We may believe in some doctrine of evolution or some idea of progress and we may use this in our interpretation of the history of centuries; but what our history contributes is not evolution but rather the realization of how crooked and perverse the ways of progress are, with what wilfulness and waste it twists and turns, and takes anything but the straight track to its goal, and how often it seems to go astray, and to be deflected by any conjecture, to return to us - if it does returns - by a back door. [Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, Penguin, 1973 (1931), 24
There have been many views of history - Marxist histories, Whig histories, Positivist histories, Great Man histories, the Annales school, and recently postmodern and gender histories. Historiography seems to be all at odds with itself. The problem of dealing with change, both of the objects of the study of history, like institutions, and of the defining traits of those objects, seems to be problematic in the extreme. How can historians deal with this?
There is already a complex, if not widely understood, account of historical change to hand. It was devised to deal with the nonsocial, though - of course I mean evolution. Can we set up the conceptual framework needed to deal with history from evolution?
Well, it has been tried many times before, but always with a particular focus derived from outside evolutionary theory. I want to outline the general features of what a Darwinian view of [human] history might involve. Ironically, the "doctrine of evolution" Butterfield mentions is not the Darwinian view of evolution, but the Spencerian, Comtean, positivist view that went by the name (and continues to go by that name, cf. Carneiro) of "cultural evolution. What Butterfield describes is, in fact, the Darwinian view of history.
1. Local progress. Many views of history rely on their being some general notion of progress. Sometimes referred to as "presentism", "anachronism" or "whiggism", such views see change as the grand development of societies towards some end state. But on a Darwinian account, any change, even when it is adaptive to the conditions of the environment of the subjects, is only ever locally and contemporaneously progressive. Just as a variety of long limb is fit only relative to the shorter limbs of its own population, in a given environment, so too any social change of an institution or cultural trait is progressive relative to the other institutions and traits in the local culture. You can't compare, say, the fitness of the totem tradition among the Pacific Native Americans with the fitness of sporting colours among English football fans. Moreover, many discoveries that might have been useful, say, in smelting technologies in the middle ages, can be lost to later generations, not to be rediscovered before they are no longer of great value. And we still don't know what "Greek Fire" was, although we have many more effective ways to set fire to things from a distance.
2. Equilibria, not succession. Historians sometimes talk about one institution replacing another, and talk, for example, about "revolutions" or "the age of X" indicate this. But a Darwinian account will not expect that older institutions will be replaced completely, and in fact, we might expect that older traditions, practices and institutions will remain in the population. Merely because someone invents rock and roll doesn't mean that all Sinatra and Crosby and Martin fans cease to exist. Merely because the Bolsheviks had a revolution didn't mean that all Menshevism, or Orthodox faith, was extinguished. And merely because there was a change in the way natural history and philosophy was investigated in the seventeenth century didn't mean that alchemy, astrology and Galenic medicine suddenly disappeared. Sinatra may make a comeback, or simply remain, along with Mozart, Chopin and medieval madrigals, part of the cultural inheritance.
3. Transmission. The old cultural evolutionism believed there was a necessary set of stages societies had to go through to advance. So they did not predict that writing, for example, would be invented only a couple of times and then spread by diffusion, instead thinking that it would be necessarily invented when the time came. On a Darwinian account, though, we expect that novelties will be rare, while the spread and local modification of novelties will be the mode of historical change. Cultural diffusion is regarded as being contrary to cultural evolution because the older, Spencerian, views held that each society undergoes a predetermined set of stages, independently reinventing each step. But a Darwinian account involves the recognition that, as Darwin said of nature, that culture is "profligate in variety but niggard in innovation". It is more likely that major transitions occur only once and are mediated by lines of descent thereafter, each lineage modifying the novelty to suit its own conditions. The Spencerian view is effectively Lamarckian evolution, rising up a Chain of Being (and ending up "civilised", or, in other words, European or Western) according to prior laws. Darwinian evolution adds contingency upon contingency as each unique history develops, and each outcome is also therefore unique. It is not necessary to think that there had to be a specific kind of transmit, either. Memes, mnemes, Elementardankens, culturgens and so forth are not specified by a Darwinian theory of history, any more than genes are by Darwin's theory of biological evolution. Neo-Darwinian genetics is one of many possible solutions to the problem of inheritance that is consistent with Darwinian thinking; it just happened to be the one that best described the actual biology (and even then, it is becoming increasingly less accurate for all organic groups).
