I’m aware of all that & have been so for a long time. I don’t buy it as you present it. Nor do I see any hope of thrashing it out in these comments. It’s too big and complicated an issue.

“But the chain is not a natural sequence; it is a cultural one . . . . ”

Categorize it how you will, the sequence needs to be explained.

the question you pose strikes me as participating in a common misunderstanding of evolution as much as it does in a common misunderstanding of culture.

Evolution is not the same thing as the medieval notion of the Great Chain of Being. The great chain of being went (for ex): rocks – frogs – dogs – people – God. Each step in the chain was good in its way, and each participated in the supreme goodness of God at the end of the chain, but each step was slightly less good than the next, superior one.

So — I read your question as asking a “Great Chain of Being” question: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states — the last being the supreme realization of a single unfolding principle of goodness, or developedness, or human potential, or whatever.

This is a fine way to organize your view of the world — lots of perfectly nice people use it — but it’s got nothing to do with evolution. Evolution doesn’t go: fish — bats — monkeys — people, with people as the highest unfolding of a single principle that was but imperfectly realized in the primitive form of a fish.

Every fish is a very good fish. Every fish is the outcome of an evolutionary process. You, a human, would be an utterly crap fish. The breathing underwater alone would do you in. And even if you could hack it as, say, a goldfish, you’d NEVER make it as a puffer fish or a swordfish. They are specifically evolved to exist in ways you couldn’t hack. mutatis mutandis, the same applies to fish acting as humans, of course. But keep in mind this is reciprocal, not one-way.

Now, obviously different “cultures” or “societies” or whatever you want to call them are not as unalike as fish and people. even so, their differences make organizing them along a Great chain of Being quite seductive — anthropology has struggled with and against this seduction throughout its history, as it comes out of the same intellectual tradition that produced and was shaped by the GCB (which is an impressively resilient mode of organizing thought).

Once you’ve applied the GCB — often all unawares — nowadays it’s a short step to mistaking the chain thereby imposed for an “evolutionary” sequence, and wondering ?how did some groups make it “up” the chain, while other groups didn’t?

But the chain is not a natural sequence; it is a cultural one organized by crypto-propositions having to do with batty notions cluttering our historical unconscious of a staircase of goodness and perfection organized around “our” society at the top. Thus the question you pose is a cultural theory crammed inappropriately into a scientific mode of investigation. There is no “scientific” answer to this question, because the very “data” it treats is hopelessly subjective. Put another way: GIGO.

Yes, all those folks have written. But as much as I have liked some of that work, they haven’t tried to conceptualize an evolutionary process in the way Ehrlich & Levin (and a bunch of folks they cite) are trying to do. That is to say, it is not clear to me that E&L would be saying things differently if they knew the cultural complexity and origins of the state literature. Do I wish they knew that literature? Sure.

But I don’t think that sneering dismissal of their article is quite an appropriate response to their apparent ignorance of that work. It seems to me that the whole question of how we got from hunter-gatherer bands to whatever it is that we have now (which, of course, includes a few remaining h-g bands) is an important question and that, by and large, 20th century social science hasn’t done very well by it. Perhaps we can do better in this century.

But what have those anthropologist had to say about cultural evolution? Not much.

I agree – why not ask them?

I’m not sure exactly what they are trying to accomplish and who they are trying to reach. Are they trying to spread the word to other biologists about what’s been going on in other disciplines? Or are they trying to show social scientists that they know what we’ve been up to?

Thanks for the link, Chris.