ANTC09H3 Midterm: Midterm Exam Notes
Document Summary
Social evolution is a subdiscipline of evolutionary biology that is concerned with social behaviors that have fitness consequences for individuals other than the actor. [citation needed] he proposes that natural selection favors mutually beneficial or selfish behaviors. Hamilton"s insight was to show how kin selection could explain altruism and spite. survivals, in anthropology, cultural phenomena that outlive the set of conditions under which they developed. The term was first employed by the british anthropologist edward burnett tylor in his primitive. Tylor believed that seemingly irrational customs and beliefs, such as peasant superstitions, were vestiges of earlier rational practices. He distinguished between continuing customs that maintained their function or meaning and those that had both lost their utility and were poorly integrated with the rest of culture. Tylor later expanded the notion of survivals to include material culture. The scottish evolutionist john fergusson mclennan used the term to denote symbolic forms of earlier customs.
