8 pages ANTH 165 paper

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The Concept of Environmental Determinism in Cultural Evolution

PHILIP L. WAGNER

The natural environment undoubtedly exerts an all-pervasive influence on human life. Environment conditions every social, cultural, and economic situation. Abundant instances in history attest to nature's intervention in the fates of men and nations.

These generalities are not at issue here. Taking them as indisputable, we further may acknowledge that cultural evolution always must itself proceed under heavy influence and tight constraints imposed by the envi- ronment. This idea is central to, and quite inseparable from, what we mean by "evolution"; there would be no point, and indeed there would be error, in talking about cultural evolution without the core idea of change toward greater efficiency, for evolution is directional. Cultures may properly, if speculatively, be thought of as "adapting" by slow cumu- lative change to their particular environments. We may, according to our tastes, conceive of given environmental circumstances as either permit- ting, or favoring, or demanding, or evoking some particular direction of cultural development, and thus we may attribute change in culture to processes of "adaptation." Such reasoning is ecological and evolutionary, and is therefore much in vogue. It has a venerable history as well.

The history and substance of the various forms of environmental deter- minism have been discussed at length by many writers (Callot 1952: 275- 360; Freeman 1961: 74-82; Fuchs 1966; Lowie 1937; Tatham 1951: 128- 162; Thomas 1925), and it would be superfluous to recapitulate them here. Sorokin (1928: 99-103) and Hartshorne (1939) have contributed extensive critiques of the doctrine on logical and empirical grounds. The ensuing discussion, however, does not constitute an attempt to summarize those critiques. It seeks only to clarify some of the chief implications of the

Origins of Agriculture, edited by Charles A. Reed, De Gruyter, Inc., 1978. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sjsu/detail.action?docID=3044546. Created from sjsu on 2021-01-16 19:43:35.

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thesis of environmental determinism, and to assess its potential relevance to contemporary culture history. How useful is the concept in the expla- nation of cultural evolution? Can it lead to fruitful redirection of research? These questions will be foremost. We may begin with some approxima- tions.

Environments, as well as cultures, are engaged in never-ending change. Evolution, then, can hardly be a static concept. Instead of seeking some advanced, perfected form of life, it could be interpreted in this light merely as a ceaseless striving to keep up with change. Yet this striving does appear to induce "progress" in a species, and perhaps in a society — that is, to lead to cumulative increase in their security and ecological efficiency. This fact implies, in turn, that changes in environment, at least over relatively great spans of time, follow a consistent trend; for otherwise, any momen- tary adaptation would probably prove fatal within a rather short span. Three notions are involved here: (1) consistent, cumulative change within societies; (2) similarly regular and incremental changes in their environ- ments; and finally, (3) some kind of orderly relationship between the two developments.

We know empirically not only that a culture may reflect environmental states and changes, but also that all environments inhabited by man are prone to culturally guided transformations. This latter fact has major implications for our topic, but we must explicitly ignore it for the moment, and suppose that only natural environmental influence on man is relevant. In such a case, it is possible to conceive of an orderly relationship like the one mentioned above, which holds between ongoing environmental change, and coordinated with it or even subordinated to it, changes in society and culture. This conception is the central feature of environ- mental determinism.

The doctrine emphasizes order and not accident. Whereas human events and mankind's evolution must, by any reckoning, fall subject now and then to interferences of nature, it is not the exceptional, spectacular occurrence that impresses the environmental determinist, but the regular and gradual effects that he supposes are exerted by any environment upon any society. Accidents themselves, in fact, may hardly interest him. They are matters for historians. Determinism is a systematic and, in principle, predictive doctrine.

