The Structure of Cultural Revolutions

AbstractIn this paper I will attempt to combine multiple evolutionarytheories concerning the nature of science and culture to create anevolutionary model for explaining social change, focusing on conflict,revolution and resolution. This theory of “cultural change” will useterms borrowed from Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd’s dual-inheritance theory, in which they apply an evolutionary model to thephenomena of human culture, and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of scientificrevolutions. To bridge the conceptual gap between the two I will bringinto play David Hull’s philosophic theory that presents an evolutionaryaccount of the interrelationships between social and conceptualdevelopment in science (Hull, 1988). I will argue that we can describesociocultural evolution as possessing analogous aspects to ThomasKuhn’s theory of scientific progress. In this theory he explains how“normal” science is conducted, through empirical observation andexperimentation, and transformed through a series of stages of revolutionary science culminating in a “paradigm shift” which functionsto resolve the accumulation of scientific “anomalies”; scientific datawhich cannot be explained by the current scientific paradigm or theory.I will argue that culture, a product of the interaction between groups of human agents, consists of cultural variants. This is the term developedby Boyd and Richerson to denote cultural information: transmittedbeliefs, ideas, practices, strategies, behaviors and preferences.

Furthermore societies can be theorized, analogously to Kuhn’s theory,to consist of “cultural paradigms”. A cultural paradigm describes agroup’s accumulation of cultural variants ordered for the sake of cognitive and social coherence. A scientific paradigm describes ascientific group’s accumulation of scientific data and theories orderedfor the sake of theoretical coherence, allowing it to continue itsfunction of empirical “truth” finding. The evolutionary purpose of cultural paradigms is to give human agents a set of information thatgives psychological coherence to the individual and groups of individuals. I will explain what coherence means, how it works and whyit is important. When competing cultural variants enter into a group,or are innovated within a group, they can be similarly called “culturalanomalies”: a cultural variant or groups of cultural variants that poseto be in immediate competition with the status-quo or “norms” of agiven social group(s). As in the Kuhnian model, normal sciencenecessarily entails the accumulation of scientific data that doesn’t fitwithin the current paradigm. Analogously we can theorize that normalsocial development entails the accumulation of similar phenomena[anomalies] that challenge a given group’s cultural paradigm. This canoperate within the entire hierarchy of societal group-size; i.e. most of the world’s cultures and social groups reject the shade of Islamicfundamentalism that led to the events on 9/11, an anomaly that hasnow challenged the near-universal cultural variants that reject this type

of aggression. And also within the small towns and villages in whichthese terrorists operate there is a struggle between these culturalvariants for fitness resulting in competition often leading to the harmor death of members of both groups. I will argue that there are varyinglevels of cultural anomalies with a variety of effects on social groupdynamics. To begin this paper I shall briefly run through past attemptsat theorizing about cultural change and evolution. From there I willexplicate the main theories devised in the 20

th

century that weredesigned to explain the phenomena of culture, focusing on theirnecessity and ingenuity in helping further our understanding of cultureand their inevitable conceptual defects. I will then begin my dissectionof each theory of science and culture I have listed above to show howtheir theoretical frameworks provide a stable ground for the model Iam attempting to flesh out. Along the way I will also use a variety of sociological and philosophic research to substantiate my claims.Early Theories on Culture & ProgressSociocultural evolution is the termed used to denote theoriesconcerned with describing the nature of social and cultural evolution.Prior to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection theoristshypothesized how societies develop, change, and sustain themselvesand sought a logical pattern behind these movements. The ScottishEnlightenment gave us thinkers such as Adam Smith, Adam Fergusonand John Millar who postulated that societies move through a series of