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Human beings, writes social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, are not genetically programmed to be members of this or that social order. You can take a human infant and place it into any kind of social order and it will function acceptably. What makes human society so distinctive is the fabulous range of quite different forms it takes across the ...
A developmental model of the evolution of the mind, culture, and society was the result, paralleling the evolution of the human species: [23] "Modern savages [sic] became, in effect, living fossils left behind by the march of progress, relics of the Paleolithic still lingering on into the present."
The idea of progress was at once a social, political and scientific theory. The theory of evolution, as described in Darwin's The Origin of Species, provided for many social theorists the necessary scientific foundation for the idea of social and political progress. The terms evolution and progress were often used interchangeably in the 19th ...
The theory of evolution by natural selection has also been adopted as a foundation for various ethical and social systems, such as social Darwinism, an idea that preceded the publication of The Origin of Species, popular in the 19th century, which holds that "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined in 1851 by Herbert Spencer, [1] 8 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution ...
Events in Europe such as the Galileo affair of the early-17th century – associated with the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment – led scholars such as John William Draper to postulate (c. 1874) a conflict thesis, suggesting that religion and science have been in conflict methodologically, factually and politically throughout ...
The sociology of the history of science—related to sociology and philosophy of science, as well as the entire field of science studies—has in the 20th century been occupied with the question of large-scale patterns and trends in the development of science, and asking questions about how science "works" both in a philosophical and practical ...
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [40] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.
Humans did not evolve from either of the living species of chimpanzees (common chimpanzees and bonobos) or any other living species of apes. [174] Humans and chimpanzees did, however, evolve from a common ancestor. [175] [176] This most recent common ancestor of living humans and chimpanzees would have lived between 5 and 8 million years ago. [177]