Sociocultural evolution
evolution of societies
Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or social evolution are theories of cultural evolution that describe how societies and culture change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure that is qualitatively different from the ancestral form".
Evolutionary sociology and biosociology are subfields of sociology. Evolutionary sociology refers to scholarship examining the interaction between human evolved traits and predispositions with social and material environments. Biosociology refers to scholarship examining the interaction between biomarkers (genes, hormones, polygenic scores, etc.) and social and material environments. This distinction roughly follows the classical distinction between “ultimate” and “proximate” causes. Ultimate or evolutionary causation focuses on the reasons a trait evolved and its adaptive functionality, and the role of evolved traits in social behavior is the focus of evolutionary sociology. Biosociology, by contrast, has a proximate focus, emphasizing mechanisms driving behaviors via hormonal, (epi-)genetic, neural, or other physiological pathways.
Most of the 19th-century and some 20th-century approaches to socioculture aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a whole, arguing that different societies have reached different stages of social development.
“Sociocultural evolution” enters the record as evolution of societies. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sociocultural, evolution and societies can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sociocultural evolution” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.