Recent and forthcoming books on cultural, social, technological and economic evolution worth reading
On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection, by Jonathan H. Turner and Alexandra Maryanski. Paradigm Publishers, 2009.
Turner and Maryanski propose a Darwinian biological theory of the evolution of human nature from our origins as mammals, primates and apes; a Spencerian sociocultural theory of the evolution of human societies through hunting and gathering, horticultural, agrarian, industrial and post-industrial types; and see five effects of the former on the latter in our individualism, sense of self, propensity for mobility, sense of community and a system of hierarchy.
The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection, by Walter G. Runciman. Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Runciman proposes a general theory of human behavioural evolution which argues that collective human behaviour patterns are the outwardly observable expression of information affecting phenotypes transmitted at three separate but interacting levels of heritable variation and competitive selection – the biological, cultural and social.
The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, by W. Brian Arthur. Free Press, 2009.
Arthur proposes a general evolutionary theory of technology (defined as a device, method or process) which argues that all technologies are combinations of elements which are themselves technologies and which capture (natural) phenomena to some purpose.
Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Godfrey-Smith’s book is a deep meditation by a philosopher on the foundations of evolutionary theory both verbal (in the text) and mathematical (in the appendix) which leads to a more general version of the famous Price equation. (See also Kerr & Godfrey-Smith, 2009). The last chapter applies these reflections and formulation to cultural evolution.
Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution, edited by Stephen Shennan. University of California Press, 2009.
A long-in-coming eclectic collection of cultural evolutionary articles, mostly on archaeology, based on a conference held in the U.K. in 2005.
Darwin’s Conjecture: The Search for General Principles of Social and Economic Evolution, by Geoffrey M. Hodgson and Thørbjorn Knudsen. Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Sociology: A Biosocial Introduction, by Rosemary L. Hopcroft, Paradigm Publishers, 2010.
An introductory text in sociology which combines biological predispositions with more traditional sociological analysis.
Was there a "mother tongue"?
I was rather cautious in Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution about the possible existence of a “mother tongue” of all human languages (sometimes called “proto-world” or “proto-sapiens”). I would be less inclined to be so today on the basis of the genomic evidence for our “recent out-of-Africa” origin.
About 50,000 years ago one or at most two small groups of anatomically and behaviourally modern humans Homo sapiens sapiens (perhaps only 150 or so individuals and probably speaking a language with many phonemes, many of them “click” sounds of various kinds) migrated out of Africa, stimulated possibly by climate change. By 10,000 years ago or so i.e. in only 40,000 years, through subsequent repeated migrations, their descendants had spread out to displace earlier migrants, to inhabit the furthest reaches of all continents except Antarctica, and to eventually give rise to the named cultures and languages of the anthropological literature. That is the story that has emerged from the human genomic evidence gathered and analyzed initially by Luigi Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University and subsequently by Spencer Wells and associates in The Genographic Project among others (for accessible treatments see Wade 2007, Wells 2007).
Because specific languages (albeit not the capacity for language) is acquired socioculturally, the implication of these findings is that all human languages on earth today have descended with modification socioculturally from one or two common ancestral languages. Since no one thinks it possible that language evolved later than 50,000 years ago and some think much earlier, that is the inescapable conclusion from the genomic evidence – unless one wished to argue that one or more groups stopped talking for some generations and then began anew again which seems most unlikely.
I will add immediately that this conclusion cannot be drawn directly from the linguistic evidence – language does changes rapidly on this time scale of tens of thousands of years and phylogenetic signals eventually get lost. Historical linguists therefore tend to argue that while this story may be true, we will never know for sure. Others however think it more prudent to say “never say never in science”. In the meantime, cultural descent with modification including of languages is consistent with what we know on smaller but still large temporal and spatial scales – the some 200 language families within each of which the languages can be shown on linguistic grounds to be historically related by common descent. The large Indo-European family of course was known even in Darwin’s time who used it as an analogy for his biological theory of descent with modification. There are at least some cases in which these language families in turn have been shown to be historically related. And of course there is similar research on other areas of culture such as social organization and material culture (both prehistoric i.e. archaeological and historic).
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