8 Long-Term Trajectories of Technological Change
Stephen Shennan2013, Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion
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Abstract
The study of technology is a fi eld in which generalized evolutionary ideas have been current for many years. However, when we start trying to implement a cultural evolutionary approach more rigorously, it turns out to be more complex than usually supposed. One of the important benefi ts of taking a cultural evolutionary approach is that it goes beyond relatively simple ideas of competition and technological improvement, and introduces a range of other forces whose impact is not often considered. In the case of technology, the entities that are the subject of variation, inheritance, and selection processes are technological lineages, recipes for techniques, routines, and practices linked by ancestor-descendant relationships. To understand them, we must fi rst address histories of the technologies themselves before we can examine the histories of the human populations through which they are transmitted, which may depend at least partly on the histories of technologies. A number of examples of technological innovation and transmission are examined to illustrate the variety of factors affecting them.
Key takeaways
- It can be argued that one of the important benefi ts of taking a cultural evolutionary approach is that it goes beyond relatively simple ideas of competition and technological improvement, and introduces a range of other forces whose impact is not often considered.
- The key point is that the object of the evolutionary analysis of technology is technological lineages, not human populations, and because they are reproduced in different ways, there is no reason that they should run in parallel even though they are obviously linked.
- Once again, as with any study of a technological lineage, the fi rst issue is to identify patterns of cultural descent in the methods used and to distinguish variation arising from transmission from that relating, for example, to the local ore or fuel type; thereafter the forces which affect that variation must be characterized in a situation where, by the very nature of the process, there are only a limited number of successful solutions.
- It includes a variety of what can be considered complex cultural (including technological) phenomena.
- More generally, the theoretical work of the last thirty years has demonstrated the wide range of transmission forces potentially operating in any given case, not least the role that can be played by unbiased transmission in fi nite populations.
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