Sociocultural evolution

Sociocultural evolution, sociocultural evolutionism or cultural evolution are theories of cultural and social evolution that describe how cultures and societies change over time. Whereas sociocultural development traces processes that tend to increase the complexity of a society or culture, sociocultural evolution also considers process that can lead to decreases in complexity (degeneration) or that can produce variation or proliferation without any seemingly significant changes in complexity (cladogenesis). Sociocultural evolution is "the process by which structural reorganization is affected through time, eventually producing a form or structure which is qualitatively different from the ancestral form".

(Note, this article focusses on that use of the term 'socio-cultural evolution' to refer to work that is not in line with contemporary understandings of the word 'evolution'. There is a separate body of academic work which uses the term 'cultural evolution' using a more consensus Darwinian understanding of the term 'evolution'. For a description of this work, based in the foundational work of DT Campbell in the 1960s and followed up by Boyd, Richerson, Cvalli-Sforza, and Feldman in the 1980s, go to Cultural evolution or Dual inheritance theory.)