4. Types are abstractions. We abstract the entities we see around us in biology, but it turns out that these abstractions are often oversimplifications. Not all mammals have hair, and not all birds fly. Likewise, not all "western modernisms" are western or modern. We need to classify things, and sometimes it suits us to classify them in terms of functional similarities, but these groups are inventions of our mind, formed from what counts to us as similar. The only truly natural groups in biology or culture are those that are genealogical - descendants of this or that particular concrete instance. "Fundamentalisms" are only those that developed from the Fundamentalism of the 1920s in the United States, and fascisms are only those political movements that are mediately influenced by the original fascisms of Europe. Islamists are neither fundamentalists nor fascists, however much they may resemble those originals (which is not much, on close inspection). To rely on these observer-relative classifications is to misunderstand the independent movements and traditions.
5. Lineages both cohere and split. One of the long-standing objections, or dysnalogies, to biological evolution of cultural evolution is that there are no simple species in culture. Why that should matter, is unclear. Lineages in biology are not so simple, either. Species concepts apply well enough to a very small fraction of the biological realm - basically metaphytes and metazooans, and not all of them, either. But it is my view that there are, in fact, taxonomic groupings in culture that are more or less isolated from other cultural lineages. We call them various names: "cultures", "languages" (for which the first evolutionary trees were devised to represent), "traditions", "religions", "movements", and so forth. Basically, despite a certain amount of cross-lineage borrowing analogous to horizontal genetic transfer, these things remain more or less their own lineages. In cladistic taxonomy, lineages that regularly recombine are called tokogenetic, while those that split and remain split are called cladogenetic. Regular cross-borrowing at a high frequency indicates that you have one tokogenetic, not two or more cladogenetic, traditions, although this is going to depend on how much you choose to analyse.
6. Cultural evolution is unplanned. Just as in economics there are those who think that economies can be centrally planned, there are those who think culture is "invented" or "constructed" by intent. But the reality is that intentions are often, if not most of the time, contrary to each other even within a society. The outcomes at the cultural level are not planned unless the great majority of influential (fit) intentions are in concord, and even then there can be unplanned outcomes (such as inflation in economics) and dynamics beyond the control of any subgroup or even the whole group. The fallacy here is the fallacy of composition - because the agents of history have intentions, it does not follow that the course of history is intended. As Sober once noted, the lion intends to eat the gazelle, and the gazelle intends not to be eaten, and evolution proceeds in any case.
7. Culture is not always to the fit. One common problem with Darwinian accounts of history is that they tend to focus on what might be called the "typically" [see point 4] Darwinian aspects of evolution - natural (and perhaps sexual) selection. But as R. A. Fisher said back in his 1930 Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, Natural Selection is not Evolution. Selection processes often as not act as brakes to further change - the stronger the selection pressure for a given trait, the more likely it is to retard change unless that pressure changes its direction or the pressure drops to roughly the level of ordinary stochastic "noise", causing drift. A great many cultural properties are the result of unselected change, tracing a random trajectory in culture-space. As G. C. Williams noted, selectionist explanations are onerous; and we can say the same for functionalist explanations in culture. It is not the default explanation unless we can demonstrate that a function is, indeed, something that we can accept in each case.
That's my manifesto of Darwinian history. We can learn a lot from the elaboration of evolutionary theory in biology, but even more from the generic version of Darwinism that doesn't need to rely on neo-Darwinian replicators or a single privileged level of evolution. Anything else I've missed? I'll add them from the comments as they strike me as true...
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John - Nice presentation of your "manifesto." I note that in your final paragraph, it seems you plump for what might be called a functionalist historiography. Also, I think that what distinguishes your approach from other sorts of functionalism would be the broadly darwinian account of functional traits you adopt -- functions as evolved capacities that contribute to survival and replication of those traits. Does that sound about right?
