond identifies 13 species of large animals over 100 pounds (45 kg) domesticated in Eurasia, compared with just one in South America (counting the llama and alpaca as breeds within the same species) and none at all in the rest of the world. Australia and North America suffered from a lack of useful animals due to extinction, probably by human hunting, shortly after the end of the Pleistocene, whilst the only domesticated animals in New Guinea came from the East Asian mainland during the Austronesian settlement some 4,000–5,000 years ago. Sub-Saharan biological relatives of the horse including zebras and onagers proved untameable; and although African elephants can be tamed, it is very difficult to breed them in captivity;^[2][3] Diamond describes the small number of domesticated species (14 out of 148 "candidates") as an instance of the Anna Karenina principle: many promising species have just one of several significant difficulties that prevent domestication. He also makes the intriguing argument that all large mammals that could be domesticated, have been.^[4]

Eurasians domesticated goats and sheep for hides, clothing, and cheese; cows for milk; bullocks for tillage of fields and transport; and benign animals such as pigs and chickens. Large domestic animals such as horses and camels offered the considerable military and economic advantages of mobile transport.

Continental axes according to Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel.

Eurasia's large landmass and long east-west distance increased these advantages. Its large area provided it with more plant and animal species suitable for domestication, and allowed its people to exchange both innovations and diseases. Its east-west orientation allowed breeds domesticated in one part of the continent to be used elsewhere through similarities in climate and the cycle of seasons. The Americas had difficulty adapting crops domesticated at one latitude for use at other latitudes (and, in North America, adapting crops from one side of the Rocky Mountains to the other). Similarly, Africa was fragmented by its extreme variations in climate from north to south: crops and animals that flourished in one area never reached other areas where they could have flourished, because they could not survive the intervening environment. Europe was the ultimate beneficiary of Eurasia's east-west orientation: in the first millennium BCE, the Mediterranean areas of Europe adopted Southwestern Asia's animals, plants, and agricultural techniques; in the first millennium CE, the rest of Europe followed suit.^[2][3]

The plentiful supply of food and the dense populations that it supported made division of labor possible. The rise of nonfarming specialists such as craftsmen and scribes accelerated economic growth and technological progress. These economic and technological advantages eventually enabled Europeans to conquer the peoples of the other continents in recent centuries by using the guns and steel of the book's title.

Eurasia's dense populations, high levels of trade, and living in close proximity to livestock resulted in widespread transmission of diseases, including from animals to humans. Smallpox, measles, and influenza were the result of close proximity between dense populations of animals and humans. Natural selection forced Eurasians to develop immunity to a wide range of pathogens. When Europeans made contact with the Americas, European diseases (to which Americans had no immunity) ravaged the indigenous American population, rather than the other way around (the "trade" in diseases was a little more balanced in Africa and southern Asia: endemic malaria and yellow fever made these regions notorious as the "white man's grave";^[5] and syphilis may have originated in the Americas).^[6] The European diseases – the germs of the book's title – decimated indigenous populations so that relatively small numbers of Europeans could maintain their dominance.^[2][3]

Diamond also proposes geographical explanations for why western European societies, rather than other Eurasian powers such as China, have been the dominant colonizers,^[2][7] claiming Europe's geography favored balkanization into smaller, closer, nation-states, bordered by natural barriers of mountains, rivers, and coastline. Threats posed by immediate neighbours ensured governments that suppressed economic and technological progress soon corrected their mistakes or were outcompeted relatively quickly, whilst the region's leading powers changed over time. Other advanced cultures developed in areas whose geography was conducive to large, monolithic, isolated empires, without competitors that might have forced the nation to reverse mistaken policies such as China banning the building of ocean-going ships. Western Europe also benefited from a more temperate climate than Southwestern Asia where intense agriculture ultimately damaged the environment, encouraged desertification, and hurt soil fertility.

Agriculture

Guns, Germs, and Steel argues that cities require an ample supply of food, and thus are dependent on agriculture. As farmers do the work of providing food, division of labor allows others freedom to pursue other functions, such as mining and literacy.

The crucial trap for the development of agriculture is the availability of wild edible plant species suitable for domestication. Farming arose early in the Fertile Crescent since the area had an abundance of wild wheat and pulse species that were nutritious and easy to domesticate. In contrast, American farmers had to struggle to develop corn as a useful food from its probable wild ancestor, teosinte.

Also important to the transition from hunter-gatherer to city-dwelling agrarian societies was the presence of 'large' domesticable animals, raised for meat, work, and long-distance communication. Diamond identifies a mere 14 domesticated large mammal species worldwide. The five most useful (cow, horse, sheep, goat, and pig) are all descendants of species endemic to Eurasia. Of the remaining nine, only two (the llama and alpaca both of South America) are indigenous to a land outside the temperate region of Eurasia.

Due to the Anna Karenina principle, surprisingly few animals are suitable for domestication. Diamond identifies six criteria including the animal being sufficiently docile, gregarious, willing to breed in captivity and having a social dominance hierarchy. Therefore, none of the many African mammals such as the zebra, antelope, cape buffalo, and African elephant were ever domesticated (although some can be tamed, they are not easily bred in captivity). The Holocene extinction event eliminated many of the megafauna that, had they survived, might have become candidate species, and Diamond argues that the pattern of extinction is more severe on continents where animals that had no prior experience of humans were exposed to humans who already possessed advanced hunting techniques (e.g. the Americas and Australia).

Smaller domesticable animals such as dogs, cats, chickens, and guinea pigs may be valuable in various ways to an agricultural society, but will not be adequate in themselves to sustain large-scale agrarian society. An important example is the use of larger animals such as cattle and horses in plowing land, allowing for much greater crop productivity and the ability to farm a much wider variety of land and soil types than would be possible solely by human muscle power. Large domestic animals also have an important role in the transportation of goods and people over long distances, giving the societies that possess them considerable military and economic advantages.

Geography

Diamond also argues that geography shaped human migration, not simply by making travel difficult (particularly by latitude), but by how climates affect where domesticable animals can easily travel and where crops can ideally grow easily due to the sun.

The dominant Out of Africa theory holds that modern humans developed east of the Great Rift Valley of the African continent at one time or another. The Sahara kept people from migrating north to the Fertile Crescent, until later when the Nile River valley became accommodating.

Diamond continues to describe the story of human development up to the modern era, through the rapid development of technology, and its dire consequences on hunter-gathering cultures around the world.

Diamond touches on why the dominant powers of the last 500 years have been West European rather than East Asian (especially Chinese). The Asian areas in which big civilizations arose had geographical features conducive to the formation of large, stable, isolated empires which faced no external pressure to change which led to stagnation. Europe's many natural barriers allowed the development of competing nation-states. Such competition forced the European nations to encourage innovation and avoid technological stagnation.

