Evolution and Communication: The Domestication of the Savage Mind

For some time now evolution has tended to be a dirty word in the social sciences.' The adjectival form, applied to a writer, tends to indicate old-fashioned, even 'biological' concerns. It is time to lay aside this negative attitude. Just as there is no sociology without comparison (implicit or explicit), so comparison almost inevitably raises the question of the change from one form to another. And the process of evolution, stripped of the implications of unilineality and irreversibility, is simply long-term change.2 Much of the best known sociology, that associated with the names of Comte, Marx, Spencer, Weber and Durkheim (not to mention the more obvious candidates, Maine, Morgan, Tylor, Robertson-Smith and Frazer) has displayed both comparative and evolutionary interests. The work of Spencer and Durkheim shows an extensive knowledge of the writings about non-European societies; that of Weber has a similar command of Asia. Much of this interest derived from a somewhat egocentric but none the less important concern having to do with the rise of modern industrial society; it centred upon a question which Parsons has recently reiterated. 'Why, then, did the breakthrough to modernization not occur in any of the Oriental advanced intermediate civilizations?' (1966: 4). This question immediately implies an opposition between 'our' type of society and 'theirs'; and its answer requires that we search the world for positive and negative cases to confirm our ideas about the relevant factors. There is nothing wrong with the search as such, but we need to recognize the ethnocentric nature of its starting point and the fact that the dichotomizing of 'we' and 'they' in this manner narrows the field of both the topic and of its explanation. If we are interested in even longer-term development (as certain of the hypotheses of Spencer, Durkheim, Marx and Weber force us to be), then a further set of considerations come into play. If I put these in an over-obvious way, it is because much contemporary social theory leads us to neglect certain obvious lines of enquiry. When we think of long-term evolutionary change, it is inevitable