Pretty much. As I've said before, functionalism in sociology and anthropology simply fails to give an account of why these things become functional. It's a kind of "irreducible complexity" argument - institutions are so tightly bound to each other that they just are, and cannot change (in the extreme structuralist view). But societies do change, and they can do so because variant cultural forms are constantly being generated and transmitted, and they can increase in a culture (a population) either because they are selectively neutral or because they are better adapted to the social ecology, in which case they may supplant other forms and become more tightly integrated with other institutions and practices. Selectively neutral forms at t, however, can become selectively biased later on.
The only account of functionality that makes any sense to me is selection. It is not, of course, the survival and reproduction of the agents that they bias, but the survival and reproduction of the forms themselves. Agents (real individuals) are just the staging post for these things. In that respect the meme theory is correct.
This brought to mind the series Connections by James Burke, shown on public tv some years ago. As I recall, the emphasis was on contingency, something that also plays a role in biologic evolution.
You've aligned the complex and disparate views of of history to a single Darwinian vision...but now all you have to do is give us a coherent definition and explanation of what "Darwinian" means, and we're all done!
I basically agree with you in an abstract way (except perhaps for point 3), but when trying to apply this approach to studying say, the Glorious Revolution or the Dred Scott decision, it doesn't do you much good.
Most historical events are about the particular lions chasing the particular gazelles. Does this lion succeed? Does that gazelle escape? Evolutionary theory can't predict the outcome of a particular chase. It can provide some sort of context and historians since Herodotus have tried to do so for events (of course he didn't have any knowledge of biological evolution), and if your point is that the events are overstressed with respect to underlying changes in society then you are in agreement (on this point) with the postmodern cultural historians. But of course the personalities and events are specifically what many historians are trying to study. Could the gazelle have escaped if he had turned left when he should have turned right? Should the lion have lunged earlier? These are not gratuitous questions.
How should Bush deal with Al Qaeda? How should Bush deal with Pakistan? Why is Bush such an utterly incompetent president? What's the best strategy for Democrats to win the midterm elections? Does an evolutionary theory of history that downplays the particular lions and gazelles, give one better answers to these questions than the old, admittedly somewhat teleological framework of studying what people do and the (alleged) reasons for and (alleged) consequences of what they do?
In natural selection, populations of organisms evolve as they do because of the beneficial or deleterious effects of hereditary traits. One can certainly study the evolution of parts or characters, but what actually does the evolving are lineages of animals and plants. In your view of history, what evolves? Sometimes you seem to be talking about societies, sometimes organizations, sometimes beliefs, sometimes artistic traditions like totem poles, a decidedly heterogeneous collection. If there's a family resemblance among all these sorts of sorts, you have to admit it's a big family and some of the kids are adopted. I'm not asking for an identification of some sort of discrete units of cultural evolution, but is it at least possible to say something more specific about the level of the entities involved?
Also, can you clarify what it means for one cultural trait to prove better than another? In natural selection, to claim that one population is fitter than another, it isn't enough to show that one population outgrew another. There has to be some connection between this success and a heritable trait; otherwise, as the Creationists are always complaining, the theory really would be tautological. So what does "success" mean in cultural evolution other than the fact that one trait in fact persisted or grew and another did not? Do societies really out compete societies in the same way that an artistic genre out competes an artistic genre? When Rome triumphed over Carthage, one group of people beat down another and killed a great many of them. That's not quite what happened when surrealism succeeded to cubism. Indeed, many of the cubists became surrealists. Which points to another problem: the leopard can't change his spots, but the actually human beings who are (I guess) the bearers of cultural characters can change theirs through learning and conversion, though some traits or practices are evidently stickier than others and people sometimes choose to go down with the ship. I remember a sentence from a history of Russian religious movements in the 19th Century: "The suicide cults tended to die out." In that case, at least, we know what cultural fitness entails; but surely that's an exceptional instance.