Germs

In the later context of the European colonization of the Americas, 95% of the indigenous populations are believed to have been killed off by diseases brought by the Europeans. Many were killed by infectious diseases such as smallpox and measles. Similar circumstances were observed in the History of Australia (1788-1850) and in History of South Africa. Aboriginal Australians and the Khoikhoi population were decimated by smallpox, measles, influenza and other diseases.^[8][9]

How was it then that diseases native to the American continents did not kill off Europeans? Diamond posits that the most of these diseases were only developed and sustained in large dense populations in villages and cities; he also states most epidemic diseases evolve from similar diseases of domestic animals. The combined effect of the increased population densities supported by agriculture, and of close human proximity to domesticated animals leading to animal diseases infecting humans, resulted in European societies acquiring a much richer collection of dangerous pathogens to which European people had acquired immunity through natural selection (see the Black Death and other epidemics) during a longer time than was the case for Native American hunter-gatherers and farmers.

He mentions the tropical diseases (mainly malaria) that limited European penetration into Africa as an exception. Endemic infectious diseases were also barriers to European colonisation of Southeast Asia and New Guinea.

Success and failure

Guns, Germs, and Steel focuses on why some populations succeeded. His later book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, focuses on environmental and other factors that have caused some populations to fail. It is a cautionary book.

Intellectual background

In the 1930s, the Annales School in France undertook the study of long-term historical structures by using a synthesis of geography, history, and sociology. Scholars examined the impact of geography, climate, and land use. Although geography had been nearly eliminated as an academic discipline in the United States after the 1960s, several geography-based historical theories were published in the 1990s.^[10]

In 1991, Jared Diamond already considered the question of "why is it that the Eurasians came to dominate other cultures?" in The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (part four).

Reception

Guns, Germs, and Steel won the 1997 Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science.^[11] In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, in recognition of its powerful synthesis of many disciplines, and the Royal Society's Rhône-Poulenc Prize for Science Books.^[12][13] The National Geographic Society produced a documentary of the same title based on the book that was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.^[1]

Academic reviews

In a review of Guns, Germs, and Steel that ultimately commended the book, historian Tom Tomlinson wrote, "Given the magnitude of the task he has set himself, it is inevitable that Professor Diamond uses very broad brush-strokes to fill in his argument."^[14]

Another historian, professor J. R. McNeill, was on the whole complimentary, but thought Diamond oversold geography as an explanation for history and underemphasized cultural autonomy.^[3][15]
In his last book published in 2000, the anthropologist and geographer James Morris Blaut criticized Guns, Germs, and Steel, among other reasons, for reviving the theory of environmental determinism, and described Diamond as an example of a modern Eurocentric historian.^[16] Blaut criticizes Diamond's loose use of the terms "Eurasia" and "innovative", which he believes misleads the reader into presuming that Western Europe is responsible for technological inventions that arose in the Middle East and Asia.^[17]

Harvard International Relations (IR) scholar Stephen Walt called the book "an exhilarating read" and put it on a list of the ten books every IR student should read.^[18]

Berkeley economist Brad DeLong describes the book as a "work of complete and total genius".^[19]
John Brätland, an Austrian school economist of the U.S. Department of the Interior, complained in a Journal of Libertarian Studies article that Guns, Germs, and Steel entirely neglects individual action, concentrating solely on the centralized state; fails to understand how societies form (assessing that societies do not exist or form without a strong government); and ignores various economical institutions, such as monetary exchange that would allow societies to "rationally reckon scarcities and the value of actions required to replace what is depleted through human use". Instead, the author concludes that because there was no sophisticated division of labor, private property rights, and monetary exchange, societies like that on Easter Island could never progress from the nomadic stage to a complex society. Those factors, according to Brätland, are crucial, and at the same time neglected by Diamond.^[20]

Anthropologist Jason Antrosio describes Guns, Germs, and Steel as a form of "academic porn". Diamond's account makes all the factors of European domination a product of a distant and accidental history and has almost no role for human agency–the ability people have to make decisions and influence outcomes. Europeans become inadvertent, accidental conquerors. Natives succumb passively to their fate. "Jared Diamond has done a huge disservice to the telling of human history. He has tremendously distorted the role of domestication and agriculture in that history. Unfortunately his story-telling abilities are so compelling that he has seduced a generation of college-educated readers."^[21]

Other critiques have been made over the author's position on the agricultural revolution.^[22][23] The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is not necessarily a one way process. It has been argued that hunting and gathering represents an adaptive strategy, which may still be exploited, if necessary, when environmental change causes extreme food stress for agriculturalists.^[24] In fact, it is sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies, especially since the widespread adoption of agriculture and resulting cultural diffusion that has occurred in the last 10,000 years.^[25]

Publication

Guns, Germs, and Steel was first published by W. W. Norton in March 1997. It was subsequently published in Great Britain under the title Guns, Germs, and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years by Vintage in 1998 (ISBN 978-0099302780).^[26] It was a selection of Book of the Month Club, History Book Club, Quality Paperback Book Club, and Newbridge Book Club.^[27]
In 2003 and 2007, the author published new English-language editions that included information collected since the previous editions. The new information did not change any of the original edition's conclusions.

Sociocultural evolution

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are theories of cultural and social evolution that describe how cultures and societies change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form".

Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches to socioculture aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies have reached different stages of social development. The most comprehensive attempt to develop a general theory of social evolution centering on the development of sociocultural systems, the work of Talcott Parsons (1902–1979), operated on a scale which included a theory of world history. Another attempt, on a less systematic scale, originated with the world-systems approach from the 1970s.

More recent approaches focus on changes specific to individual societies and reject the idea that cultures differ primarily according to how far each one is on some linear scale of social progress. Most modern archaeologists and cultural anthropologists work within the frameworks of neoevolutionism, sociobiology, and modernization theory.

Many different societies have existed in the course of human history, with estimates as high as over one million separate societiey; however, as of 2013, the number of different societies had reduced to about two hundred.^[3]

Introduction

Anthropologists and sociologists often assume that human beings have natural social tendencies and that particular human social behaviours have non-genetic causes and dynamics (i.e. people learn them in a social environment and through social interaction). Societies exist in complex social environments (i.e. with natural resources and constraints) and adapt themselves to these environments. It is thus inevitable that all societies change.

Specific theories of social or cultural evolution often attempt to explain differences between coeval societies by positing that different societies have reached different stages of development. Although such theories typically provide models for understanding the relationship between technologies, social structure or the values of a society, they vary as to the extent to which they describe specific mechanisms of variation and change.

