That Complex Whole: Hierarchies, Sorts, and Punctuation

Summary

Implicit in most approaches to the evolution of culture is both the view that cultural evolution is always incremental and that cultures are structurally simple entities, making individual cultures seem entirely as capable of evolving in one direction as another, based solely on phenotypic plasticity and/or selective forces. However, as noted 140+ years ago by Tylor, culture is a complex whole. Structurally, it can best be viewed as multiple reflexive social, behavioral and informational hierarchies, each subject to a different mode of selection. Selection within each hierarchy produces a sort that feeds into each of the other hierarchies to be reflexively acted on there by the specific selective forces in operation within each of the destination hierarchies. The sort sent by one hierarchy to another given hierarchy and the selective forces operating within that destination hierarchy are not of necessity always compatible. When such incompatibility occurs, punctuational change is sometimes produced.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Evolutionary Theory and Archaeology, Part II: Applications of Human Behavioral Ecology, Macroevolutionary Approaches, and Costly Signaling   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords