DJ Kool Herc The break What was the break? Herc used the record to focus on a short, heavily percussive part in it: the "break". What did the break consist of? Specifically, DJ Kool Herc: extended an instrumental beat (breaking or scratching) to let people dance longer Did people like it? ... [This] helped lay the foundation for a cultural revolution.
How did it lead to a cultural evolution?
How did the break lead to a cultural evolution?
DJ Kool Herc developed the style that was the blueprint for hip hop music. Herc used the record to focus on a short, heavily percussive part in it: the "break". Since this part of the record was the one the dancers liked best, Herc isolated the break and prolonged it by changing between two record players. As one record reached the end of the break, he cued a second record back to the beginning of the break, which allowed him to extend a relatively short section of music into "five-minute loop of fury". This innovation had its roots in what Herc called "The Merry-Go-Round," a technique by which the deejay switched from break to break at the height of the party. This technique is specifically called "The Merry-Go-Round" because according to Herc, it takes one "back and forth with no slack." Herc told The New York Times that he first introduced the Merry-Go-Round into his sets in 1972. The earliest known Merry-Go-Round involved playing James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" (with its refrain, "Now clap your hands! Stomp your feet!"), then switching from that record's break into the break from a second record, "Bongo Rock" by The Incredible Bongo Band. From the "Bongo Rock"'s break, Herc used a third record to switch to the break on "The Mexican" by the English rock band Babe Ruth. Kool Herc also contributed to developing the rhyming style of hip hop by punctuating the recorded music with slang phrases, announcing: "Rock on, my mellow!" "B-boys, b-girls, are you ready? keep on rock steady" "This is the joint! Herc beat on the point" "To the beat, y'all!" "You don't stop!" For his contributions, Herc is called a "founding father of hip hop," a "nascent cultural hero," and an integral part of the beginnings of hip hop by Time. On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc was a disc jockey and emcee at a party in the recreation room at Sedgwick Avenue. Specifically, DJ Kool Herc: extended an instrumental beat (breaking or scratching) to let people dance longer (break dancing) and began MC'ing (rapping) during the extended breakdancing. ... [This] helped lay the foundation for a cultural revolution. According to music journalist Steven Ivory, in 1973, Herc placed on the turntables two copies of Brown's 1970 Sex Machine album and ran "an extended cut 'n' mix of the percussion breakdown" from "Give It Up or Turnit Loose", signaling the birth of hip hop. CANNOTANSWER
the style that was the blueprint for hip hop music.
Clive Campbell (born April 16, 1955), better known by his stage name DJ Kool Herc, is a Jamaican-American DJ who is credited for originating hip hop music in the Bronx, New York City, in the 1970s through his "Back to School Jam", hosted on August 11, 1973, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. After his younger sister, Cindy Campbell, became inspired to earn extra cash for back-to-school clothes, she decided to have her older brother, then 18 years old, play music for the neighborhood in their apartment building. Known as the "Founder of Hip-Hop" and "Father of Hip-Hop", Campbell began playing hard funk records of the sort typified by James Brown.

Campbell began to isolate the instrumental portion of the record which emphasized the drum beat—the "break"—and switch from one break to another. Using the same two-turntable set-up of disco DJs, he used two copies of the same record to elongate the break. This breakbeat DJing, using funky drum solos, formed the basis of hip hop music. Campbell's announcements and exhortations to dancers helped lead to the syncopated, rhythmically spoken accompaniment now known as rapping.

He called the dancers "break-boys" and "break-girls", or simply b-boys and b-girls. Campbell's DJ style was quickly taken up by figures such as Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash. Unlike them, he never made the move into commercially recorded hip hop in its earliest years.

Biography

Early life and education

Clive Campbell was the first of six children born to Keith and Nettie Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica. While growing up, he saw and heard the sound systems of neighborhood parties called dance halls, and the accompanying speech of their DJs, known as toasting. He emigrated with his family at the age of 12 to The Bronx, New York City in November 1967, where they lived at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

Campbell attended the Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School in the Bronx, where his height, frame, and demeanor on the basketball court prompted the other kids to nickname him "Hercules".  After being involved in a physical altercation with school bullies, the Five Percenters came to Herc's aid, befriended him and as Herc put it, helped "Americanize" him with an education in New York City street culture.  He began running with a graffiti crew called the Ex-Vandals, taking the name Kool Herc. Herc recalls persuading his father to buy him a copy of "Sex Machine" by James Brown, a record that not a lot of his friends had, and which they would come to him to hear. He used the recreation room of their building, 1520 Sedgwick Avenue.

