32 Facts About Sociocultural evolution

Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity.

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".

The most comprehensive attempt to develop a general theory of social evolution centering on the development of sociocultural systems, the work of Talcott Parsons, operated on a scale which included a theory of world history.

Some forms of early sociocultural evolution theories have led to much-criticised theories like social Darwinism and scientific racism, sometimes used in the past by European imperial powers to justify existing policies of colonialism and slavery and to justify new policies such as eugenics.

However, most 20th-century approaches, such as multilineal Sociocultural evolution, focused on changes specific to individual societies.

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Sociocultural evolution likens the development of laws, the presence or absence of civil liberty, differences in morality, and the whole development of different cultures to the climate of the respective people, concluding that the environment determines whether and how a people farms the land, which determines the way their society is built and their culture is constituted, or, in Montesquieu's words, the “general spirit of a nation”.

Spencer clearly thought society's Sociocultural evolution brought about a racial hierarchy with Caucasians at the top and Africans at the bottom.

Sociocultural evolution differentiated between two phases of development as regards societies' internal regulation: the "military" and "industrial" societies.

Edward Burnett Tylor, a pioneer of anthropology, focused on the Sociocultural evolution of culture worldwide, noting that culture is an important part of every society and that it is subject to a process of Sociocultural evolution.

Sociocultural evolution 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.

Anthropologists Sir E B Tylor in England and Lewis Henry Morgan in the United States worked with data from indigenous people, who represented earlier stages of cultural evolution that gave insight into the process and progression of evolution of culture.

Tylor and Morgan elaborated the theory of unilinear Sociocultural 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.

Ward, who was a botanist and a paleontologist, believed that the law of Sociocultural 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".

Sociocultural evolution stressed that humans, driven by emotions, create goals for themselves and strive to realize them whereas there is no such intelligence and awareness guiding the non-human world.

Sociocultural evolution believed that the evolutionary processes have four stages:.

Sociocultural evolution notes that there is a tendency to standardisation and unification, when all smaller societies are absorbed into a single, large, modern society.

Critical theorists argue that notions of social Sociocultural evolution are simply justifications for power by the elites of society.

Social Sociocultural 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.

Sociocultural evolution conducted a comprehensive pre-history account that provided scholars with evidence for African and Asian cultural transmission into Europe.

Sociocultural evolution 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.

Sociocultural evolution 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.

Sociocultural evolution proposes a society's energy consumption as a measure of its advancement.

Julian Steward, author of Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution, created the theory of "multilinear" Sociocultural evolution which examined the way in which societies adapted to their environment.

Sociocultural evolution 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.

Sociocultural evolution 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.

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Sociocultural evolution 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.

Sociocultural evolution believed that it is possible to create theories analysing typical common culture, representative of specific eras or regions.

General Sociocultural evolution is the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization and adaptiveness to environment.

Sociocultural evolution cites the concept of 'truth' within many human cultures and the ever flowing dynamics between truth, power, and knowledge as a resultant complex dynamics and how they flow with ease like water which make the concept of 'truth' impervious to any further rational investigation.

Sociocultural evolution cites as further examples the 'Scientific study' of Population biology and Population genetics 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.

Sociocultural evolution calls them "Knowledge's from below" and a "historical knowledge of struggles".

Several cumulative major transitions of Sociocultural evolution have transformed life through key innovations in information storage and replication, including RNA, DNA, multicellularity, and language and culture as inter-human information processing systems.