Do ideas and socially just movements count as evolution?

[Red Noob]

This is going to be hard to word right, so bear with me.


Are ideas and theories that are put into practice considered evolution for the species as a whole? Take women's rights for example, or the abolition of slavery, or the modern green movement, are these ideas brought on by our species advancing and evolving?


The main reason I ask is because I'm wondering if so, would that make organized religion an aspect of earlier evolution?

[Caj]

Do you mean evolution as in Darwinian evolution? If so, then no. Not all human behavior is evolutionary in origin. The abolition of slavery, for example, was not the result of biological evolution but the result of societal and economic evolution, i.e., the evolution from material conditions that made slavery profitable to those that made it unprofitable.

[Red Noob]

Do you mean evolution as in Darwinian evolution? If so, then no. Not all human behavior is evolutionary in origin. The abolition of slavery, for example, was not the result of biological evolution but the result of societal and economic evolution, i.e., the evolution from material conditions that made slavery profitable to those that made it unprofitable.

Alright. So theoretically, would organized religion have been the result of societal/economic evolution? This is what I'm trying to understand. A means of controlling people in a 'positive way' (keeping them from stealing because it is 'wrong') to deal with scarcity and poor living/working conditions?


And thank you.

[Caj]

So theoretically, would organized religion have been the result of societal/economic evolution?

Most likely. Although superstition and a belief in supernatural phenomena may have existed among pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer groups, organized religion emerged after, or perhaps simultaneously, with the rise of agriculture, the State, civilization, and class society.


A means of controlling people in a 'positive way' (keeping them from stealing because it is 'wrong') to deal with scarcity and poor living/working conditions?

Yes, religion has historically been a means utilized by the ruling classes of each age to impose a system of morality upon the public that favors the perpetuation of the status quo.

[Ocean Seal]

This is going to be hard to word right, so bear with me.


Are ideas and theories that are put into practice considered evolution for the species as a whole? Take women's rights for example, or the abolition of slavery, or the modern green movement, are these ideas brought on by our species advancing and evolving?


The main reason I ask is because I'm wondering if so, would that make organized religion an aspect of earlier evolution?
No they aren't evolution in the Darwinian sense, but they are part of our social evolution, much like Marx put it in his letters celebrating the scientific basis that Darwin had given him for the idea of evolving as a society.

[Revolution starts with U]

Evolution is a word to describe the process of change. It is not a word to describe things getting better, per se. Evolution can happen for the worst. A species can evolve itself right out of existence, like the dinosaurs (evolved to a point of being too big, or too specialist [that's a heated debate] to continue after the Chixilub impact).

[Mr. Natural]

Red Noob, Oklahoma?? Comrade, do you ever have some organizing to do! But then, don't we all?

Marx and Engels, in Anti-Duhring, define dialectics as "the science of the general laws of the motion and development of nature, human society, and thought." This definition nicely encompasses the elements of your OP question: "Do ideas and socially just movements count as evolution?"

The Marxist materialist dialectic understands ideas, social movements, and evolution as organic, systemic processes. The new sciences of the organizational relations of life reveal all life forms to arise from the organic, systemic process of self-organizing matter, and ideas arise from the self-organized, material brain, social movements from self-organized people, and evolution from self-organized material organisms.

Do you see the systemic unity of life in all its forms here? Life and society are, indeed, organic, systemic process, and religions "evolve" from material conditions of life, society, and the brain.

The gist of the above remarks is that life (thus society) has a universal pattern of organization by which matter self-organizes to life, and that the Marxist materialist dialectic uncannily manages to model the process and essence of "nature, human society, and thought." And religion.

My red-green, non-religious best.

[Hammilton]

This sort of expanding definition would make anything "evolution" - anything we considered progress of any sort would be "evolution."

Evolution can't go backwards. Something can't de-evolve. Even if things were to change for the worse, they'd just be "evolving" to fit new circumstances and opinions.

I don't see how anything useful could come from viewing societal progress as a form of evolution.

NOW, were there definable biological underpinnings to changes in societal changes, THAT would be interesting and worth considering from an evolutionary perspective. There may be, of course, but given the timescales we have to work with, it wouldn't be all that useful.

[Ostrinski]

Religions, just like ideologies, are responses to the material conditions in which certain peoples find themselves under, and the interaction with this material phenomena. And like all ideologies, religions have been employed as instruments of jurisprudence for ruling classes hitherto. It's not just some conspiracy developed by an elite social strata to control a populace. It's a constant social process. So the things that the OP has mentioned are not examples of Darwinian evolution, as that would imply biological adaptation, but they are all examples of the evolution of society and the relations within society.


This sort of expanding definition would make anything "evolution" - anything we considered progress of any sort would be "evolution."All progress IS evolution, in that social and systemic contradictions are constantly being neutralized, decadent and obsolete phenomena are constantly decaying, and thus new phenomena that addresses the changes in material conditions that old phenomena cannot address, or facilitate the addressing of, are constantly emerging. We're in a constant state of social, systemic, and biological evolution.

[Revolution starts with U]

You're right there is no de-evolution; but only because that term doesn't make sense, not because things always get better. Evolution, again, is a synonym for "change over time." A star evolves throughout its lifetime; it evolves itself right into an inert brown dwarf (depending on star type). Homo habillis evolved, and some died out, some became Homo Erectus.

For good or bad evolution describes change. From Rome to the "dark ages" was a societal evolution... it didn't get better, it just changed.

[Blake's Baby]

Right.

But the 'theory of the evolution of species through natural selection' is commonly called 'evolution'. So is societal change 'evolution' in this sense? No. Our changing society is not a result of Darwinian forces of natural selection. It's just naked apes playing with organisation. Not biological.

A demonstration:

Consider the lilies... no wait. Consider a boatload of children, landing on a desert island. They will not grow into homo habilis or homo ergastor, they will grow into homo sapiens. H sapiens is programmed in, that's what they are, tiny little representatives of h sapiens.

Consider the same boatload of children. Will they grow up on their island to be scientists, Lutherans, TV producers, golfers, barbers, choclatiers, interior designers, Jehovah's Witnesses, specialists in French history, reality TV stars? No; because those things are learned through social interaction not innate, not built in. They'll grow up as fishermen and fisherwomen, coconut farmers and leaf-plaiters, because that's what they have to work with. So they're not the result of changes to our physical makeup (ie, they're not 'evolution of the species through natural selection') they're cultural.

The archaeologist and anthropologist Lewis Binford called culture humankind's 'extra-somatic means of adaption', meaning that cultural change is an attempt to make up for a lack of biological adaption - it is adaption outside of the body. We are short, we want fruit from high up, we invent ladders. We want to hunt animals that are fast, we tame horses and dogs to help us. We want to carry stone tools long distances but we only have two hands, we invent bags to hold the load. If we were adapting biologically we'd be multi-handed fast-running carniverous giraffes. But we're not, we adapt culturally instead.

On the other hand, if our culture was inherited, the offspring of a Dutch baker and a French firefighter would be a Belgian who would be unable to make bread because of the urge to put the oven out.

[smk]

This is going to be hard to word right, so bear with me.


Are ideas and theories that are put into practice considered evolution for the species as a whole? Take women's rights for example, or the abolition of slavery, or the modern green movement, are these ideas brought on by our species advancing and evolving?


The main reason I ask is because I'm wondering if so, would that make organized religion an aspect of earlier evolution?

Yes. It probably is an evolutionary trait of humans to seek to form a coherent weltanschauung. In the past, the only way they could do that was through the nonmaterial world. Now, we got le science.