PHILOSOPHICAL DETERMINISM

The general concept of determinism holds that "for everything that ever

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The Concept of Environmental Determinism in Cultural Evolution 51

happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen" (Taylor 1967: 359). This concept has a lengthy history within philosophy and has found varied expression and application among phi- losophers. These can probably be fairly represented as falling into three categories. One group, embracing in modern times such leading thinkers as Leibniz, Hobbes, and most of the "logical positivists," would hold that all events and phenomena are determinately caused, or at least can best be explained by deterministic assumptions. A second group, typified by Kant and perhaps most existentialists, would regard determinism as a just hypothesis concerning certain classes of phenomena, but would reserve a place for the undetermined sphere of human freedom. The third view- point, perhaps best exemplified by thinkers like Hume and Wittgenstein, would eschew causality as an epistemological and ontological principle, and so reject determinism. There is no doubt at all that for a great many philosophers — analytic, existential, or other— deterministic explanation has become a losing game.

These philosophical differences, of course, go far beyond the special problem of environmental determinism. They relate to the question of whether or not ANY complete causal explanation of anything is possible. Furthermore, some of the most important perplexities in this regard revolve around whether or not anything whatever is possible, i.e. they affect the possibility of knowing discrete entities or particular events. If the flow of reality cannot be subdivided, how can anything be extricated as the effect of given "causes"? This notion translates into doubt that the character and delimitation of historical events may be important for the problems to which the environmental determinists address themselves. Such perplexities have entertained philosophers as far apart as Wittgen- stein and Husserl.

The doctrine of determinism has a reciprocal predictive form, deriving known effects from known determinate circumstances. The proposition may be turned around so that successful prediction implies cause. Finding expression in contemporary probabilistic thinking, this idea permits an event predicted successfully, but NOT on the basis of strict (deterministic) causality, to be assigned a posteriori to a series of imputed causes. In effect this tends to make the "laws of nature" mostly retroactive! Such a rather Active form of determinism may provide explanatory frames, if not the only rational account of things. Determinism and "destiny" display some common features here, as if myth and science had met. This view- point may or may not help in discovery procedures or experimental design.

The logic of explanation and prediction does not inherently depend

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upon deterministic assumptions. As Curry (1966) has argued, landscape change can be explained by chance events, operating cumulatively. Rela- tions of possibility and likelihood, as well as necessity or certainty, can be subjected to successive transformations and summations; falsification serves as a criterion perhaps as good or better than confirmation for evaluating hypotheses (Popper 1962). There are manifestly full resources in philosophy to provide for logical analysis of problems of cultural evolution, even if deterministic doctrines now enjoy less currency.

As for the doctrine of environmental determinism, the decline of philo- sophical determinism may simply leave the controversy where it has been; for if nothing is determined, strictly speaking, then NEITHER environmental determinism nor any of its actual or potential rival theories can explain phenomena deterministically. As a doctrine concerning the tendency of evolution, even if not as a causal doctrine, environmental determinism may still attract adherents. It belongs to the wider tradition of deter- minism in history which, given mankind's unfortunate inability as yet to conquer circumstance, is likely to persist for a while.

DETERMINISTIC VIEWS OF HISTORY

Many peoples have regarded human history as dependent on the wills and whims of gods. Fatalism, an extreme determinism devoid of methods of prediction, has been widespread since ancient times, often in conjunc- tion — as among the Aztecs or the Greeks — with some idea of either periodic cycles of creation, or successive and distinct epochs of develop- ment. Prescientific observation and interpretation of natural phenomena have given models for speculation about the course of human events, represented, for example, in the wide variety of concepts known collec- tively as totemism and animism. Astronomical, even more than biological exemplars, often having application to the notion of man's destiny, have figured prominently in the speculative determinisms of different peoples, from the Sumerians and probably the men of Stonehenge down to the mathematical macrocosmologists of the present day.

Astrology, unrivaled as a popular determinism, looks to astral controls on human life, and the deterministic view of history, first expressed in modern times by Vico, also rested in good measure on stargazing. For Vico, history manifested an overall direction of progress followed by decline. Like many subsequent conceptions, his bore a moral tone. That moral tone was even stronger in the doctrines that descended from the- ology. Christian eschatology continued to impart a teleological cast to

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views of history right down to at least the end of the nineteenth century in Europe. These Christian versions in their more predestinarian varieties presented nature and the human race as the abject executors of God's inexorable will and plan. Their dualistic struggle of the spirit with the flesh may echo Manichaean thought. Calvin brought this tendency in Christianity to its most categorical expression. The more or less self- conscious agents of the divine plan, the "saved," could be regarded as fulfilling ordained necessity — which, in Calvin's own time, operated through capitalist production and commerce.