Herc's first sound system consisted of two turntables connected to two amplifiers and a Shure "Vocal Master" PA system with two speaker columns, on which he played records such as James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", Jimmy Castor's "It's Just Begun" and Booker T. & the M.G.'s' "Melting Pot". With Bronx clubs struggling with street gangs, uptown DJs catering to an older disco crowd with different aspirations, and commercial radio also catering to a demographic distinct from teenagers in the Bronx, Herc's parties had a ready-made audience.

The "break"
DJ Kool Herc developed the style that was the blueprint for hip hop music. Herc used the record to focus on a short, heavily percussive part in it: the "break". Since this part of the record was the one the dancers liked best, Herc isolated the break and prolonged it by changing between two record players. As one record reached the end of the break, he cued a second record back to the beginning of the break, which allowed him to extend a relatively short section of music into  "five-minute loop of fury". This innovation had its roots in what Herc called "The Merry-Go-Round," a technique by which the deejay switched from break to break at the height of the party. This technique is specifically called "The Merry-Go-Round" because according to Herc, it takes  one "back and forth with no slack."

Herc stated that he first introduced the Merry-Go-Round into his sets in 1972. The earliest known Merry-Go-Round involved playing James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" (with its refrain,  "Now clap your hands! Stomp your feet!"), then switching from that record's break into the break from a second record, "Bongo Rock" by The Incredible Bongo Band. From the "Bongo Rock"'s break, Herc used a third record to switch to the break on "The Mexican" by the English rock band Babe Ruth.

Kool Herc also contributed to developing the rhyming style of hip hop by punctuating the recorded music with slang phrases, announcing: "Rock on, my mellow!" "B-boys, b-girls, are you ready? keep on rock steady" "This is the joint! Herc beat on the point" "To the beat, y'all!" "You don't stop!"  For his contributions, Herc is called a "founding father of hip hop," a "nascent cultural hero," and an integral part of the beginnings of hip hop by Time.

On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc was a disc jockey and emcee at a party in the recreation room at Sedgwick Avenue. Specifically, DJ Kool Herc:

According to music journalist Steven Ivory, in 1973, Herc placed on the turntables two copies of Brown's 1970 Sex Machine album and ran "an extended cut 'n' mix of the percussion breakdown" from "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose", signaling the birth of hip hop.

B-boys and b-girls
The "b-boys" and "b-girls" were the dancers to Herc's breaks, who were described as "breaking". Herc has noted that "breaking" was also street slang of the time meaning "getting excited", "acting energetically," or "causing a disturbance". Herc coined the terms "b-boy", "b-girl," and "breaking" which became part of the lexicon of what would be eventually called hip hop culture. Early Kool Herc b-boy and later DJ innovator Grandmixer DXT describes the early evolution as follows:

 ... [E]verybody would form a circle and the B-boys would go into the center. At first the dance was simple: touch your toes, hop, kick out your leg. Then some guy went down, spun around on all fours. Everybody said wow and went home to try to come up with something better.

In the early 1980s, the media began to call this style "breakdance," which in 1991 the New York Times wrote was "an art as demanding and inventive as mainstream dance forms like ballet and jazz." Since this emerging culture was still without a name, participants often identified as "b-boys," a usage that included and went beyond the specific connection to dance, a usage that would persist in hip hop culture.

