Adams, Richard N.
Description:
Cultural evolution has long been among the themes of anthropology but it has never ranked high. It is left mainly to archaeologists because they have to make sense of
how society works and survives through time–a concern that has pretty much been
abandoned by many cultural anthropologists. Anthropologists today seem little
motivated to find out how society works, but rather to make the world a better place to
live in for a particular population. The challenges of atmospheric change, nuclear
proliferation, environmental degradation and resource exhaustion, the emergence of life
threatening species–these challenges of contemporary evolution have awakened less
interest in anthropology. The concern with cultural evolution seems to be of greater
interest to non-anthropologists, such as in the work of Jarrod Diamond (2005), a
biologist, and the genre that as emerged as Big History, with the works of David
Christian (2005) and others. Among the few contemporary anthropologists who have
sought the dynamics of cultural evolution, the work of Joseph Tainter (1996) stands out.