Seldom have determinisms so specified their individual human agents; the "great man theory" of history is most commonly at odds with them. But one other great determinist system in which the roles of given indi- viduals can be known is Marxism. According to Marxism, history is progressive and can be predicted through scientific laws. Class analysis permits progressive forces in society to be identified. Not nature, but the productive system of society itself, is for Marxism the locus of historical determination; cultural and social evolution is interpreted as man's prog- ress in "the struggle with nature."

In all advanced modern societies, what is perhaps a more fundamental determinism inheres in practical decision and the public rationales of policy. It dates back at least to the physiocrats and English "classical" economists. The idea of progress, moral as well as material, is well bound up, in contemporary thinking, with what is often seen as a necessary order of development within technology. Popular thinking finds nothing astonishing in the conquest of the world by the industrial, commercial, urban order. Thus, all of history is sometimes seen as the growth of rational efficiency, full employment, and economies of scale. Strongly influenced by certain conceptions of the growth of science and by current scientific principles applied to social issues, this is a central tenet of both capitalist and socialist belief.

VARIETIES OF DETERMINISM IN ENVIRONMENTAL EVOLUTION

One rationalist view of history sees progress as the discovery and appli- cation of the laws of nature and society. Nature is constant, but knowl- edge of it grows; man does not evolve organically (for the time considered), but comes to know himself. Society does change, and culture — as the correct understanding and implementation of the principles of order in the universe — does grow and is dynamic. The modern temper finds

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congenial this particular materialism, sometimes expressed in what is loosely called a "cultural determinism" (cf. White 1949), in which nature takes a passive role, while shared, transmitted human knowledge (itself determinate, of course) evolves in its determined order, and in doing so transforms the world. The conception is a realist conception: the truth is "there," behind the principles we seek to grasp. The cosmic reality itself, if anything, is static; change does not proceed in consequence of a chang- ing fundamental structure of reality, but occurs as human knowledge reaches ever deeper toward a comprehension of that fundamental struc- ture, and becomes diffused increasingly among humanity. Environment, in turn, is changed as culture, and in this sense, evolves.

Cultural determinism on this realist basis has been vigorously chal- lenged by such philosophers of history as Collingwood and Croce. Their idealist conceptions represent another kind of cultural outlook, in which no accessible underlying world structure compels recognition and obedi- ence. Human evolution is for them a human creation-invention, rather than the product of discoveries. Implicitly, this outlook calls for a rejection of determinism in regard to human history. The most explicit opposition to deterministic philosophies of history has perhaps been that of Popper (1957), who has argued that the astronomically inspired model of a universe of order, on which these philosophies rest, itself is suspect. The apparent motions of the heavens are explained upon the basis of advance agreement on a model, then confirmed in observation. But no such agreed-upon model has developed for history. The appeal of Marxist thought, of course, must rest in large part precisely on possession of just such a model; but Popper impugns the model of that historical material- ism on the epistemological ground that history can teach no lessons and reveal no order of its own, since fundamentally the very concepts of "event" and "tendency" and "cause" remain unclarifiable.

Another, rather odd, determinism is expressed in racial theories of history. Writers like Gobineau and Chamberlain have claimed innate superiority for certain groups, and attempted to explain most great his- torical achievements as the work of some single biological stock. Purity of race becomes for them the key to progress. Almost always chauvinistic, racial doctrines well exemplify the invidious way in which most deter- minisms single out particular social elements for a uniquely positive, progressive role.