Move to the streets
With the mystique of his graffiti name, his physical stature, and the reputation of his small parties, Herc became a folk hero in the Bronx. He began to play at nearby clubs including the Twilight Zone, Hevalo, Executive Playhouse, the PAL on 183rd Street, as well as at high schools such as Dodge and Taft. Rapping duties were delegated to Coke La Rock and Theodore Puccio. Herc's collective, known as The Herculoids, was augmented by Clark Kent and dancers The Nigga Twins. Herc took his soundsystem (the herculords) —still legendary for its sheer volume—to the streets and parks of the Bronx. Nelson George recalls a schoolyard party:

The sun hadn't gone down yet, and kids were just hanging out, waiting for something to happen. Van pulls up, a bunch of guys come out with a table, crates of records. They unscrew the base of the light pole, take their equipment, attach it to that, get the electricity – Boom! We got a concert right here in the schoolyard and it's this guy Kool Herc. And he's just standing with the turntable, and the guys were studying his hands. There are people dancing, but there's as many people standing, just watching what he's doing. That was my first introduction to in-the-street, hip hop DJing.

Influence on artists
In 1975, the young Grandmaster Flash, to whom Kool Herc was, in his words, "a hero", began DJing in Herc's style.  By 1976, Flash and his MCs The Furious Five played to a packed Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Venue owners were often nervous of unruly young crowds, however, and soon sent hip hop back to the clubs, community centres and high school gymnasiums of the Bronx.

Afrika Bambaataa first heard Kool Herc in 1973. Bambaataa, at that time a general in the notorious Black Spades gang of the Bronx, obtained his own soundsystem in 1975 and began to DJ in Herc's style, converting his followers to the non-violent Zulu Nation in the process. Kool Herc began using The Incredible Bongo Band's "Apache" as a break in 1975. It became a firm b-boy favorite—"the Bronx national anthem"—and is still in use in hip hop today. Steven Hager wrote of this period:

For over five years the Bronx had lived in constant terror of street gangs. Suddenly, in 1975, they disappeared almost as quickly as they had arrived. This happened because something better came along to replace the gangs. That something was eventually called hip-hop.

In 1979, the record company executive Sylvia Robinson assembled a group she called The Sugarhill Gang and recorded "Rapper's Delight". The hit song ushered in the era of commercially released hip hop. By that year's end, Grandmaster Flash was recording for Enjoy Records. In 1980, Afrika Bambaataa began recording for Winley. By this time, DJ Kool Herc's star had faded.

Grandmaster Flash suggests that Herc may not have kept pace with developments in techniques of cueing (lining up a record to play at a certain place on it). Developments changed techniques of cutting (switching from one record to another) and scratching (moving the record by hand to and fro under the stylus for percussive effect) in the late 1970s. Herc said he retreated from the scene after being stabbed at the Executive Playhouse while trying to intercede in a fight, and the burning down of one of his venues. In 1980, Herc had stopped DJing and was working in a record shop in South Bronx.

Later years
Kool Herc appeared in Hollywood's motion picture take on hip hop, Beat Street (Orion, 1984), as himself. In the mid-1980s, his father died, and he became addicted to crack cocaine. "I couldn't cope, so I started medicating", he says of this period.

In 1994, Herc performed on Terminator X & the Godfathers of Threatt's album, Super Bad. In 2005, he wrote the foreword to Jeff Chang's book on hip hop, Can't Stop Won't Stop. In 2005 he appeared in the music video of "Top 5 (Dead or Alive)" by Jin from the album The Emcee's Properganda. In 2006, he became involved in getting Hip Hop commemorated at the Smithsonian Institution museums. He participated in the 2007 Dance parade.

Since 2007, Herc has worked on a campaign to prevent 1520 Sedgwick Avenue from being sold to developers and withdrawn from its status as a Mitchell-Lama affordable housing property. In the summer of 2007, New York state officials declared 1520 Sedgwick Avenue the "birthplace of hip-hop", and nominated it to national and state historic registers. The city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development ruled against the proposed sale in February 2008, on the grounds that "the proposed purchase price is inconsistent with the use of property as a Mitchell-Lama affordable housing development". It is the first time they have so ruled in such a case.

Serious illness
According to a DJ Premier fan blog, The Sources website and other sites, DJ Kool Herc fell gravely ill in early 2011 and was said to lack health insurance. He had surgery for kidney stones, with a stent placed to relieve the pressure. He needed follow-up surgery but St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, the site that performed the previous surgery, requested that he make a deposit toward the next surgery, because he had missed several follow-up visits. (The hospital noted that it would not turn away uninsured patients in the emergency room.) DJ Kool Herc and his family set up an official website on which he described his medical issue and set a larger goal of establishing the DJ Kool Herc Fund to pioneer long-term health care solutions. In April 2013, Campbell recovered from surgery and moved into post-medical care.