I sympathize with the desire to come up with a comprehensive framework for a general historiography, and I don't expect everything to be figured out at once. Heck, I'm still trying to figure out the ontological status of haecceities like World War II. On the other hand, I keep looking around for a particular case in which something like your version of culture evolution elucidated a particular historical era or problem. Where is the book or essay that corresponds to Macaulay's History of England or Goldmann's The Hidden God or Braudel's The Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II, i.e. something substantive rather than programmatic?
'Haecceities' Jim? Could you aid us mere vocabularial mortals... From Latin haec, but beyond that I'm lost.
Many excellent points. A few more:
Cultural evolution outpaces genetic evolution, but once it reaches an equilibrium, it can in turn feed back on genetic equilibrium. This is likely the story behind the "domestication" of humanity.
Some technological innovations have drastically non-linear effects on particular cultures, even dirupting equilibria. (Leather horse-collars come to mind)
Certain subcultures can (and usually will) provide a stream of innovations. The scientific establishment is the most successful of these to date. How the society reacts to these innovations is another story.
Haecceity meant something else in the Scholastic philosophy of Duns Soctus, but in discusions of historiography, it refers to a complicated individual things like a historical event (WWII, in my example) whose nature is exceedingly hard to pin down. People say things like "9/11 changed everything." OK. We know that people and animals and physical objects can change things. So what kind of being does a historical event have that makes it legit to claim that it does things?
I hate to call these kind of questions metaphysical or ontological because that suggests to a lot of folks that you're talking about something deep or maybe spiritual when what you're really doing is kinda like trying to define data types. I got interested in this way of thinking after reading a Stanley Cavell essay about the movies because a movie, like a war, is not something that's easy to define. At the least a movie is a complex object like, say, a book, which can upset you either after you read it or somebody hits you over the head with it.
Watch out, Jim, reading Cavell can force you to think weird things. I did it once, but I think I got better :-)
You are absolutely right that a key issue is what is evolving. As I said in point 3, anything can evolve, at any level: artifacts, strategies, economic units, beliefs, institutions, etc. Why should there be a single unit of evolution in culture any more than in biology? This is an empirical matter, not to be specified in advance (which is what was wrong with the third wave of neo-Darwinism in the 1970s). It may turn out that history is all about the evolution of some class of entities, but I doubt it.
A Darwinian view of history is populational - you need ensembles of tranmission events for it to be applicable. I can't explain, in Darwinian terms, why Caesar crossed the Rubicon - that is a matter of Caesar's psychological processes. But I can explain why Rome supplanted Carthage in those terms, and I can explain why such actors as Caesar were effective in Roman society that way (or could, if I were knowledgeable).
A Darwinian view is midway between haeccities and universals - we expect a certain kind of what 19thC physicists called "statics", an abstract model of the behaviour of systems which, when the actual causes are plugged in, becomes the dynamics of the system. There is a "universe" of possible models in a Darwinian system (such as people like Gavrilets are working out) which we will be able to identify the actual models for a particular case from. History is not about singular instances, but about large scale ensembles that behave in a unique way. Trying to explain the uniqueness in terms of simple laws won't work, but explaining them as instances of a larger class of types can.
It is an open question what the social ecology is that determines the fitness of a cultural lineage. I believe that it what previous sociologists and historians have described weakly as the Zeitgeist or the functional structure of the society or culture. A selectionist (or drift) explanation sets the background as fixed in order to explain why this event took the course it did. Doing so allows us to more carefully identify what those conditions are. We can't just say, as the meme theorists do, that a fashion spreads because it's a mind virus, but rather we have to identify what the reasons are that it is a mind virus - what is it parasitising, why is it spreadable, and how, etc. A Darwinian history is an invitation to further invenstigation, just as identifying the spread of a given allele in population genetics is an invitation to asking why it spread (for instance, it permits the metabolising of dairy products, or confers resistance to a disease that is in play) and how.
As far as I can remember, the film idea was the only thing I've ever gotten from Cavell. It's like the scene in the movie when somebody's chance comment sets off the hero's insight into how to destroy the mole monsters from outer space.
