Natural Selection, Energetics, and "Cultural Materialism" [and Comments and Reply]

Adams, Richard N.; Campbell, Donald T.; Cohen, Ronald; Curtin, Richard A.; Davis, Whitney; Ruijter, A. de; Diener, Paul; Dunnell, Robert C.; Ehrenreich, Jeffrey; Ekholm, Kajsa; Friedman, Jonathan; Parker, Ronn; Prattis, J. I.; Weil, Jim

doi:10.1086/202745

Cited by 18 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Although the bulk of this paper was written prior to the appearance of Adams's (1981) stimulating and provocative analysis of Darwinian selection and energetic theory, much of the immediately preceding discussion is strikingly congruent with his treatment, even where he invokes a somewhat different set of intellectual ancestors. What is puzzling in the present context, however, is the partial nature of the convergence.…”

Section: Marx and Darwinmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…An energy criterion for measurement and comparison is hardly new in anthropology. White's dictum that culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita increases (1949,1959) has long been considered a virtual truism; Adams (1975) has used energy to describe and analyze sociopolitical systems and especially the concept of political power. In ecology the work of Howard Odum (1971) uses energy as a principal integrative concept for his analysis of ecosystems.…”

Section: Energy and Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rather, the energy criterion suggests that the behaviors indicated by these concepts are measurable in terms of costs and returns (cf. Adams 1981) and thereby requires their treatment from the same set of initial premises and rules of reasoning. Accordingly, such behaviors will be of analytical importance to the extent that they are demonstrably involved in the overall energetic system.…”

Section: Prime Movers and Systems Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cultural Materialism: A Theoretical Review

Price¹

1982

Am. antiq.

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A review of the principles of cultural materialism (a synthesis of Marx's causal primacy of the infrastructure and Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection), this paper addresses certain substantive and metatheoretical problems of contemporary anthropology. A position paper, it is written from the standpoint that cultural materialism offers the most powerful and productive set of premises extant in the discipline for the explanation of cultural similarity and difference, stability and change, and for the nonidiosyncratic formulation—and potential falsification—of the broadest possible comparative and diachronic propositions. The implications of this position for disciplinary and subfield relationships in the social sciences are explored.

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Section: Marx and Darwinmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Energy and Behaviormentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Prime Movers and Systems Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Cultural Materialism: A Theoretical Review

Price¹

1982

Am. antiq.

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“…In the late 1970s and early 1980s, cultural anthropology was in the midst of a paradigm shift in which evolutionary explanations were being touted as critical to understanding cultural change over time (e.g., Adams et al, 1981). Previously, and currently at the time, him that the uniqueness of human "evolvability" (Muller, 1955: 3;Hanson, 1977: 5) has been questioned.…”

Section: Dr Lammerts Was the Director Of Research In The Horticulturalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early usage and meaning of evolvability

Crother

Murray

2019

Ecology and Evolution

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Evolvability has become an enormously popular concept in evolutionary biology and in machine learning software architecture. While it is claimed that the term was coined in 1988 by Richard Dawkins, it was used as early as 1931 as a characteristic of life by John A. Thomson. We quote and review the earliest uses and definitions of evolvability in biological frameworks up until 1989, which are remarkably few. The meaning changed from simply the “ability to evolve” as a characteristic of life to various versions of including necessary variation to predict whether or not something could evolve to the rate and quality of that evolution. Or, meaning changed from the ability to evolve to the “quality” of the ability to evolve. Since then, evolvability has taken on many definitions as it has exploded in usage.

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“…The problem is probably due in part to the static nature of classification versus the continuous dynamics of social reality. It is also partly due to the biased ethnographic information generated by Boas (see Boas et al [2002], Ruyle [1973], or Moss [2011]), whose interests included fighting evolutionism (Estévez and Vila 2010) and discrediting historical determinism (Adams 1981;Knight 2011Knight [1978; Maud 1982).…”

Section: Jordi Estévezmentioning

confidence: 99%

Anarchism and the Archaeology of Anarchic Societies

Angelbeck¹,

Grier²

2012

Current Anthropology

120

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology.Throughout human history, people have lived in societies without formalized government. We argue that the theory of anarchism presents a productive framework for analyzing decentralized societies. Anarchism encompasses a broad array of interrelated principles for organizing societies without the centralization of authority. Moreover, its theory of history emphasizes an ongoing and active resistance to concentrations of power. We present an anarchist analysis of the development of social power, authority, and status within the Coast Salish region of the Northwest Coast. Coast Salish peoples exhibited complex displays of chiefly authority and class stratification but without centralized political organization. Ethnographically, their sociopolitical formation is unique in allowing a majority of "highclass" people and a minority of commoners and slaves, or what Wayne Suttles described as an "inverted-pear" society. We present the development of this sociopolitical structure through an analysis of cranial deformation from burial data and assess it in relation to periods of warfare. We determine that many aspects of Coast Salish culture include practices that resist concentrations of power. Our central point is that anarchism is useful for understanding decentralized (or anarchic) networks-those that allow for complex intergroup relations while staving off the establishment of centralized political authority.It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might also be said, with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is the history of their struggle against the State. (Pierre Clastres 1987:218) Archaeologists and anthropologists have had difficulty characterizing Northwest Coast cultures because these societies were socially complex but lacked centralized authorities. Many have presented Northwest Coast societies as examples of chiefdoms because of the presence of chiefs. While these leaders were often dressed in the trappings of high authority, they were not the chiefs of the classic anthropological chiefdom model, which posits figures with consolidated authority over large territories. Rather, the power of Northwest Coast chiefs was quite limited in spatial and social scale. Ames (1995) andBill Angelbeck is an independent archaeologist and anthropologist based in Seattle (

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Natural Selection, Energetics, and "Cultural Materialism" [and Comments and Reply]

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

Cultural Materialism: A Theoretical Review

Cultural Materialism: A Theoretical Review

Early usage and meaning of evolvability

Anarchism and the Archaeology of Anarchic Societies

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