First vinyl record
In May 2019, Kool Herc released his first vinyl record with Mr. Green.

Discography

Albums
2019 – Last of the Classic Beats (with Mr. Green)

Guest appearances
Terminator X – "Herc's Message" from Super Bad (1994)
The Chemical Brothers – "Elektrobank" from Dig Your Own Hole (1997)
Substantial – "Sacrifice" from Sacrifice (2008)

Notes

References
Chang, Jeff. Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. St. Martin's Press, New York: 2005. 
Cross, Brian. It's Not About A Salary...Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles. New York: Verso, 1993. 
Hager, Steven, "Afrika Bambaataa's Hip-Hop", Village Voice, September 21, 1982. Reprinted in And It Don't Stop! The Best American Hip-Hop Journalism of the Last 25 Years. Cepeda, Raquel (ed.). New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2004. 
Ogg, Alex, with Upshall, David. The Hip Hop Years, London: Macmillan, 1999 
Shapiro, Peter. Rough Guide to Hip-Hop, 2nd. ed., London: Rough Guides, 2005 
Toop, David. Rap Attack, 3rd. ed., London: Serpent's Tail, 2000

External links

Official Website of DJ Kool Herc

A biography of DJ Kool Herc at OldSchoolHipHop.com
Lengthy Kool Herc bio @ hiphop.sh

1955 births
American rappers of Jamaican descent
American hip hop DJs
The Godfathers Of Threatt members
Jamaican hip hop musicians
Jamaican emigrants to the United States
Musicians from Kingston, Jamaica
Rappers from the Bronx
Living people
21st-century American rappers
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change. It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". Cultural evolution is the change of this information over time.

Cultural evolution, historically also known as sociocultural evolution, was originally developed in the 19th century by anthropologists stemming from Charles Darwin's research on evolution. Today, cultural evolution has become the basis for a growing field of scientific research in the social sciences, including anthropology, economics, psychology and organizational studies. Previously, it was believed that social change resulted from biological adaptations, but anthropologists now commonly accept that social changes arise in consequence of a combination of social, evolutionary and biological influences.

There have been a number of different approaches to the study of cultural evolution, including dual inheritance theory, sociocultural evolution, memetics, cultural evolutionism and other variants on cultural selection theory. The approaches differ not just in the history of their development and discipline of origin but in how they conceptualize the process of cultural evolution and the assumptions, theories and methods that they apply to its study. In recent years, there has been a convergence of the cluster of related theories towards seeing cultural evolution as a unified discipline in its own right.

History

Aristotle thought that development of cultural form (such as poetry) stops when it reaches its maturity. In 1873 in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, it was written: "By the principle which Darwin describes as natural selection short words are gaining the advantage over long words, direct forms of expression are gaining the advantage over indirect, words of precise meaning the advantage of the ambiguous, and local idioms are everywhere in disadvantage".

Cultural evolution, in the Darwinian sense of variation and selective inheritance, could be said to trace back to Darwin himself. He argued for both customs (1874 p. 239) and "inherited habits" as contributing to human evolution, grounding both in the innate capacity for acquiring language.

Darwin's ideas, along with those of such as Comte and Quetelet, influenced a number of what would now be called social scientists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hodgson and Knudsen single out David George Ritchie and Thorstein Veblen, crediting the former with anticipating both dual inheritance theory and universal Darwinism. Despite the stereotypical image of social Darwinism that developed later in the century, neither Ritchie nor Veblen were on the political right.

The early years of the 20th century and particularly the First World War saw biological concepts and metaphors shunned by most social sciences. Even uttering the word evolution carried "serious risk to one's intellectual reputation." Darwinian ideas were also in decline following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics but were revived, especially by Fisher, Haldane and Wright, who developed the first population genetic models and as it became known the modern synthesis.