I'm one of those irritating guys who is forever recommending that you drop everything and read some terrifying long and complicated book. So here's your chance to get even. Can you give me an example of the analysis of a specific cultural/political/social unit/character/tendency that makes real use of your kind of evolutionary analysis? You write, "...anything can evolve, at any level: artifacts, strategies, economic units, beliefs, institutions, etc." Is there already a something that belongs to this anything? Has evolutionary history gotten off the ground? It's not that I don't think it can't. It's just that I don't know that it has.
There is an excellent book published last year full of case studies:
Mace, Ruth, Clare J. Holden, and Stephen Shennan. 2005. The evolution of cultural diversity: a phylogenetic approach. London: UCL Press.
The locus classicus for this view (still overly selectionist IMO) is:
Hull, David L. 1988. Science as a process: an evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
On evolutionary archeology, try
O'Brien, Michael J., ed. 1996. Evolutionary archaeology: theory and application, Foundations of archaeological inquiry. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Oh, and evolutionary economics is developing apace:
Hamilton, David Boyce. 1991. Evolutionary economics: a study of change in economic thought. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers.
I have discussed some of these issues in print:
Wilkins, John S. 2001. The appearance of Lamarckism in the evolution of culture. In Darwinism and evolutionary economics, edited by J. Laurent and J. Nightingale. Cheltenham UK: Edward Elgar.
I don't know what you mean by "cultures" in number 5, John, but things like "Western culture" and "European culture" and so forth cannot be understood as being lineages that are basically isolated from other lineages. As terms of cultural analysis terms they are all but useless. I rather doubt that "America culture" or "French culture" fare much better. These terms all reflect geopolitical ideologies more than historical reality.
Depending on what you mean by "tradition," it is open to the same objection. Whatever it is, the "jazz tradition," is not an isolated lineage.
As for languages, your characterization is strongest if you restrict it to phonology and perhaps syntax, for languages borrow words fairly freely. That is to say, the language trees of historical linguistics are mostly trees of phonological patterns. As far as I know, that's pretty much how they're built, more through the analysis of sound patterns than through any other aspects of language.
Thanks for the references. I read Hull when it first came out. It reminded me of a similar effort of Stephen Toulmin that also consisted of a first volume, but not a second, which is to say, it was a nice program but hard to follow up. I'll look up your other suggestions when I get a chance.
Meanwhile, a random thought. If you're looking for ways to create a Darwin-style historical sociology, maybe what you need is something analogous to the inspiration Darwin drew from Malthus. Only what guarantees competition between institutions/ideas/whatevers is not population pressure outrunning resources but the extraordinary narrowness of both the public and private mind, which guarantees that only a relative handful of items--a veritable Cantor's dust, in fact--can persist, whether by chance or merit. It strikes me that people just aren't that much smarter than chimps or pigeons and what makes it possible to believe we are is that set of drastic simplifications of the world that we call culture. Levi-Strauss quotes some native or other who, having been brought to a modern city, was amazed that people were clever enough to drive at high speeds without killing themselves and everybody else. He didn't realize how much of driving was just a matter of staying on your side of the center line and obeying the street signs and the traffic lights. We know what we're doing at the cost of limiting ourselves to very few choices.
Any comment thread exemplifies how things more or less automatically get simplified. In principle, a long enough exchange of messages could allow two individuals to figure out where their ideas were in the vastness of possible concepts. In practice, one is more or less obliged to take up one of the available prefabricated points of view while enforcing some canonical banality on the other guy at the same time, not out of a failure of imagination but simply to make even an approximate connection. Creatity is mostly expressed in performance, not composition.
Culture, sensu latu, doesn't tell us what we must do, but the options presented by the available social games, like the abundance of melodies in traditional Western music, are based on the prior establishment of a system that excludes almost everything. There are enormously more possibilities than actualities, yet culture inverts this proportion so that there are many copies of each type.
Bill, long time!
