ANTHROPOLOGY Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Cultural Ecology, Evolutionism, Sociobiology
26 Jul 2021
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Document Summary
Four broad strands of evolutionist thinking in anthropology: unilinear, universal, and multilinear evolutionism, plus neo-darwinism. Some scholars believed that 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). 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. Unilinear evolutionism is the notion that there exists one dominant line of evolution.