Cultural evolutionary concepts, or even metaphors, revived more slowly. If there were one influential individual in the revival it was probably Donald T. Campbell. In 1960 he drew on Wright to draw a parallel between genetic evolution and the "blind variation and selective retention" of creative ideas; work that was developed into a full theory of "socio-cultural evolution" in 1965 (a work that includes references to other works in the then current revival of interest in the field). Campbell (1965 26) was clear that he perceived cultural evolution not as an analogy "from organic evolution per se, but rather from a general model for quasiteleological processes for which organic evolution is but one instance".

Others pursued more specific analogies notably the anthropologist F. T. (Ted) Cloak who argued in 1975 for the existence of learnt cultural instructions (cultural corpuscles or i-culture) resulting in material artefacts (m-culture) such as wheels. The argument thereby introduced as to whether cultural evolution requires neurological instructions continues to the present day .

Unilinear theory 
In the 19th century cultural evolution was thought to follow a unilineal pattern whereby all cultures progressively develop over time. The underlying assumption was that Cultural Evolution itself led to the growth and development of civilization.

Thomas Hobbes in the 17th Century declared indigenous culture to have "no arts, no letters, no society" and he described facing life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He, like other scholars of his time, reasoned that everything positive and esteemed resulted from the slow development away from this poor lowly state of being.

Under the theory of unilinear Cultural Evolution, all societies and cultures develop on the same path. The first to present a general unilineal theory was Herbert Spencer. Spencer suggested that humans develop into more complex beings as culture progresses, where people originally lived in "undifferentiated hordes" culture progresses and develops to the point where civilization develops hierarchies. The concept behind unilinear theory is that the steady accumulation of knowledge and culture leads to the separation of the various modern day sciences and the build-up of cultural norms present in modern-day society.

In Lewis H. Morgan's book Ancient Society (1877), Morgan labels seven differing stages of human culture: lower, middle, and upper savagery; lower, middle, and upper barbarism; and civilization. He justifies this staging classification by referencing societies whose cultural traits resembled those of each of his stage classifications of the cultural progression. Morgan gave no example of lower savagery, as even at the time of writing few examples remained of this cultural type.  At the time of expounding his theory, Morgan's work was highly respected and became a foundation for much of anthropological study that was to follow.

Cultural particularism 
There began a widespread condemnation of unilinear theory in the late 19th century. Unilinear cultural evolution implicitly assumes that culture was borne out of the United States and Western Europe. That was seen by many to be racist, as it assumed that some individuals and cultures were more evolved than others.

Franz Boas, a German-born anthropologist, was the instigator of the movement known as 'cultural particularism' in which the emphasis shifted to a multilinear approach to cultural evolution. That differed to the unilinear approach that used to be favoured in the sense that cultures were no longer compared, but they were assessed uniquely. Boas, along with several of his pupils, notably A.L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, changed the focus of anthropological research to the effect that instead of generalizing cultures, the attention was now on collecting empirical evidence of how individual cultures change and develop.

Multilinear theory 
Cultural particularism dominated popular thought for the first half of the 20th century before American anthropologists, including Leslie A. White, Julian H. Steward, Marshall D. Sahlins, and Elman R. Service, revived the debate on cultural evolution. These theorists were the first to introduce the idea of multilinear cultural evolution.

Under multilinear theory, there are no fixed stages (as in unilinear theory) towards cultural development. Instead, there are several stages of differing lengths and forms. Although, individual cultures develop differently and cultural evolution occurs differently, multilinear theory acknowledges that cultures and societies do tend to develop and move forward.

Leslie A. White focused on the idea that different cultures had differing amounts of 'energy', White argued that with greater energy societies could possess greater levels of social differentiation. He rejected separation of modern societies from primitive societies. In contrast, Steward argued, much like Darwin's theory of evolution, that culture adapts to its surroundings. 'Evolution and Culture' by Sahlins and Service is an attempt to condense the views of White and Steward into a universal theory of multilinear evolution.

Memetics

Richard Dawkins' 1976 book The Selfish Gene proposed the concept of the "meme", which is analogous to that of the gene. A meme is an idea-replicator that can reproduce itself, by jumping from mind to mind via the process of one human learning from another via imitation. Along with the "virus of the mind" image, the meme might be thought of as a "unit of culture" (an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour, etc.), which spreads among the individuals of a population. The variation and selection in the copying process enables Darwinian evolution among memeplexes and therefore is a candidate for a mechanism of cultural evolution. As memes are "selfish" in that they are "interested" only in their own success, they could well be in conflict with their biological host's genetic interests. Consequently, a "meme's eye" view might account for certain evolved cultural traits, such as suicide terrorism, that are successful at spreading meme of martyrdom, but fatal to their hosts and often other people.