Early sociocultural evolution theories – the ideas of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881)  – developed simultaneously with, but independently of, Charles Darwin's works and were popular from the late 19th century to the end of World War I. These 19th-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilized over time; they equated the culture and technology of Western civilization with progress. Some forms of early sociocultural evolution theories (mainly unilineal ones) have led to much-criticised theories like social Darwinism and scientific racism, sometimes used in the past^{[by whom?]} to justify existing policies of colonialism and slavery and to justify new policies such as eugenics.

Most 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a single entity. However, most 20th-century approaches, such as multilineal evolution, focused on changes specific to individual societies. Moreover, they rejected directional change (i.e. orthogenetic, teleological or progressive change). Most archaeologists work within the framework of multilineal evolution. Other contemporary approaches to social change include neoevolutionism, sociobiology, dual inheritance theory, modernisation theory and postindustrial theory.

In his seminal 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins wrote that "there are some examples of cultural evolution in birds and monkeys, but ... it is our own species that really shows what cultural evolution can do".^[4]

Stadial theory

Enlightenment and later thinkers often speculated that societies progressed through stages: in other words, they saw history as stadial. While expecting humankind to show increasing development, theorists looked for what determined the course of human history. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), for example, saw social development as an inevitable process.^{[citation needed]} It was assumed that societies start out primitive, perhaps in a state of nature, and could progress toward something resembling industrial Europe.

While earlier authors such as Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) had discussed how societies change through time, the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century proved key in the development of the idea of sociocultural evolution.^{[citation needed]} In relation to Scotland's union with England in 1707, several^[quantify] Scottish thinkers pondered the relationship between progress and the affluence brought about by increased trade with England. They understood the changes Scotland was undergoing as involving transition from an agricultural to a mercantile society. In "conjectural histories", authors such as Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), John Millar (1735–1801) and Adam Smith (1723–1790) argued that societies all pass through a series of four stages: hunting and gathering, pastoralism and nomadism, agriculture, and finally a stage of commerce.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857)

Philosophical concepts of progress, such as that of Hegel, developed as well during this period. In France, authors such as Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) and other philosophes were influenced by the Scottish tradition. Later thinkers such as Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) developed these ideas.^{[citation needed]} Auguste Comte (1798–1857) in particular presented a coherent view of social progress and a new discipline to study it: sociology.

These developments took place in a context of wider processes. The first process was colonialism. Although imperial powers settled most differences of opinion with their colonial subjects through force, increased awareness of non-Western peoples raised new questions for European scholars about the nature of society and of culture. Similarly, effective colonial administration required some degree of understanding of other cultures. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution allowed Europeans to organise their new knowledge in a way that reflected and justified their increasing political and economic domination of others: such systems saw colonised people as less evolved, and colonising people as more evolved. Modern civilization (understood as the Western civilization), appeared the result of steady progress from a state of barbarism, and such a notion was common to many thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Voltaire (1694–1778).

The second process was the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism, which together allowed and promoted continual revolutions in the means of production. Emerging theories of sociocultural evolution reflected a belief that the changes in Europe brought by the Industrial Revolution and capitalism were improvements. Industrialisation, combined with the intense political change brought about by the French Revolution of 1789 and the U.S. Constitution, which paved the way for the dominance of democracy, forced European thinkers to reconsider some of their assumptions about how society was organised.

Eventually, in the 19th century three major classical theories of social and historical change emerged:

• sociocultural evolutionism
• the social cycle theory
• the Marxist theory of historical materialism.

These theories had a common factor: they all agreed that the history of humanity is pursuing a certain fixed path, most likely that of social progress. Thus, each past event is not only chronologically, but causally tied to present and future events. The theories postulated that by recreating the sequence of those events, sociology could discover the "laws" of history.^[5]

Sociocultural evolutionism and the idea of progress

While sociocultural evolutionists agree that an evolution-like process leads to social progress, classical social evolutionists have developed many different theories, known as theories of unilineal evolution. Sociocultural evolutionism became the prevailing theory of early sociocultural anthropology and social commentary, and is associated with scholars like Auguste Comte, Edward Burnett Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, Benjamin Kidd, L. T. Hobhouse and Herbert Spencer. Sociocultural evolutionism attempted to formalise social thinking along scientific lines, with the added influence from the biological theory of evolution. If organisms could develop over time according to discernible, deterministic laws, then it seemed reasonable that societies could as well. Human society was compared to a biological organism, and social science equivalents of concepts like variation, natural selection, and inheritance were introduced as factors resulting in the progress of societies. The idea of progress led to that of a fixed "stages" through which human societies progress, usually numbering three – savagery, barbarism, and civilization – but sometimes many more. As early as the late 18th century, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) listed ten stages, or "epochs", each advancing the rights of man and perfecting the human race. At that time, anthropology was rising as a new scientific discipline, separating from the traditional views of "primitive" cultures that was usually based on religious views.

Herbert Spencer

Classical social evolutionism is most closely associated with the 19th-century writings of Auguste Comte and of Herbert Spencer (coiner of the phrase "survival of the fittest").^[6] In many ways, Spencer's theory of "cosmic evolution" has much more in common with the works of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Auguste Comte than with contemporary works of Charles Darwin. Spencer also developed and published his theories several years earlier than Darwin. In regard to social institutions, however, there is a good case that Spencer's writings might be classified as social evolutionism. Although he wrote that societies over time progressed – and that progress was accomplished through competition – he stressed that the individual rather than the collectivity is the unit of analysis that evolves; that, in other words, evolution takes place through natural selection and that it affects social as well as biological phenomenon. Nonetheless, the publication of Darwin's works^[which?] proved a boon to the proponents of sociocultural evolution, who saw the ideas of biological evolution as an attractive explanation for many questions about the development of society.^[7]

Both Spencer and Comte view society as a kind of organism subject to the process of growth—from simplicity to complexity, from chaos to order, from generalisation to specialisation, from flexibility to organisation. They agree that the process of societal growth can be divided into certain stages, have^{[clarification needed]} their beginning and eventual end, and that this growth is in fact social progress: each newer, more-evolved society is "better". Thus progressivism became one of the basic ideas underlying the theory of sociocultural evolutionism.^[6]

Auguste Comte, known as "the father of sociology", formulated the law of three stages: human development progresses from the theological stage, in which nature was mythically conceived and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from supernatural beings; through a metaphysical stage in which nature was conceived of as a result of obscure forces and man sought the explanation of natural phenomena from them; until the final positive stage in which all abstract and obscure forces are discarded, and natural phenomena are explained by their constant relationship.^[8] This progress is forced through the development of human mind, and through increasing application of thought, reasoning and logic to the understanding of the world.^[9] Comte saw the science-valuing society as the highest, most developed type of human organization.^[8]

