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Anthro Theory test1
Progressive evolution,
| Answer | Question |
|---|---|
| anthropology | the study of humankind |
| socio-cultural anthropology | the study of cultural ideas and behaviors |
| biological (physical) anthropology | the study of human biological evolution and variation, especially as they relate to culture |
| anthropological archaeology | the study of artifacts and the relationships among them in terms of the concept of culture |
| anthropological linguistics | the study of language as part of culture |
| culture | shared ideas |
| artifact | anything made or modified by human beings |
| theory | a set of principles used to generate explanations for phenomena |
| hypothesis | a proposed explanation for a particular set of phenomena |
| consistency | the absence of logical contradictions |
| elegance | simplicity, referring to the number of steps, operations, or connections |
| parsimony | simplicity, referring to the number of outside assumptions or necessity to assume things not in evidence |
| sufficiency | adequacy to produce explanations of data |
| progressive evolution | the theory that evolution (biological or cultural) is progressive, proceeds through stages, and is driven by internal mechanisms |
| racial determinism | the belief that biological races are real among humans and that race determines cultural, linguistic, and technological abilities |
| Herbert Spencer | author of Principles of Sociology (1876-1896), in large part responsible for theory of social Darwinism |
| social Darwinism | the theory that progressive cultural (social) change occurs through competition between societies and survival of the fittest among them |
| Joseph Blumenbach | originator of an early racial classification for humans (1781), which was based partially on examination of skulls |
| Paul Broca | founder of the Anthropological Society of Paris, inventor of many anthropometric tools |
| anthropometry | the measurement of the human body and skeleton |
| monogenists | scientists who believed that modern humans all belong to the same species and sub-species, that existing human races evolved fairly recently, and that humans have evolved on only one line for a long span of time |
| polygenists | scientists who believed that modern humans belong to several different species or sub-species and that human races evolved separately and in parallel for a long time |
| Franz Weidenreich | a biological anthropologist who made casts of the specimens of "Peking man," now classified as Homo erectus, and described these specimens and those of "Java man," discerning ancestors of several modern human races among them |
| unilinear cultural evolution | the theory that culture has evolved through one series of progressive stages |
| psychic unity of (hu)mankind | the assumption that all humans are possessed of equal basic intellectual abilities, regardless of racial differences |
| ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny | a process, believed to operate as part of progressive evolutionary theory, in which individual or social group development reflects past evolutionary stages |
| orthogenetic | change that is internally driven and occurs in a predetermined progressive direction |
| comparative method | the use of evidence from modern cultures to reconstruct past stages of cultural evolution |
| Lamarckian evolution | the theory that acquired characteristics can be inherited through some unspecified biological mechanism; also includes the assumption that traits are acquired because they are needed |
| E. B. Tylor | a British anthropologist active in the late nineteenth century who was a prominent unilinear evolutionist, especially important in developing the theory and defining important concepts |
| Lewis Henry Morgan | an American anthropologist active in the late nineteenth century who was a prominent unilinear evolutionist |
| nomothetic explanation | explanation based on the application of general laws to particular cases |
| universal cultural evolution | a version of progressive evolution applied to cultural traits, in which cultural evolution is held to occur through increased energy capture and more efficient use of energy |
| multilinear cultural evolution | a version of progressive evolution applied to cultural traits, in which cultural evolution is held to be strongly influenced by environmental factors, so it occurs in multiple lines |
| Julian Steward | an American anthropologist who was associated with the variant of cultural evolution known as multilinear evolution and who did pioneering ethnographic work using a cultural ecology perspective in the Great Basin |
| Leslie White | an American anthropologist who was associated with the variant of cultural evolution known as universal evolution |
| Marshall Sahlins | one of Leslie White’s students, he elaborated the concepts of universal cultural evolution, especially general evolution |
| Elman Service | a student of Steward's who formulated three evolutionary stages of political organization (band, chiefdom, and state) based on an examination of ethnographic data |
| general (cultural) evolution | the theory that culture evolves progressively through increased energy capture, similar to White’s universal evolution; contrasted with specific evolution |
| specific (cultural) evolution | the theory that cultures evolve not only progressively but through closer adaptation to a particular environment, with adaptation seen as a process, but one that does embody progress |
| band-tribe-chiefdom-state | a progressive sequence of political organization, devised by 20th century progressive cultural evolutionists, based on population size and distribution of wealth and power; sometimes used to refer to kinds, rather than stages, of political organization |
| culture as superorganic | the belief that culture exists at a level higher than that of the biological individual and that individual behavior is controlled, often unconsciously, by culture |
| essentialism | treating phenomena as being composed of bounded essences or entities, with variability within and between entities being treated as noise |
| John Lubbock | 19th century archaeologist and author of Prehistoric Times (1865), applied stages derived from modern cultures to archaeological materials |
| Marxism | a progressive evolutionary theory that holds that political-economic systems follow an inevitable set of stages, leading eventually to a classless society |
| materialism (definition #1) | the theoretical view that the material base of human society (economics, technology, division of labor) determines all other aspects |
| V. Gordon Childe | Marxist archaeologist who devised the concepts of the Neolithic and urban revolutions to explain evolution of agriculture and cities in the Near East |
| Darwinian evolution | the theory that change in groups of organisms (broadened to include both genetic-based and culturally-based change) is due to modification in successive generations via differential persistence of variability |
| Charles Darwin | inventor of the theory of evolution by natural selection; author of On the Origin of Species (1859) |
| Ales Hrdlicka | curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution beginning in 1910, studied purported early fossil humans in New World and discounted most on the basis that they had been inadequately excavated and documented |
| Charles Lyell | the author of Principles of Geology (1833), which presented the principle of uniformitarianism and applied it to argue that the earth is relatively old |
| uniformitarianism | the principle that the geologic processes operating on the earth today also operated in the past and are responsible for the modern geologic record |
| the modern synthesis | the mid-twentieth century integration of evolutionary theory, population biology, genetics, and paleontology to form a coherent Darwinian biological theory |
| Ernst Mayr | biologist who was instrumental in the modern synthesis; he explicated evolutionary theory. especially the species concept and processes of speciation in population biology |
| Julian Huxley | a biologist active in the modern synthesis, who wrote Evolution, the Modern Synthesis (1942) |
| Theodosius Dobzhansky | a geneticist who participated in the modern synthesis and studied fruit flies but also was interested in human biology and genetics |
| George Gaylord Simpson | a paleontologist instrumental in the modern synthesis, wrote Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944) |
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