Evolutionary epistemology

"Evolutionary epistemology" can also refer to a theory that applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human knowledge and argues that units of knowledge themselves, particularly scientific theories, evolve according to selection. In that case, a theory, like the germ theory of disease, becomes more or less credible according to changes in the body of knowledge surrounding it.

Evolutionary epistemology is a naturalistic approach to epistemology, which emphasizes the importance of natural selection in two primary roles. In the first role, selection is the generator and maintainer of the reliability of our senses and cognitive mechanisms, as well as the "fit" between those mechanisms and the world. In the second role, trial and error learning and the evolution of scientific theories are construed as selection processes.

One of the hallmarks of evolutionary epistemology is the notion that empirical testing alone does not justify the pragmatic value of scientific theories but rather that social and methodological processes select those theories with the closest "fit" to a given problem. The mere fact that a theory has survived the most rigorous empirical tests available does not, in the calculus of probability, predict its ability to survive future testing. Karl Popper used Newtonian physics as an example of a body of theories so thoroughly confirmed by testing as to be considered unassailable but were nevertheless overturned by Albert Einstein's bold insights into the nature of space-time. For the evolutionary epistemologist, all theories are true only provisionally, regardless of the degree of empirical testing they have survived.

Popper is considered by many to have given evolutionary epistemology its first comprehensive treatment, bur Donald T. Campbell had coined the phrase in 1974.

Dual inheritance theory 

Taken from the main page:

Dual inheritance theory (DIT), also known as gene–culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution."

Criticism and controversy 
As a relatively new and growing scientific field, cultural evolution is undergoing much formative debate. Some of the prominent conversations are revolving around Universal Darwinism, dual inheritance theory, and memetics.

More recently, cultural evolution has drawn conversations from multi-disciplinary sources with movement towards a unified view between the natural and social sciences. There remains some accusation of biological reductionism, as opposed to cultural naturalism, and scientific efforts are often mistakenly associated with Social Darwinism. However, some useful parallels between biological and social evolution still appear to be found.

Criticism of historic approaches to cultural evolution 

Cultural evolution has been criticized over the past two centuries that it has advanced its development into the form it holds today. Morgan's theory of evolution implies that all cultures follow the same basic pattern. Human culture is not linear, different cultures develop in different directions and at differing paces, and it is not satisfactory or productive to assume cultures develop in the same way.

A further key critique of cultural evolutionism is what is known as "armchair anthropology". The name results from the fact that many of the anthropologists advancing theories had not seen first hand the cultures they were studying. The research and data collected was carried out by explorers and missionaries as opposed to the anthropologists themselves. Edward Tylor was the epitome of that and did very little of his own research. Cultural evolution is also criticized for being ethnocentric; cultures are still seen as attempting to emulate western civilization. Under ethnocentricity, primitive societies are said to not yet be at the cultural levels of other Western societies.

Much of the criticism aimed at cultural evolution is focused on the unilinear approach to social change. Broadly speaking in the second half of the 20th century the criticisms of cultural evolution have been answered by the multilinear theory. Ethnocentricity, for example, is more prevalent under the unilinear theory.

Some recent approaches, such as dual inheritance theory, make use of empirical methods including psychological and animal studies, field site research, and computational models.

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

Early foundational books

Modern review books 
 Mesoudi, A (2011). Cultural evolution: how Darwinian theory can explain human culture and synthesize the social sciences. University of Chicago Press

In evolutionary economics

In evolutionary biology 
 Lindenfors, P. (2017). For whose benefit? The biological and cultural evolution of cooperation. Springer.
 Jablonka, E., Lamb, M.J., (2014). Evolution in Four Dimensions, revised edition: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. MIT Press.