Herbert Spencer, who argued against government intervention as he believed that society should evolve toward more individual freedom,^[10] differentiated between two phases of development as regards societies' internal regulation:^[8] the "military" and "industrial" societies.^[8] The earlier (and more primitive) military society has the goal of conquest and defense, is centralised, economically self-sufficient, collectivistic, puts the good of a group over the good of an individual, uses compulsion, force and repression, and rewards loyalty, obedience and discipline.^[8] The industrial society, in contrast, has a goal of production and trade, is decentralised, interconnected with other societies via economic relations, works through voluntary cooperation and individual self-restraint, treats the good of individual as of the highest value, regulates the social life via voluntary relations; and values initiative, independence and innovation.^[8][11] The transition process from the military to industrial society is the outcome of steady evolutionary processes within the society.^[8]

Regardless of how scholars of Spencer interpret his relation to Darwin, Spencer became an incredibly popular figure in the 1870s, particularly in the United States. Authors such as Edward L. Youmans, William Graham Sumner, John Fiske, John W. Burgess, Lester Frank Ward, Lewis H. Morgan (1818–1881) and other thinkers of the gilded age all developed theories of social evolutionism as a result of their exposure to Spencer as well as to Darwin.

Lewis H. Morgan

In his 1877 classic Ancient Societies, Lewis H. Morgan, an anthropologist whose ideas have had much impact on sociology, differentiated between three eras: savagery, barbarism and civilization, which are divided by technological inventions, like fire, bow, pottery in the savage era, domestication of animals, agriculture, metalworking in the barbarian era and alphabet and writing in the civilization era.^[12] Thus Morgan drew a link between social progress and technological progress. Morgan viewed technological progress as a force behind social progress, and held that any social change—in social institutions, organizations or ideologies—has its beginnings in technological change.^[12][13] Morgan's theories were popularized by Friedrich Engels, who based his famous work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State on them.^[12] For Engels and other Marxists this theory was important, as it supported their conviction that materialistic factors—economic and technological—are decisive in shaping the fate of humanity.^[12]

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), a pioneer of anthropology, focused on the evolution of culture worldwide, noting that culture is an important part of every society and that it is also subject to a process of evolution. He believed that societies were at different stages of cultural development and that the purpose of anthropology was to reconstruct the evolution of culture, from primitive beginnings to the modern state.

Edward Burnett Tylor

Anthropologists Sir E.B. Tylor in England and Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States worked with data from indigenous people, who (they claimed) represented earlier stages of cultural evolution that gave insight into the process and progression of evolution of culture. Morgan would later^[when?] have a significant influence on Karl Marx and on Friedrich Engels, who developed a theory of sociocultural evolution in which the internal contradictions in society generated a series of escalating stages that ended in a socialist society (see Marxism). Tylor and Morgan elaborated the theory of unilinear evolution, specifying criteria for categorising cultures according to their standing within a fixed system of growth of humanity as a whole and examining the modes and mechanisms of this growth. Theirs was often a concern with culture in general, not with individual cultures.

Their analysis of cross-cultural data was based on three assumptions:

1. contemporary societies may be classified and ranked as more "primitive" or more "civilized"
2. there are a determinate number of stages between "primitive" and "civilized" (e.g. band, tribe, chiefdom, and state)
3. all societies progress through these stages in the same sequence, but at different rates

Theorists usually measured progression (that is, the difference between one stage and the next) in terms of increasing social complexity (including class differentiation and a complex division of labour), or an increase in intellectual, theological, and aesthetic sophistication. These 19th-century ethnologists used these principles primarily to explain differences in religious beliefs and kinship terminologies among various societies.

Lester Frank Ward

Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913), sometimes referred to^{[by whom?]} as the "father" of American sociology, rejected many of Spencer's theories regarding the evolution of societies. Ward, who was also a botanist and a paleontologist, believed that the law of evolution functioned much differently in human societies than it did in the plant and animal kingdoms, and theorized that the "law of nature" had been superseded by the "law of the mind".^[14] He stressed that humans, driven by emotions, create goals for themselves and strive to realize them (most effectively with the modern scientific method) whereas there is no such intelligence and awareness guiding the non-human world.^[15] Plants and animals adapt to nature; man shapes nature. While Spencer believed that competition and "survival of the fittest" benefited human society and sociocultural evolution, Ward regarded competition as a destructive force, pointing out that all human institutions, traditions and laws were tools invented by the mind of man and that that mind designed them, like all tools, to "meet and checkmate" the unrestrained competition of natural forces.^[14] Ward agreed with Spencer that authoritarian governments repress the talents of the individual, but he believed that modern democratic societies, which minimized the role of religion and maximized that of science, could effectively support the individual in his or her attempt to fully utilize their talents and achieve happiness. He believed that the evolutionary processes have four stages:

• First comes cosmogenesis, creation and evolution of the world.
• Then, when life arises, there is biogenesis.^[15]
• Development of humanity leads to anthropogenesis, which is influenced by the human mind.^[15]
• Finally there arrives sociogenesis, which is the science of shaping the evolutionary process itself to optimize progress, human happiness and individual self-actualization.^[15]

While Ward regarded modern societies as superior to "primitive" societies (one need only look to the impact of medical science on health and lifespan^{[citation needed]}) he rejected theories of white supremacy; he supported the Out-of-Africa theory of human evolution and believed that all races and social classes were equal in talent.^[16] However, Ward did not think that evolutionary progress was inevitable and he feared the degeneration of societies and cultures, which he saw as very evident in the historical record.^[17] Ward also did not favor the radical reshaping of society as proposed by the supporters of the eugenics movement or by the followers of Karl Marx; like Comte, Ward believed that sociology was the most complex of the sciences and that true sociogenesis was impossible without considerable research and experimentation.^[16]

Émile Durkheim

Émile Durkheim, another of the "fathers" of sociology, developed a dichotomal view of social progress.^[18] His key concept was social solidarity, as he defined social evolution in terms of progressing from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity.^[18] In mechanical solidarity, people are self-sufficient, there is little integration and thus there is the need for the use of force and repression to keep society together.^[18] In organic solidarity, people are much more integrated and interdependent and specialisation and cooperation are extensive.^[18] Progress from mechanical to organic solidarity is based firstly on population growth and increasing population density, secondly on increasing "morality density" (development of more complex social interactions) and thirdly on increasing specialisation in the workplace.^[18] To Durkheim, the most important factor in social progress is the division of labour.^[18] This^{[clarification needed]} was later used in the mid-1900s by the economist Ester Boserup (1910–1999) to attempt to discount some aspects of Malthusian theory.

Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) describes evolution as the development from informal society, where people have many liberties and there are few laws and obligations, to modern, formal rational society, dominated by traditions and laws, where people are restricted from acting as they wish.^[19] He also notes that there is a tendency to standardisation and unification, when all smaller societies are absorbed into a single, large, modern society.^[19] Thus Tönnies can be said to describe part of the process known today as globalization. Tönnies was also one of the first sociologists to claim that the evolution of society is not necessarily going in the right direction, that social progress is not perfect, and it can even be called a regression as the newer, more evolved societies are obtained only after paying a high cost, resulting in decreasing satisfaction of the individuals making up that society.^[19] Tönnies' work became the foundation of neoevolutionism.^[19]

Although Max Weber is not usually counted^{[by whom?]} as a sociocultural evolutionist, his theory of tripartite classification of authority can be viewed^{[by whom?]} as an evolutionary theory as well. Weber distinguishes three ideal types of political leadership, domination and authority:

1. charismatic domination
2. traditional domination (patriarchs, patrimonalism, feudalism)
3. legal (rational) domination (modern law and state, bureaucracy)

Weber also notes that legal domination is the most advanced, and that societies evolve from having mostly traditional and charismatic authorities to mostly rational and legal ones.

Critique and impact on modern theories

The early 20th-century inaugurated a period of systematic critical examination, and rejection of the sweeping generalisations of the unilineal theories of sociocultural evolution. Cultural anthropologists such as Franz Boas (1858–1942), along with his students, including Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, are regarded^{[by whom?]} as the leaders of anthropology's rejection of classical social evolutionism.

They used sophisticated ethnography and more rigorous empirical methods to argue that Spencer, Tylor, and Morgan's theories were speculative and systematically misrepresented ethnographic data. Theories regarding "stages" of evolution were especially criticised as illusions. Additionally, they rejected the distinction between "primitive" and "civilized" (or "modern"), pointing out that so-called primitive contemporary societies have just as much history, and were just as evolved, as so-called civilized societies. They therefore argued that any attempt to use this theory to reconstruct the histories of non-literate (i.e. leaving no historical documents) peoples is entirely speculative and unscientific.

They observed that the postulated progression, which typically ended with a stage of civilization identical to that of modern Europe, is ethnocentric. They also pointed out that the theory assumes that societies are clearly bounded and distinct, when in fact cultural traits and forms often cross social boundaries and diffuse among many different societies (and are thus an important mechanism of change). Boas in his culture-history approach focused on anthropological fieldwork in an attempt to identify factual processes instead of what he criticized as speculative stages of growth. His approach greatly influenced American anthropology in the first half of the 20th century, and marked a retreat from high-level generalization and from "systems building".

Later critics observed that the assumption of firmly bounded societies was proposed precisely at the time when European powers were colonising non-Western societies, and was thus self-serving. Many anthropologists and social theorists now consider unilineal cultural and social evolution a Western myth seldom based on solid empirical grounds. Critical theorists argue that notions of social evolution are simply justifications for power by the élites of society. Finally, the devastating World Wars that occurred between 1914 and 1945 crippled Europe's self-confidence. After millions of deaths, genocide, and the destruction of Europe's industrial infrastructure, the idea of progress seemed dubious at best.

Thus modern sociocultural evolutionism rejects most of classical social evolutionism due to various theoretical problems:

1. The theory was deeply ethnocentric—it makes heavy value judgments about different societies, with Western civilization seen as the most valuable.
2. It assumed all cultures follow the same path or progression and have the same goals.
3. It equated civilization with material culture (technology, cities, etc.)

Because social evolution was posited as a scientific theory, it was often used to support unjust and often racist social practices — particularly colonialism, slavery, and the unequal economic conditions present within industrialized Europe. Social Darwinism is especially criticised, as it purportedly led to some philosophies used by the Nazis.

Max Weber, disenchantment, and critical theory

Max Weber in 1917

Weber's major works in economic sociology and the sociology of religion dealt with the rationalization, secularisation, and so called "disenchantment" which he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity.^[20] In sociology, rationalization is the process whereby an increasing number of social actions become based on considerations of teleological efficiency or calculation rather than on motivations derived from morality, emotion, custom, or tradition. Rather than referring to what is genuinely "rational" or "logical", rationalization refers to a relentless quest for goals that might actually function to the detriment of a society. Rationalization is an ambivalent aspect of modernity, manifested especially in Western society - as a behaviour of the capitalist market, of rational administration in the state and bureaucracy, of the extension of modern science, and of the expansion of modern technology.^{[citation needed]}

Weber's thought regarding the rationalizing and secularizing tendencies of modern Western society (sometimes described as the "Weber Thesis") would blend with Marxism to facilitate critical theory, particularly in the work of thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas (born 1929). Critical theorists, as antipositivists, are critical of the idea of a hierarchy of sciences or societies, particularly with respect to the sociological positivism originally set forth by Comte. Jürgen Habermas has critiqued the concept of pure instrumental rationality as meaning that scientific-thinking becomes something akin to ideology itself. For theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), rationalization as a manifestation of modernity may be most closely and regrettably associated with the events of the Holocaust.

Modern theories

Composite image of the Earth at night, created by NASA and NOAA. The brightest areas of the Earth are the most urbanized, but not necessarily the most populated. Even more than 100 years after the invention of the electric light, most regions remain thinly populated or unlit.

When the critique of classical social evolutionism became widely accepted, modern anthropological and sociological approaches changed respectively. Modern theories are careful to avoid unsourced, ethnocentric speculation, comparisons, or value judgments; more or less regarding individual societies as existing within their own historical contexts. These conditions provided the context for new theories such as cultural relativism and multilineal evolution.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Gordon Childe revolutionized the study of cultural evolutionism. He conducted a comprehensive pre-history account that provided scholars with evidence for African and Asian cultural transmission into Europe. He combated scientific racism by finding the tools and artifacts of the indigenous people from Africa and Asia and showed how they influenced the technology of European culture. Evidence from his excavations countered the idea of Aryan supremacy and superiority. Childe explained cultural evolution by his theory of divergence with modifications of convergence. He postulated that different cultures form separate methods that meet different needs, but when two cultures were in contact they developed similar adaptations, solving similar problems. Rejecting Spencer’s theory of parallel cultural evolution, Childe found that interactions between cultures contributed to the convergence of similar aspects most often attributed to one culture. Childe placed emphasis on human culture as a social construct rather than products of environmental or technological contexts. Childe coined the terms "Neolithic Revolution", and "Urban Revolution" which are still used today in the branch of pre-historic anthropology.

In 1941 anthropologist Robert Redfield wrote about a shift from ‘folk society’ to ‘urban society’. By the 1940s cultural anthropologists such as Leslie White and Julian Steward sought to revive an evolutionary model on a more scientific basis, and succeeded in establishing an approach known as neoevolutionism. White rejected the opposition between "primitive" and "modern" societies but did argue that societies could be distinguished based on the amount of energy they harnessed, and that increased energy allowed for greater social differentiation (White’s law). Steward on the other hand rejected the 19th-century notion of progress, and instead called attention to the Darwinian notion of "adaptation", arguing that all societies had to adapt to their environment in some way.

The anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service prepared an edited volume, Evolution and Culture, in which they attempted to synthesise White’s and Steward’s approaches.^[21] Other anthropologists, building on or responding to work by White and Steward, developed theories of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology. The most prominent examples are Peter Vayda and Roy Rappaport. By the late 1950s, students of Steward such as Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz turned away from cultural ecology to Marxism, World Systems Theory, Dependency theory and Marvin Harris’s Cultural materialism.

Today most anthropologists reject 19th-century notions of progress and the three assumptions of unilineal evolution. Following Steward, they take seriously the relationship between a culture and its environment to explain different aspects of a culture. But most modern cultural anthropologists have adopted a general systems approach, examining cultures as emergent systems and arguing that one must consider the whole social environment, which includes political and economic relations among cultures. As a result of simplistic notions of "progressive evolution", more modern, complex cultural evolution theories (such as Dual Inheritance Theory, discussed below) receive little attention in the social sciences, having given way in some cases to a series of more humanist approaches. Some reject the entirety of evolutionary thinking and look instead at historical contingencies, contacts with other cultures, and the operation of cultural symbol systems. In the area of development studies, authors such as Amartya Sen have developed an understanding of ‘development’ and ‘human flourishing’ that also question more simplistic notions of progress, while retaining much of their original inspiration.

Neoevolutionism

Neoevolutionism was the first in a series of modern multilineal evolution theories. It emerged in the 1930s and extensively developed in the period following the Second World War and was incorporated into both anthropology and sociology in the 1960s. It bases its theories on empirical evidence from areas of archaeology, palaeontology, and historiography and tries to eliminate any references to systems of values, be it moral or cultural, instead trying to remain objective and simply descriptive.^[22]
While 19th-century evolutionism explained how culture develops by giving general principles of its evolutionary process, it was dismissed by the Historical Particularists as unscientific in the early 20th century. It was the neo-evolutionary thinkers who brought back evolutionary thought and developed it to be acceptable to contemporary anthropology.

Neo-evolutionism discards many ideas of classical social evolutionism, namely that of social progress, so dominant in previous sociology evolution-related theories.^[22] Then neo-evolutionism discards the determinism argument and introduces probability, arguing that accidents and free will greatly affect the process of social evolution.^[22] It also supports counterfactual history—asking "what if" and considering different possible paths that social evolution may take or might have taken, and thus allows for the fact that various cultures may develop in different ways, some skipping entire stages others have passed through.^[22] Neo-evolutionism stresses the importance of empirical evidence. While 19th-century evolutionism used value judgments and assumptions for interpreting data, neo-evolutionism relies on measurable information for analysing the process of sociocultural evolution.

Leslie White, author of The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome (1959), attempted to create a theory explaining the entire history of humanity.^[22] The most important factor in his theory is technology.^[22] Social systems are determined by technological systems, wrote White in his book,^[23] echoing the earlier theory of Lewis Henry Morgan. He proposes a society’s energy consumption as a measure of its advancement.^[22] He differentiates between five stages of human development.^[22] In the first, people use the energy of their own muscles.^[22] In the second, they use the energy of domesticated animals.^[22] In the third, they use the energy of plants (so White refers to agricultural revolution here).^[22] In the fourth, they learn to use the energy of natural resources: coal, oil, gas.^[22] In the fifth, they harness nuclear energy.^[22] White introduced a formula, P=E*T, where E is a measure of energy consumed, and T is the measure of efficiency of technical factors utilising the energy.^[22] This theory is similar to Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev’s later theory of the Kardashev scale.

Julian Steward, author of Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (1955, reprinted 1979), created the theory of "multilinear" evolution which examined the way in which societies adapted to their environment. This approach was more nuanced than White’s theory of "unilinear evolution." Steward rejected the 19th-century notion of progress, and instead called attention to the Darwinian notion of "adaptation", arguing that all societies had to adapt to their environment in some way. He argued that different adaptations could be studied through the examination of the specific resources a society exploited, the technology the society relied on to exploit these resources, and the organization of human labour. He further argued that different environments and technologies would require different kinds of adaptations, and that as the resource base or technology changed, so too would a culture. In other words, cultures do not change according to some inner logic, but rather in terms of a changing relationship with a changing environment. Cultures therefore would not pass through the same stages in the same order as they changed—rather, they would change in varying ways and directions. He called his theory "multilineal evolution". He questioned the possibility of creating a social theory encompassing the entire evolution of humanity; however, he argued that anthropologists are not limited to describing specific existing cultures. He believed that it is possible to create theories analysing typical common culture, representative of specific eras or regions. As the decisive factors determining the development of given culture he pointed to technology and economics, but noted that there are secondary factors, like political system, ideologies and religion. All those factors push the evolution of a given society in several directions at the same time; hence the application of the term "multilinear" to his theory of evolution.

Marshall Sahlins, co-editor with Elman Service of Evolution and Culture (1960), divided the evolution of societies into ‘general’ and ‘specific’.^[24] General evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization and adaptiveness to environment.^[24] However, as the various cultures are not isolated, there is interaction and a diffusion of their qualities (like technological inventions).^[24] This leads cultures to develop in different ways (specific evolution), as various elements are introduced to them in different combinations and at different stages of evolution.^[24]

In his Power and Prestige (1966) and Human Societies: An Introduction to Macrosociology (1974), Gerhard Lenski expands on the works of Leslie White and Lewis Henry Morgan,^[24] developing the ecological-evolutionary theory. He views technological progress as the most basic factor in the evolution of societies and cultures.^[24] Unlike White, who defined technology as the ability to create and utilise energy, Lenski focuses on information—its amount and uses.^[24] The more information and knowledge (especially allowing the shaping of natural environment) a given society has, the more advanced it is.^[24] He distinguishes four stages of human development, based on advances in the history of communication.^[24] In the first stage, information is passed by genes.^[24] In the second, when humans gain sentience, they can learn and pass information through by experience.^[24] In the third, humans start using signs and develop logic.^[24] In the fourth, they can create symbols and develop language and writing.^[24] Advancements in the technology of communication translate into advancements in the economic system and political system, distribution of goods, social inequality and other spheres of social life. He also differentiates societies based on their level of technology, communication and economy: (1) hunters and gatherers, (2) agricultural, (3) industrial, and (4) special (like fishing societies).^[24]

Talcott Parsons, author of Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966) and The System of Modern Societies (1971) divided evolution into four subprocesses: (1) division, which creates functional subsystems from the main system; (2) adaptation, where those systems evolve into more efficient versions; (3) inclusion of elements previously excluded from the given systems; and (4) generalization of values, increasing the legitimization of the ever more complex system.^[25] He shows those processes on 4 stages of evolution: (I) primitive or foraging, (II) archaic agricultural, (III) classical or "historic" in his terminology, using formalized and universalizing theories about reality and (IV) modern empirical cultures. However, these divisions in Parsons’ theory are the more formal ways in which the evolutionary process is conceptualized, and should not be mistaken for Parsons’ actual theory. Parsons develops a theory where he tries to reveal the complexity of the processes which take form between two points of necessity, the first being the cultural "necessity," which is given through the values-system of each evolving community; the other is the environmental necessities, which most directly is reflected in the material realities of the basic production system and in the relative capacity of each industrial-economical level at each window of time. Generally, Parsons highlights that the dynamics and directions of these processes is shaped by the cultural imperative embodied in the cultural heritage, and more secondarily, an outcome of sheer "economic" conditions.