I think that "culture" is an object if it forms independent lineages. That is, when a set of lineages more or less coalesce and evolve in their own way, then they are a cultural object. Take your favourite example, jazz. So far as it has its own set of traditions, it is a cultural object, but when it is fused with, say, rock, as in the 70s, or classical traditions, then that becomes a distinct and separate cultural object from the ancestral jazz. It is like a hybrid species in plants, or an endosymbiotic event. The point is that there is no "level" in a "hierarchy" of cultural processes that uniquely form taxa; a taxon is entirely a matter of post hoc independence.
What counts as a taxon, if there are no set ranks or hierarchies? The same problem occurs in biology. It seems to me that when, in biology, a large number of genetic lineages, and organismic lineages, coalesce such that they coevolve, then you have a basal taxon. The same thing is true in culture, only moreso. There is no privileged class of taxa in culture, just things that are phenomenally salient and call for explanation, which is what an evolutionary account offers. The existence of crosslineage borrowings doesn't much matter so long as it remains more or less a minority of relationships. But if jazz and folk music began to share about equal lineages of riffs, scales, modalities and the like, then I would say that "jazz" and "folk music" were no longer independent cultural objects, but had merged to become a single one. However, I'd be very surprised if two such independent traditions did this - more likely the third fusion would coexist with the prior two.
Jim, the Toulmin book is in fact the one that set me off on this trek about 25 years ago:
Toulmin, S. 1972. Human understanding. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Re-reading it now I find it very simplified and sketchy. But at the time it was a very influential piece on my thinking. Like Hull, it basically dealt with science. Hull's book is much more detailed, both in the case study and the philosophical underpinnings, and I think it holds up very well.
I do agree that something like a fitness landscape model is a good basis for a Darwinian account of history, but it turns out to be a lot more complex than the simple Dobzhanskyan account. Gavrilets has done a lot of good work on fitness landscape models which I think can be used to do good sociology and history. One point he makes is that in a suitably complex fitness landscape, where the fitness values are correlated enough, there are high fitness regions which are equivalent throughout all or most of the [conceptual] space through which populations can drift contingently while being at a high fitness (his "holey landscape" idea). This overcomes the objection to selectionist models of science that said that if true, science would be stuck on sub-optimal peaks - if there are corridors throughout the space, stochastic variation will allow the population to change its location until a higher fitness path is tricked upon.
But the key elements of a "Darwinian" account are not restricted to selection, but also include, now, drift, as I said, and cladogenetic lineages. Descent with modification, and common descent, are in my mind (are you listening, PZ?), the crucial elements of a Darwinismus. Selection is just one model among several (which will include, for example, developmental entrenchment, as well as phylogenetic entrenchment).
I fully agree that one's "performance" (to continue the musical theme) is constrained by being not too far from available options of the tradition. It's rather like Wittgenstein's "language games" - the games are constituted by the consensus of the community, but on an evolutionary account, they are also something that is influenced by external factors (a language that consisted of binary sequences would not work for us, as we can't track binary numbers of any complexity), and by deviants who change the "centre of gravity" as it were. Individual behaviour will bias the fitness values of the cultural objects in play.
As to possibilities - selection occurs only on actual variants. It may be there's a physical theory that accounts for everything better than any currently conceived physics, but until it gets into the public domain, the language community, it can't compete. Only actual competitors get to play this game...
Oh, I have no trouble with jazz as a cultural object, but I don't think it's the kind of object you seem to be claiming. As far as i can tell, there never was one Ur-taxon from which all jazz springs. Back in late 19th and early 20th century America lots of musical styles were mixing and matching. Here and there -- New Orleans, Kansas City, Chicago, New York -- music precipitated out that, in retrospect, we call jazz. Musicians and audiences recognized the affinities and the musicians borrowed from one another right and left. When recording and radio broadcasts got going the borrowing was much easier,
But at every step of the way jazz musicians were borrowing from other traditions, and other traditions were borrowing from jazz. The trick is to understand how, if all this borrowing and influencing was going on at one scale, we have these more or less coherent "traditions" on a larger scale. Keep in mind that the musicians and their audiences pretty much all of them knew music from several of these traditions and many musicians performed in more than one tradition.
