Evolution, evolutionism and sociocultural anthropology: contributions to an unfinished debate

Abstract

It is well established that the modern notion of human being is firmly based on the concept of natural evolution, regarding its biological origins, and on the concept of culture, regarding its existential condition and its multiplicity of way of life. This paper discusses the relationship between the evolutionary paradigm in the natural sciences and modern anthropological thought by analyzing the roots of some misunderstandings between these two intellectual traditions. Notably, the conflation of the legacies of naturalist Charles Darwin and philosopher Herbert Spencer in the works of the school of thought known as Social Evolutionism, which was hegemonic between the 1870s and World War I (1914-1918) in the anthropological field. Based on the criticism directed at the authors of this school by Franz Boas, founder of North American Cultural Anthropology, the paper demonstrates that the evolutionary concept used by social evolutionists such as Edward B. Tylor and Lewis H. Morgan refers more to Spencer’s teleological and deductive conceptions of evolution as a law than to Darwin’s approach to natural selection as a mechanism. Finally, the paper highlights that the affinities between the Boasian theory of culture and the Darwinian worldview are greater than might be supposed, such as: a retrodictive view on the process of natural and cultural variancy, rather than a predictive one; the substitution of determined orthogenesis for non-deterministic phylogenesis; and the replacement of the belief on absolute progress and human exceptionalism for relativism concerning the place of humanity and its various cultural ways of life in the world.

Keywords: Evolution. Social evolutionism. Anthropology. Darwin. Spencer.