Michel Foucault’s recent, and very much misunderstood, concepts such as Biopower, Biopolitics and Power-knowledge has been cited as breaking free from the traditional conception of man as cultural animal. Foucault regards both the terms “cultural animal” and "human nature"as misleading abstractions, leading to a non critical exemption of man and anything can be justified when regarding social processes or natural phenomena (social phenomena).^[26] Foucault argues these complex processes are interrelated, and difficult to study for a reason so those 'truths' cannot be topled or disrupted. For Foucault, the many modern concepts and practices that attempt to uncover “the truth” about human beings (either psychologically, sexually, religion or spiritually) actually create the very types of people they purport to discover. Requiring trained "specialists" and knowledge codes and know how, rigorous pursuit is "put off" or delayed which makes any kind of study not only a ‘taboo’ subject but deliberately ignored. He cites the concept of ‘truth’^[27] within many human cultures and the ever flowing dynamics between truth, power, and knowledge as a resultant complex dynamics (Foucault uses the term regimes of truth) and how they flow with ease like water which make the concept of ‘truth’ impervious to any further rational investigation. Some of the West’s most powerful social institutions are powerful for a reason, not because they exhibit powerful structures which inhibit investigation or it is illegal to investigate there historical foundation. It is the very notion of "legitimacy" Foucault cites as examples of "truth" which function as a "Foundationalism" claims to historical accuracy. Foucault argues, systems such as Medicine, Prisons,^[28][29] and Religion, as well as groundbreaking works on more abstract theoretical issues of power are suspended or buried into oblivion.^[30] He cites as further examples the ‘Scientific study’ of Population biology and Population genetics^[31] as both examples of this kind of “Biopower” over the vast majority of the human population giving the new founded political population their ‘politics’ or polity. With the advent of biology and genetics teamed together as new scientific innovations notions of study of knowledge regarding truth belong to the realm of experts who will never divulge their secrets openly, while the bulk of the population do not know their own biology or genetics this is done for them by the experts. This functions as a truth ignorance mechanism: “where the “subjugated knowledge’s,” as those that have been both written out of history and submerged in it in a masked form produces what we now know as truth. He calls them “Knowledge’s from below” and a “historical knowledge of struggles”.Genealogy, Foucault suggests, is a way of getting at these knowledge’s and struggles; “they are about the insurrection of knowledge’s.”Foucault tries to show with the added dimension of “Milieu”(derived from Newtonian mechanics) how this Milieu from the 17th century with the development of the Biological and Physical sciences managed to be interwoven into the political, social and biological relationship of men with the arrival of the concept Work placed upon the industrial population.^[32] Foucault uses the term borrowed from Jakob von Uexküll Umwelt meaning environment within. Technology, production, Cartography the production of Nation states and Government making the efficiency of the Body politic, Law, Heredity and Consanguine^[33] not only sound genuine and beyond historical origin and foundation it can be turned into ‘exact truth’ where the individual and the societal body are not only subjugated and nullified but dependent upon it. Foucault is not denying that genetic or biological study is inaccurate or is simply not telling the truth what he means is that notions of this newly discovered sciences were extended to include the vast majority (or whole populations) of populations as an exercise in “regimes change”.Foucault argues that the conceptual meaning from the Middle ages and Canon law period, the Geocentric model, later superseded by the Heliocentrism model placing the position of the law of right in the Middle ages (Exclusive right or its correct legal term Sui generis) was the Divine right of kings and Absolute monarchy where the previous incarnation of truth and rule of political sovereignty was considered absolute and unquestioned by Political Philosophy(monarchs, popes and emperors). However, Foucault notices that this Pharaonic version of Political power was transversed and it was with 18th-century emergence of Capitalism and Liberal democracy that these terms began to be “democratized”.The modern Pharaonic version represented by the President, the monarch, the Pope and the Prime minister all became propagandized versions or examples of symbol agents all aimed at towards a newly discovered phenomenon, the population.^[34][32] As symbolic symbol agents of power making the mass population having to sacrifice itself all in the name of the newly formed voting franchise we now call Democracy. However, this was all turned on its head (when the Medieval rulers were thrown out and replaced by a more exact apparatus now called the state) when the human sciences suddenly discovered: “The set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became an object of a political strategy and took on board the fundamental facts that humans were now a biological species."^[35][36]

Sociobiology

Sociobiology departs perhaps the furthest from classical social evolutionism.^[37] It was introduced by Edward Wilson in his 1975 book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis and followed his adaptation of evolutionary theory to the field of social sciences. Wilson pioneered the attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviours such as altruism, aggression, and nurturance.^[37] In doing so, Wilson sparked one of the greatest scientific controversies of the 20th century.^[37]
The current theory of evolution, the modern evolutionary synthesis (or neo-darwinism), explains that evolution of species occurs through a combination of Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection and Gregor Mendel’s theory of genetics as the basis for biological inheritance and mathematical population genetics.^[37] Essentially, the modern synthesis introduced the connection between two important discoveries; the units of evolution (genes) with the main mechanism of evolution (selection).^[37]

Due to its close reliance on biology, sociobiology is often considered a branch of the biology, although it uses techniques from a plethora of sciences, including ethology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, population genetics, and many others. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely related to the fields of human behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology.

Sociobiology has remained highly controversial as it contends genes explain specific human behaviours, although sociobiologists describe this role as a very complex and often unpredictable interaction between nature and nurture. The most notable critics of the view that genes play a direct role in human behaviour have been biologists Richard Lewontin Steven Rose and Stephen Jay Gould.