On Carniero, I've read some of his work, but not the book you discuss in another post, and I'm familiar with the research tradition in which he operates, which was reviewed by David Hays a little over a decade ago. There is a considerable empirical tradition based mostly on work with preliterate cultures and some archaeology showing that when cultures are compared with respect to such things as number of levels of political organization, population of the largest community or of the whole polity, division of labor (number of crafts, technological diversity), external commerce, means of enforcing justice and equity, social stratification (caste and class), character of religion, legitimation of government, use of machinery, sources of power, kinds and amount of transportation, extent and quantity of communication, kind and amount of capital investment, some cultures have more than others. Further, the cultures which are more complex in one arena tend to be more complex in the others as well.
That is, let's say we score different social groups for traits A, X, Q, D, J and Z. Does the group exhibit the trait or not? Here are the results for four groups.
Bramble: A J
Greblek: A J D X Q
TinTins: A J D X
Zinqtoc: A J D
There's an obvious pattern here. The traits are ordered A J D X Q. If a culture exhibits some trait on the scale, it will also exhibit the earlier traits on the scale. Where does that ordering come from?
No one knows. But it does seem to imply that certain things in culture imply certain other things. I'm inclined to think that a Darwinian explanation is required here, but I don't know how to construct it.
If you classify cladistically, then you would want to be very sure that your data matric is not lumping together homoplasious characters. For instance, is writing in the Mayans the "same" thing as writing in the fertile crescent? Some things, such as a division of labour, are clearly homoplasious, and equally depend on homoplasious precursor states. It's like saying that you can't have "hearts" until you have a circulatory system, but invertebrate hearts and vertebrate hearts are very different structures.
Attempts to make series out of the individual evolutionary pathways of culture will suffer, I think, from the overabstraction in attempts to find homology of function in biology - they will ride roughshod over the differences in the rush to find similarities. I don't think that there is a standard form of the evolution of culture any more than there is a standard form of the evolution of complex animals or plants.
At best it seems like an evolutionary approach history is reinventing the wheel. Change has always been a given in the study of history and the study of that which we call culture. (Weren't the known changes in language one of Darwin's inspirations?) Calling change 'evolution'--a word indelibly associated with biological change--when we cannot be certain that changes in society are analagous to biological change, rather obfuscates than addresses the question of how and why social change happens.
Take the example of why 'Rome supplanted Carthage' cited as something our Evolutionary Method should be good at. We discard the personality-based actions of Hannibal and his kin, Scipio Africanus and Cato. What is left to examine? Economics, military organization, social organization, politics, laws, customs, agriculture, religion, language, class conflict, natural resources, georgraphy, technology, honor, and so on. These are the same things historians already examine. Neither the word 'evolution' nor vague biological tropes give us real insight into how these things change, how much each matters and how they interact. Or if the point is merely to go through the list and examine how language changes, how technlogy changes and so on, with no a priori assumptions, people have been doing that for many centuries.
As the posting states: 'The problem of dealing with change, both of the objects of the study of history, like institutions, and of the defining traits of those objects, seems to be problematic in the extreme.' How does calling change 'evolution' with its attendant connotations make any of this less problematic?
At worst the evolutionary approach to history just encourages historians to fashion abstract models from biological evolution. And historians don't even necessarily understand biological evolution. The models will of course introduce new scientific-sounding terms to replace the old scientific-sounding terms. (customs become values become mores become folkways become memes, etc.) Progress!
And ideas may well work like viruses. Maybe they work like ecosystems. Maybe they work like sex. Maybe they work like tools. Maybe they work like potato chips. Who knows? Two observers (with an electron microscope) can look at a virus and agree that it's a virus, but can two observers agree on what an idea is? Is the tree the idea or the oak tree or the oak tree in my backyard? One might as well argue over how many angels can sit on a pin.
Where's the methodology? Where's the verifiable measurement? What's the classification system? How is this falsifiable? In short, how is this not pseudoscience? And if it is pseudoscience, why does contemplating biologicial evolution seem to inspire, even among reasonable, intelligent people, more pseudoscience than all the rest of science combined?