The cultural evolution of sociopolitical organization

Abstract

One of broadest patterns of sociopolitical evolution over the last 12,000 years is the trend towards increasingly larger societies with more centralized and complex governance institutions. This chapter outlines how evolutionary theory is being applied to understand key changes in how wealth and power are distributed, how group decisions are made, and the scale at which societies are organized. The chapter discusses different evolutionary models that have been proposed to explain why leadership and inequalities in power might have emerged, contrasting ‘extractive’ theories of hierarchy, with ‘managerial’ or group-beneficial theories. The chapter builds on these theories to examine different hypotheses about why more politically complex societies were more common in certain parts of the world than others. The authors argue that cultural evolutionary theory can help organize and synthesize information from diverse disciplines to shed new light on long-standing issues and debates.