High-profile empirical work

In organisational studies

Organisational memetics

Evolutionary linguistics

External links 
 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-cultural/
 Cultural Evolution Society

Sociocultural evolution theory Multilineal evolution is a 20th-century social theory about the evolution of societies and cultures. It is composed of many competing theories by various sociologists and anthropologists. This theory has replaced the older 19th century set of theories of unilineal evolution, where evolutionists were deeply interested in making generalizations.

When critique of classical social evolutionism became widely accepted, modern anthropological and sociological approaches have changed to reflect their responses to the critique of their predecessor. Modern theories are careful to avoid unsourced, ethnocentric speculation, comparisons, or value judgements; more or less regarding individual societies as existing within their own historical contexts. These conditions provided the context for new theories such as cultural relativism and multilinear evolution, which criticizes the generalization of culture and hypothetical stages of evolution.

History 
Around 1940, a number of American anthropologists began rejecting the ideas of unilinear evolutionism and universal evolutionism, and began to move towards the idea of multilinear evolutionism. This theory focused around the process that culture moves forward down a number of paths consisting of different styles and lengths.

Approaches 
By mid-twentieth century, anthropologists started to criticize the generalization of culture and the hypothetical stages of cultural evolution, and instead, started a new trend of viewing all cultures as unique according to time and place.

Leslie White rejected the opposition between "primitive" and "modern" societies but did argue that societies could be distinguished based on the amount of energy they harnessed, and that increased energy allowed for greater social differentiation. White thought in broad, universal schemes, while anthropologists such as Julian Steward preferred to use a more limited, multilinear strategy. Steward rejected the 19th century notion of progress, and instead called attention to the Darwinian notion of "adaptation," arguing that all societies had to adapt to their environment in some way, but that the process could differ between cultures. Julian Steward thus linked multilinear evolution with the idea of cultural ecology.

Anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service wrote a book, Evolution and Culture, in which they attempted to synthesize White's and Steward's approaches. Sahlins and Service argue that societies develop through a process of specialized adaptions to their habitat and neighbouring societies, and that variations in environments and historical contacts are what leads to cultural diversification.

Cultural evolution had previously been treated much like biological evolution, but many anthropologists were quick to dismiss this comparison. Steward wrote that unlike biological evolution, in cultural evolution it is assumed that cultural patterns in different parts of the world are genetically unrelated, and yet they were said in unilinear evolution to pass through parallel sequences. Sahlins and Service also dismissed this comparison, stating that cultural variation could be transmitted between different lines by diffusion, where biological evolution cannot.

The multilineal evolutionary theory views the process of cultural development as an adaption to nature's resources through technological breakthroughs, as well as coping with outside cultural influence. Through this adaptation process, cultures form new traits called "inventions," and new items are made available from outside cultures through "diffusion." While each anthropologist's theory regarding multilineal evolution has varied slightly, most agreed that no specific evolutionary changes are experienced by all cultures universally, but that all human societies do generally evolve or progress.

Other anthropologists, such as Peter Vayda and Roy Rappaport, have gone on to build or respond to work done by White and Steward, such as developing theories of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology. By the late 1950s, students of Steward such as Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz turned away from cultural ecology to Marxism, World Systems Theory, Dependency theory and Marvin Harris's cultural materialism.

Twenty-first Century 
Today most anthropologists continue to reject 19th century notions of progress and the three original assumptions of unilineal evolution. Following Steward, they take seriously the relationship between a culture and its environment in attempts to explain different aspects of a culture. But most modern cultural anthropologists have adopted a general systems approach, examining cultures as emergent systems and argue that one must consider the whole social environment, which includes political and economic relations among cultures. There are still others who continue to reject the entirety of the evolutionary thinking and look instead at historical contingencies, contacts with other cultures, and the operation of cultural symbol systems. As a result, the simplistic notion of 'cultural evolution' has grown less useful and given way to an entire series of more nuanced approaches to the relationship of culture and environment. In the area of development studies, authors such as Amartya Sen have developed an understanding of 'development' and 'human flourishing' that also question more simplistic notions of progress, while retaining much of their original inspiration.

See also 

 Neoevolutionism
 Sociobiology
 Theory of modernisation
 Theory of post-industrial society

References 

Sociocultural evolution theory
Emergence