The Dynamics of Cultural Evolution: The Central Role of Purposive Behaviors

Michael Rosenberg

Jul 2022 · Studies in Human Ecology and Adaptation Book 12 · Springer Nature

About this eBook

This book explores the nature of cultural and culturally structured social and behavioral entities, their evolutionary interactions, and the central role purposive behaviors play in those interactions. It, first, makes the case for cultural and cultural structured systems being considered as true entities bounded in time and space, and not ephemera in a constant state of becoming another system. Second, it examines how these entities interact to produce evolutionary culture change. It then argues that the intent of purposive behaviors is reliably knowable in the aggregate, at least when dealing with expressions of behavioral tendencies in the animal kingdom, humans included. Finally, the book references well documented behavioral tendencies for examples of proximate causation in the evolution of settled village societies and, following that, socially complex societies. Through these efforts, the book synthesizes the various approaches to the evolution of culture and provides a complete and comprehensive picture of the process. It provides a corrective to the tendency to view cultural systems as entirely open ended and as capable of changing in any direction; and also to treating cultural evolution as solely a result of selective forces, that is, in terms of only ultimate causation. This book provides an engaging and critical counterview to established theories of cultural evolution and is of interest to scholars and students of different disciplines, from anthropology and archeology, to evolutionary biology and epigenetics.

About the author

Michael Rosenberg is a retired Professor of Anthropology at the University of Delaware, Wilmington, USA. His primary research interests are the mechanics of cultural evolution and understanding the beginnings of food production, settled village life, and social complexity in the context of those mechanics. In the late 1980s-early 1990s, he participated in the Tigris-Euphrates Archaeological Reconnaissance Project in Anatolia, Turkey and in the late 1990s he discovered and directed the salvage excavations at the early Neolithic sites of Hallan Çemi and Demirköy in southeastern Turkey. He has published over 40 journal articles in reputed journals, and several book chapters in edited volumes with international publishers.