Sociocultural evolution

(noun)

It is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social evolution, describing how cultures and societies have changed over time.

Related Terms

  • Gerhard Lenski
  • shared culture

Examples of Sociocultural evolution in the following topics:

  • Lenski's Sociological Evolution Approach

    • Lenski's sociological evolution approach views technological progress as the most basic factor in the evolution of societies and cultures.
    • Sociocultural evolution is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social evolution, describing how cultures and societies have changed over time.
    • Most nineteenth century and some twentieth century approaches aimed to provide models for the evolution of humankind as a whole, argue that different societies are at different stages of social development.
    • He views technological progress as the most basic factor in the evolution of societies and cultures.
    • It is the relationships among population, production, and environment that drive sociocultural evolution.
  • Urban Gentrification

    • The sociocultural explanation is based on the assumption that values and beliefs influence behavior.
    • Discuss the process of gentrification based on three models - demographic, sociocultural and political/economy
  • Monarchies and Liberal Democracies

    • Monarchies are associated with political or sociocultural hereditary rule, in which monarchs rule for life (although some monarchs do not hold lifetime positions).
  • Socialization Throughout the Life Span

    • The life course approach studies the impact that sociocultural contexts have on an individual's development, from infancy until old age.
  • The Role of Biology

    • While sex is the determination of whether a person is biologically male or female, gender is the sociocultural determination of
  • Spencer and Social Darwinism

    • He believed that all natural laws could be reduced to one fundamental law, the law of evolution.
    • Spencer believed that this evolutionary mechanism was necessary to explain 'higher' evolution, especially the social development of humanity.
    • Moreover, in contrast to Darwin, Spencer held that evolution had a direction and an endpoint—the attainment of a final state of equilibrium.
    • Evolution meant progress, improvement, and eventually perfection of the social organism.
    • Herbert Spencer built on Darwin's framework of evolution, extrapolating it to the spheres of ethics and society.
  • Sociobiology

    • In the course of human evolution, we had to run away from predators.
    • Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution.
    • Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, population genetics, and other disciplines.
  • The Symbolic Nature of Culture

    • Anthropologists have argued that, through the course of their evolution, human beings evolved a universal human capacity to classify experiences, and encode and communicate them symbolically, such as with written language .
    • Since these symbolic systems were learned and taught, they began to develop independently of biological evolution (in other words, one human being can learn a belief, value, or way of doing something from another, even if they are not biologically related).
    • That this capacity for symbolic thinking and social learning is a product of human evolution confounds older arguments about nature versus nurture.
    • Anthropologists view culture as not only a product of biological evolution, but as a supplement to it; culture can be seen as the main means of human adaptation to the natural world.
  • Caste Systems

    • Both biological and sociocultural indicators were used to measure ethnicity.
  • Alienation

    • The sociocultural changes associated with such a move contributed to individuals feeling uncomfortable with their new environments, and feeling as though they could not easily place themselves in a social order .
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