The concept of inevitable developmental stages of historical develop- ment was widely prevalent in nineteenth-century European thought. It came to figure, through the influence of Lewis Morgan, in the stages of productive relationships adopted by Marx and Engels, as well as in the

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The Concept of Environmental Determinism in Cultural Evolution 55

idea of inevitable stages of technological development so commonly still encountered among prehistorians and ethnologists (cf. Lowie 1937). A notion of this same sort is also inherent in the psychological determinism propagated by the school of Freud. Psychoanalysis interprets not only individual life histories in terms of unconscious motivations and images fixed in childhood, but history, also, as the enactment of the fundamental psychic dramas. Freudian concepts are vulgarized in visions of Oedipal confrontations that overthrow patriarchal systems, or of capitalism as an "anal" stage of social development. The symbols and encounters that make history, and all the underlying behavior, are, according to this viewpoint, just projections or realizations of the underlying psychic real- ity, obedient to its own "natural laws." Another immanence is apparent here, although its spelling out has remained only fragmentary.

The foregoing instances suffice to show the range of deterministic view- points in recent historical thought. All of these disparate doctrines empha- size the immanence of one or another supposedly immutable order: the divine plan, the laws of historical materialism, physical (and economic) law, the structure of the unconscious, or genetic inheritance. Each of them in its own way presents human cultures as dynamic applications of some fundamental principles that govern transformation of the world. Man, if not determinant, is agent and executor of underlying forces, and social evolution is PROGRESSIVE realization of those principles. For all these doctrines, man's evolutionary role is central; they are all more or less anthropocentric and some are also teleological.

GEOGRAPHICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINISM

Thoughtful men have always remarked not only differences in custom and appearance among the variously situated human populations, but deeper differences of character and temperament that seem to coincide with geographical location and, perhaps in consequence of these differences, great contrasts in the constitution of society and the political order. A plausible geography of character, as we should call it now, suggests itself to many discerning observers. Why should personal and national traits exhibit so much geographic regularity? Montesquieu and Buckle gave the classic expression to the idea that character and social forms agree with some environmental factors — an idea still vigorously advocated by some few writers today. Whatever cause may be adduced, it becomes but reason- able to investigate the geographic distribution of the causal factors indi- cated. Geographical determinism generally means "deterministic reason-

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ing applied geographically," and an injunction to consider a phenom- enon within its geographic context. Even in the absence of strict causal reasoning, and apart from any doctrinal position, this particular notion is unexceptionable.

One objection does arise, however, even at a most general level, to geographical determinism. For a dubious assumption may be hidden in this reasoning, to the effect that whichever causes (or, if "cause" is abdi- cated, then "associated circumstances") might account for the presence of a given phenomenon in a certain place, these causes will themselves be found in that place. It is unwarranted to assume that the geographical distributions of effects and "causes" must necessarily long remain con- gruent. Therefore, the simple comparison of distributions cannot ever lead to certainty concerning "cause."

Strictly speaking, environmental determinism ought probably to be distinguished as a special case of the more general geographical deter- minism just alluded to. The distinction does not, unfortunately, hold con- sistently in the literature, but it may help clarify some issues. The meaning of environmental determinism, as such, revolves around the common usage of the term "environment." In particular, it concerns itself with factors of the natural environment.

"Environment" is one of those words that seem to have an obvious intuitive meaning — until considered carefully. Let us examine some of its possibilities:

SPATIAL: Environment means the spatially contiguous surroundings — simply whatever exists in the vicinity of something. The spatial extent remains unspecified: how far away from a point is the perimeter of its environment?

SENSORY: Environment refers to the normal field of a subject's percep- tion. The boundary of a person's environment lies at the limit of his sight, hearing, and so on. (The heavens make up, spatially, most of our environment. Or do they?)

DYNAMIC: Environment connotes the zone of interaction between a body and the forces impinging on it. Invisible microscopic pathogens infest it; distant nuclear explosions intrude themselves into it. Most restrictedly, "environment" in this sense stops at the surface of the skin and somewhere in the inner pulmonary sacs; most broadly, it includes whatever can touch or be touched, affect or be affected.

