956 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
ability... Consequently, not every apparently "primitive" or "archaic"
figure is necessarily old... and some of the earliest art will probably look
quite sophisticated.A similar reconceptualization and corrective, for a more restricted region at a
smaller scale of centuries rather than millennia, has been offered, citing punctuated
equilibrium as a source of ideas, in Berry's (1982) treatise on the history of the
Anasazi people of western North America. Berry treats the Anasazi as a
geographically variable cultural entity, in many ways akin to a biological species
under punctuated equilibrium, and not, as in most previous writing, as a group in
continuous flux, with nearly all variation expressed temporally. Eldredge and
Grene (1992, p. 118) write of Berry's work:
Rather than interpreting the pattern as a linear history, in which change
sometimes occurred rapidly and at other times at a more leisurely pace,
Berry argues that the patterns of stasis interrupted by spurts of rather
profound cultural change do not represent linear evolution, but rather a
sequence of habitation and replacement. The Anasazi are a historical whole,
as regionally diverse and as temporally modified as they were. They were
replaced by another cultural system, not as a smooth evolutionary
outgrowth but because the Anasazi were eventually (and rather abruptly) no
longer able to occupy their territory.Several social scientists have used the model of punctuated equilibrium as a
guide to reconstructing patterns in social and technological development as
punctuationally disrupted and then reformulated, rather than gradually altering—as
in Weiss and Bradley (2001) on climatic forcing as a prod to rapid societal collapse
in early civilizations throughout the world, over several millennia of time and types
of organization. Adams (2000) has generalized this argument about "accelerated
technological change in archaeology and ancient history." He explicitly cites the
Lyellian tradition as a former impediment to recognizing and resolving such social
punctuations (2000, pp. 95-96): "Built into traditional Darwinian 'descent with
modification' was an acceptance of the standpoint of Lyell's geological gradualism.
In its time, his assumption of uniformitarian change in the earth's geological
history carried the day against competing doctrines of catastrophism. Today,
however, there is increasing recognition of great diversity in rates of evolutionary
change ... Accelerated phases of change, often referred to in evolutionary biology
as punctuations, invite closer study by students of human as well as natural
history."
Finally, as a generality for the key transition to agriculture that marks
(through the accumulation of wealth leading to social stratification, and the
initiation of fixed-placed dwelling leading to towns and cities) the multiple
inception of what, for better or worse, we generally call "civilization"— Boulding
(1992, p. 181) cites active stasis and rapid punctuation as the predominant pattern,
in opposition to a uniformitarian tradition most famously promulgated in Alfred
Marshall's Principles of Economics, one of the most