Anthropology Archive

Biological and anthropological traditions

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Encyclopedists of the Middle Ages classified the universe from high to low - God to angels to man; man to apes, and apes to worms; animals to plants. They believed the world was ordered, and they thought they could deduce its order according to principles embodied in the 'Great Chain of

Being' which united all living things. The term was in use well into the eighteenth century, and arguably the modern theory of evolution is an elaboration of this notion (see Lovejoy 1936).

However, there are two important differences between the Great Chain of Being and the theory of evolution. First, the concept 'evolution' has a temporal as well as a spatial aspect: things change or evolve through time. Secondly, whereas the classic notion of the Great Chain of Being was based on the idea of the fixity of species, the theory of evolution, in its biological form, depends on the contrary notion of the mutability of species. Lower forms evolve into higher forms.

Social evolution has parallels with biological evolution. This is obvious today, in a world where most book-educated people learn biological evolution before they learn of other cultures. It was also obvious in the late nineteenth century, when social advancement was often seen as analogous to biological evolution. However, to view social evolution merely in this way would be to invert historical precedent. The widespread acceptance in intellectual circles of the notion of 'progress' predates the theory of evolution as we know it. Eighteenth-century thinkers accepted the idea of the progress of humankind within the framework of biological immutability; it was only in the late nineteenth century that modern notions of social evolution became associated with ideas like 'mutual struggle' or 'survival of the fittest'.

The boundary between the Great Chain of Being and evolutionism is hardly a precise one, and beliefs concerning the mechanisms of biological change were varied. Linnaeus, essentially an anti-evolutionist, believed in a system of hybridization, whereby hybrids constantly form and produce new genera. The comte de Buffon seems to have changed his mind in the course of completing his forty-four-volume Histoire naturelle (1749-1804), at first rejecting any ancestral connection between different species, and later moving towards a degenerativist, or anti-evolutionist view. He argued that a small number of pure, ancestral animal forms developed into a multiplicity of less-pure, modern forms.

In Philosophie zoologique, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1914 [1809]) suggested that each line of descent evolves to produce more-and-more-sophisticated life forms, but that the earliest forms continue to be reproduced by spontaneous generation. The earliest amoebas, he claimed, evolved into jellyfish. These evolved eventually into fishes, and later to reptiles, then later to mammals. Meanwhile, more recently generated amoebas evolved into jellyfish and fishes, but they will not yet have become reptiles or mammals. More recently still, other amoebas will have reproduced to form jellyfish, but not yet fishes. Lamarck believed that organs improve or decay according to whether they are used to their potential or not. He also held that individuals acquired characteristics which could be passed on to their descendants. For example, if a girl learned to paint at an early age, later she could pass on such talents to her children in the womb. Plainly, Lamarck had the idea of evolution, but he misunderstood its mechanism.

Charles Darwin (1859) rejected the Lamarckian view. He argued instead that evolution proceeds only through the passing down of what we now call genetic traits. Accidental mutation produced greater variety, and the forms which were most successful in their respective environments would reproduce more efficiently. Darwin, along with Alfred Russel Wallace (who came to similar conclusions), described the mechanism of evolution as 'sexual selection'. Since only those individuals that survive to reproduce will pass on their genes, mutations which enable this survival will be favoured. Isolation encourages greater change, and ultimately the formation of new species. As Darwin's ideas became well known, they came to have wide implications in Western societies, where they were seen as a threat to Christian orthodoxy. Their impact in the social sciences has, of course, been profound too (see Kuper 1994).

However, it would be wrong to see all developments in evolutionist anthropology simply as an extension of Darwinian theory. Evolutionist thinking in anthropology predates Darwin. Darwin published his most 'anthropological' work (he preferred the word 'ethnological'), The Descent of Man, in 1871 - the same year as important works by Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Burnett Tylor. Arguably, Lamarck's theory, though flawed in biology, makes better sense than Darwin's as an analogy to explain gradual, unilinear, or universal, cultural evolution. Although biological traits may not be passed on in the womb as Lamarck thought, nevertheless newly invented cultural traits may be passed rapidly from individual to individual. New culture traits have the capacity to transform existing social relations. Societies become more complex as this process continues.