HABITUAL : Environment, as enduring and developing reality, includes the whole potential range in which an individual functions. It coincides with his daily round of places visited and occupied, or with seasonally various haunts. For mobile creatures, an environment cannot be (mean-

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The Concept of Environmental Determinism in Cultural Evolution 57

ingfully) just a single point in space. (When is an "environment" a life- time's range of wandering?)

CAUSAL: Environment signifies the physical (and perhaps symbolic) conditions associated necessarily with the presence or persistence of a given phenomenon. It is the characteristic situation in which a given phenomenon can occur. Yet other definitions, suitable for certain pur- poses, have been proposed. Clearly, "environment" can be conceived in many different ways. The causal viewpoint required by the idea of envi- ronmental determinism — some combination of immediate environmen- tal conditions necessary and sufficient to produce a given phenomenon — in the present case becomes not merely a logical but also a geographical concept.

One of the implied premises of traditional environmental determinism holds that the environmental conditions presiding over human destiny or character are those conditions that are not man-made. Nature dominates mankind. Since physical rather than some kind of "mental" causality is almost always contemplated — even if supposedly it operates through physical effects upon mentalities — the relevant environment must be "physical." But more particularly, "physical environment" in this context emphatically does not include everything in the spatial, sensory, or dynam- ic fields that is physical; it carries the implication of the "natural" elements alone, and so in effect becomes the "natural environment" as against what I have called (Wagner 1960) the "artificial environment." Further- more, according to this theory, even if the natural environment does at times allegedly affect mentalities, it operates primarily in a directly phys- ical and not a symbolic fashion. Whatever environmental determinism offers, it is not a theory of perception.

The factors of the natural environment that have figured in the argu- ments of the environmental determinists include particularly spatial prop- erties — e.g. contiguity; concentration or dispersion; climatic features, especially the seasonal march of temperature and rainfall; soil and min- eral resources; and general surface configuration.

At its simplest, environmental determinism attempts to find an explan- atory correlation between the areal patterns of physical and those of cul- tural geography. The relationships discovered have not always been envisaged as specific processes, which, as will be apparent, constitutes one of the fundamental weaknesses of this whole thesis. In more evolved form, the intimately related concepts of environmental influence and environmental adaptation, applied to historical developments in the con- text of environmental change, sometimes allegedly permit investigators to identify key processes. The concepts of environment evoked vary not only

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according to the several categories outlined just above, but also in their temporal reference. This permits four possible modes of relationship between society and (natural) environment: (1) gradual "adaptation" by society to constant environmental conditions; (2) continual adaptive "response" by society in consequence of continually varying environ- mental conditions; (3) fixed, unchanged "adjustment" to unchanged con- ditions; and (4) established "accommodation" of a society that serves to cope with considerable ongoing variation of environmental conditions.

VARIETIES OF ADAPTATION AND ADJUSTMENT

Every human society must somehow come to terms with its environment, and every such society must deal with some inconstancy in its sur- roundings. The amplitudes of variations in the social and environmental domains, as well as systematic correlations linking them, provide the basis for distinctions drawn above between what I shall call (using terms never well standardized in the geographic literature), "adaptation," "adjustment," "response," and "accommodation." The ideal of a society and its environment remaining constantly in close adjustment oversimpli- fies the case; however, we may assume that many a society becomes sufficiently accommodated that its normal functions adequately cope with modest amplitudes of environmental change. This situation in fact better represents a typical "adjusted" state than does an ideal thoroughly immo- bile, static case, wherein neither domain exhibits change. The relationship of society and environment, however, may become more or less stabilized, either when both remain comparatively constant or when both are chang- ing but in phase with one another. Potential instability develops when environmental change occurs to which society is not accommodated, and the necessary response is long delayed; this may bring on cataclysm.

A balanced statement on adaptation and adjustment must make allu- sion to a formidable complication of the argument, to wit, the fact that when society "accommodates," "adapts," "adjusts," or "responds" to environmental influence, it does so, partly if not wholly, through trans- forming the environment itself. This is a salient universal characteristic of human societies. A view directed only toward the evolution of society and culture, therefore, may misread the history; alteration of the environ- ment claims equal relevance.