Since the rise of evolutionary psychology, another school of thought, Dual Inheritance Theory, has emerged in the past 25 years that applies the mathematical standards of Population genetics to modeling the adaptive and selective principles of culture. This school of thought was pioneered by Robert Boyd at UCLA and Peter Richerson at UC Davis and expanded by William Wimsatt, among others. Boyd and Richerson’s book, Culture and the Evolutionary Process (1985),^[38] was a highly mathematical description of cultural change, later published in a more accessible form in Not by Genes Alone (2004).^[39] In Boyd and Richerson’s view, cultural evolution, operating on socially learned information, exists on a separate but co-evolutionary track from genetic evolution, and while the two are related, cultural evolution is more dynamic, rapid, and influential on human society than genetic evolution. Dual Inheritance Theory has the benefit of providing unifying territory for a "nature and nurture" paradigm and accounts for more accurate phenomenon in evolutionary theory applied to culture, such as randomness effects (drift), concentration dependency, "fidelity" of evolving information systems, and lateral transmission through communication.^[40]

Theory of modernization

Theories of modernization have been developed and popularized in 1950s and 1960s and are closely related to the dependency theory and development theory.^[41] They combine the previous theories of sociocultural evolution with practical experiences and empirical research, especially those from the era of decolonization. The theory states that:

• Western countries are the most developed, and the rest of the world (mostly former colonies) is in the earlier stages of development, and will eventually reach the same level as the Western world.^[41]
• Development stages go from the traditional societies to developed ones.^[41]
• Third World countries have fallen behind with their social progress and need to be directed on their way to becoming more advanced.^[41]

Developing from classical social evolutionism theories, the theory of modernization stresses the modernization factor: many societies are simply trying (or need) to emulate the most successful societies and cultures.^[41] It also states that it is possible to do so, thus supporting the concepts of social engineering and that the developed countries can and should help those less developed, directly or indirectly.^[41]

Among the scientists who contributed much to this theory are Walt Rostow, who in his The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1960) concentrates on the economic system side of the modernization, trying to show factors needed for a country to reach the path to modernization in his Rostovian take-off model.^[41] David Apter concentrated on the political system and history of democracy, researching the connection between democracy, good governance and efficiency and modernization.^[41] David McClelland (The Achieving Society, 1967) approached this subject from the psychological perspective, with his motivations theory, arguing that modernization cannot happen until given society values innovation, success and free enterprise.^[41] Alex Inkeles (Becoming Modern, 1974) similarly creates a model of modern personality, which needs to be independent, active, interested in public policies and cultural matters, open to new experiences, rational and able to create long-term plans for the future.^[41] Some works of Jürgen Habermas are also connected with this subfield.

The theory of modernization has been subject to some criticism similar to that levied against classical social evolutionism, especially for being too ethnocentric, one-sided and focused on the Western world and its culture.

Prediction for a stable cultural and social future

Cultural evolution follows punctuated equilibrium which Gould and Eldredge developed for biological evolution. Bloomfield^[42][43] has written that human societies follow punctuated equilibrium which would mean first, a stable society, and then a transition resulting in a subsequent stable society with greater complexity. This model would claim mankind has had a stable animal society, a transition to a stable tribal society, another transition to a stable peasant society and is currently in a transitional industrial society.

The status of a human society rests on the productivity of food production. Deevey^[44] reported on the growth of the number of humans. Deevey also reported on the productivity of food production, noting that productivity changes very little for stable societies, but increases during transitions. When productivity and especially food productivity can no longer be increased, Bloomfield has proposed that man will have achieved a stable automated society.^[45] Space is also assumed to allow for the continued growth of the human population, as well as providing a solution to the current pollution problem by providing limitless energy from solar satellite power stations.

Contemporary perspectives

Political perspectives

The Cold War period was marked by rivalry between two superpowers, both of which considered themselves to be the most highly evolved cultures on the planet. The USSR painted itself as a socialist society which emerged from class struggle, destined to reach the state of communism, while sociologists in the United States (such as Talcott Parsons) argued that the freedom and prosperity of the United States were a proof of a higher level of sociocultural evolution of its culture and society. At the same time, decolonization created newly independent countries who sought to become more developed—a model of progress and industrialization which was itself a form of sociocultural evolution.

There is, however, a tradition in European social theory from Rousseau to Max Weber arguing that this progression coincides with a loss of human freedom and dignity. At the height of the Cold War, this tradition merged with an interest in ecology to influence an activist culture in the 1960s. This movement produced a variety of political and philosophical programs which emphasized the importance of bringing society and the environment into harmony.

Technological perspectives

Schematic Timeline of Information and Replicators in the Biosphere: major evolutionary transitions in information processing^[46]

Many^[who?] argue that the next stage of sociocultural evolution consists of a merger with technology, especially information processing technology. Several cumulative major transitions of evolution have transformed life through key innovations in information storage and replication, including RNA, DNA, multicellularity, and also language and culture as inter-human information processing systems.^[47][48] in this sense it can be argued that the carbon-based biosphere has generated a cognitive system (humans) capable of creating technology that will result in a comparable evolutionary transition. "Digital information has reached a similar magnitude to information in the biosphere. It increases exponentially, exhibits high-fidelity replication, evolves through differential fitness, is expressed through artificial intelligence (AI), and has facility for virtually limitless recombination. Like previous evolutionary transitions, the potential symbiosis between biological and digital information will reach a critical point where these codes could compete via natural selection. Alternatively, this fusion could create a higher-level superorganism employing a low-conflict division of labor in performing informational tasks...humans already embrace fusions of biology and technology. We spend most of our waking time communicating through digitally mediated channels, ...most transactions on the stock market are executed by automated trading algorithms, and our electric grids are in the hands of artificial intelligence. With one in three marriages in America beginning online, digital algorithms are also taking a role in human pair bonding and reproduction".^[46]

Anthropological perspectives

Current political theories of the new tribalists consciously mimic ecology and the life-ways of indigenous peoples, augmenting them with modern sciences. Ecoregional Democracy attempts to confine the "shifting groups", or tribes, within "more or less clear boundaries" that a society inherits from the surrounding ecology, to the borders of a naturally occurring ecoregion. Progress can proceed by competition between but not within tribes, and it is limited by ecological borders or by Natural Capitalism incentives which attempt to mimic the pressure of natural selection on a human society by forcing it to adapt consciously to scarce energy or materials. Gaians argue that societies evolve deterministically to play a role in the ecology of their biosphere, or else die off as failures due to competition from more efficient societies exploiting nature's leverage.

Thus, some have appealed to theories of sociocultural evolution to assert that optimizing the ecology and the social harmony of closely knit groups is more desirable or necessary than the progression to "civilization." A 2002 poll of experts on Neoarctic and Neotropic indigenous peoples (reported in Harper's magazine)[citation needed] revealed that all of them would have preferred to be a typical New World person in the year 1491, prior to any European contact, rather than a typical European of that time. This approach has been criticised by pointing out that there are a number of historical examples of indigenous peoples doing severe environmental damage (such as the deforestation of Easter Island and the extinction of mammoths in North America) and that proponents of the goal have been trapped by the European stereotype of the noble savage.