From Seeds to Civilizations Bruce D Smith - Essay Example

These factors influence the cultural macroevolution. Here the changes are determined by the environmental factors and not by the social economic and political ones. The important influence of these macro evolutionary factors has been brought to the limelight by Jared Diamond. These factors played a very pivotal role at the dawn of history especially when writing was first invented. For example the Inuit could not invent farming but people in the Middle East could do so because they were surrounded by wild animals/plants which could be domesticated.

Cultural microevolution on the other hand generated a need for liquid fuels for industrialized nations. But it was the macro evolutionary factors which shaped the World War II, where Germany and Japan had to use all their efforts to obtain and defend their petroleum supplies since their own territories lacked them. Early historians did not give much importance to the evolutionary view of history. But seventeenth century onwards scholars like Voltaire, Comte and others visualized history as an evolutionary process that was moving towards a goal.

Karl Marx was one of the pioneers of the first great theories of historical evolution. Marx tried to find an evolutionary pattern of history based on scientific analysis. Apart from historians even. We are all products of our social and biological backgrounds. It is due to this very reason that the human nature of citizens living for long under democracies is different than those under dictatorships. Evolutionary theory has converted biology into a logical discipline. Evolutionary theory, primarily its cultural aspects can do the same to social sciences.

Although some aspects of such a theory can be overshadowed by the story of sociopolitical evolution from hunting and gathering through the establishment of states that can be put together today. Evolutionary theory thus can be formed without making assumptions about genetics. The change in human natures is essentially because of cultural and not biological evolution.Plant domestication i.e. agriculture has played a very pivotal role in human history. It first began in the Fertile Crescent which is now a part of Israel and Lebanon.

Population pressure, declining game supplies and increased plant gathering are some of the reasons given for the origins of agriculture .It is believed that the key reason for the spread of farming was due to the episodic periods of scarcity- a discrepancy of the general population pressure speculation. This could explain the rapid spread of agriculture from the Fertile Crescent The second hypothesis is that agriculture developed due to the rapid end of the ice age. The agricultural revolution was accompanied by rising birth rates.

This eventually led to the demand of more food and thus led to the pressure of technological change to make more intensive agriculture possible. Due to this intensification and division of labor human society underwent changes through villages, clans to ultimately modern nation states. Differences in the productivity of the physical