Excerpt

Human societies are complex networks of people, energy, and information, but our understanding of how humans actually represent information and utilize it in structuring behavior remains poorly developed. In this chapter I build a model of knowledge representation that is grounded in experimental research in cognitive and social psychology and which exhibits several key properties of genotypes noted in post-neo-Darwinian studies of evolutionary innovation. This framework also leads to several insights concerning the evolution of social complexity and a potential research program for studying it in evolutionary terms.

Specifically, I address a curious situation with respect to the relationship between evolutionary theory and research on social complexity. Over the past several decades anthropologists have explored a variety of ways in which evolutionary theory, drawn largely from biology, might help to characterize social change through time (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Durham 1991; Laland and Brown 2002; Shennan 2002). For example, a recent summary identified five distinct schools of evolutionary thought in anthropology (Laland and Brown 2002):

• Sociobiology investigates the biological dimension of prosocial behavior.

• Human behavioral ecology investigates how the environment influences behavioral predispositions.

• Evolutionary psychology investigates the evolution of psychological predispositions.

• Cultural evolution considers cultural inheritance through analogy with the gene.

• Gene-culture coevolution considers how genes and culture influence each other across generations.

Although these approaches have been productive in addressing a number of questions, they have not had much impact on research concerning the origins of complex societies. Recent studies have utilized comparative approaches (M. E. Smith 2012; Trigger 2003), collective action theory (Blanton and Fargher 2008), various strands of Marxist theory (Feinman and Marcus 1998; Pauketat 2007; A. Smith 2003; Yoffee 2005), concepts of agency (Flannery and Marcus 2012; M. L. Smith 2003), and even socioeconomic development theory (Morris 2010), but none have been grounded in the various strands of evolutionary thought listed above.

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