Culture Evolves Slowly, Falls Apart Quickly

[n2doc]

By Brandon Keim October 13, 2010

Societies come together slowly, but can fall apart quickly, say researchers who applied the tools of evolutionary biologists to an anthropological debate.

Using archaeological records and linguistic analyses rather than fossils and genes, they created an evolutionary tree of political forms once found in Pacific islands.

The study, published October 13 in Nature, was intended to illuminate an issue of contention among archaeologists, anthropologists and historians: whether societies become more complex in incremental steps or sudden bursts, and whether they dissolve in similar fashion.

According to the classic academic narrative of political evolution, post-ice age complexity — defined as increasing levels of social hierarchy — evolved slowly but surely, with mechanical predictability. First came egalitarian bands of closely-related people; then came larger but still-egalitarian tribes, with only informal leadership; these clustered into chiefdoms, with hereditary leaders; chiefdoms united into states, with bureaucracies and administrative offices.

To some scholars, however, this narrative is deterministic. They say that political evolution doesn’t proceed neatly from lower to higher complexity, but proceeds in bursts. To them, tribes, chiefdoms and states all represent distinct evolutionary trajectories rather than stages of a single progression. The critics also say that the tendency of societies to move from higher to lower complexity has been underestimated.



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/evolution-of-culture/

[ladjf]

1. Good post. The same principle applies to all structures. Order requires

more supportive elements than disorder. Or, to put it another way, Order is a sequence of related and supportive events or process that take time to build. Disorder, or collapse, is a matter of disconnecting the Ordered elements, thereby converting Order into a mass of disorder, guided by only the most basic of rules.