A second complication that generally applies is the possibility of geo- graphical mobility. A potent influence from the environment may fail to operate in the expected fashion because the society withdraws from that

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The Concept of Environmental Determinism in Cultural Evolution 59

environment. This, too, is response. Such an eventuality gives rise to a special kind of environmental determinism — it has been contended that particular outbreaks of migration have ensued upon the occurrence of certain crucial changes in the environment. As developed especially by Huntington (1907, 1922, 1945), this has counted among the most striking and influential environmental determinist theses.

Having taken account of these reservations, we may consider both environmental and social or cultural change as capable of a varying degree of consistent directedness and continuity. The manifold number of possibilities expands: we can conceive now of societies possibly remain- ing altogether static in the face of either an unchanging environment, an environment of sporadic and disarticulated variability, or an environ- ment that evolves progressively in some direction. Alternatively, we may entertain the corresponding possibilities of social systems undergoing articulated or chaotic change as a reflection of environmental influence of any one of these kinds.

MAN AND THE ICE AGE

A temporal coincidence between the reconstructed history of glaciation in the Pleistocene and what was known of mankind's record struck many people long ago. Although discoveries have demonstrated that the earlier episodes of human history took place outside the glaciated zones them- selves, climatic, topographic, and biotic conditions differing substantially from the present ones presumably occurred in the intertropical and sub- tropical zones (apparently the scene of critical stages in mankind's devel- opment) concurrently with what was happening in higher latitudes. Hence a temptation arises to interpret mankind's cultural and physical develop- ment as "determined" by environmental changes during the Pleistocene.

If man "evolved" at all, as almost all authorities would nowadays acknowledge, it meant a process of becoming ever better fitted to survive and multiply within the conditions of environment prevailing at a given time. Consistent upward reassessments of the age of man imply that not only nonglacial but preglacial environments may have been of conse- quence for early man. The theme of human physical evolution lies outside our scope, but we ought to remark upon the seeming lack of a convincing correlation between certain critical periods in that development and the most impressive changes of environment of which we know. And when we come to the story of Neanderthal and diverse other mid-Paleolithic

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physical types, relationships with environmental change are somewhat puzzling, to say the least.

The actual environmental picture anywhere during Pleistocene time is still unclear enough that any close connections with man's cultural devel- opment are necessarily uncertain. Some broad outlines do suggest them- selves, however. Simultaneous physical, social, cultural, and ecological distinctiveness among the recognizable ancestors of man began at the latest in the Lower Pleistocene and probably before, well outside the zones affected by the ice sheets. At least in Africa, several different environ- mental niches permitted, or encouraged, the development of divergent types of men. Climatic change may have exerted increasing selection pressure on the heavier, more vegetarian population of Paranthropus and ultimately brought about its extinction, while hunting bands evolved among its relatives, accentuating human sociability and encouraging some kind of culture.

The mastery of fire and possibly the invention of clothing may have given men the means of seizing ecological dominance themselves by the time of the Mindel glacial period, and may have allowed them to colonize and endure in much colder northern latitudes. Men did not, however, move toward a physical adaptation to cold environments in one zone, to warm wet or dry ones in another, and so on. The concomitant of climatic, vegetational, and faunal change seems not to have been physical special- ization into very closely adjusted local stocks, leading toward new species, but rather development into a culturally accommodated, dominant stock, able, because of its versatility and artificial influence on environments, to survive virtually everywhere except on the ice caps. Nothing is perceptible physically, even in Neanderthal men, that is clearly and irretrievably cold- adapted; nor was their Mousterian cultural equipment obviously so adapted. Apparently man did not adjust to one or another environment as such, but to the very fact of secular climatic change with all its conse- quences. Finding nature's climates unreliable, he undertook to make his own.

Once the overthrow of the pressure of natural selection is accounted for, this interpretation of our evolution need not absolutely presuppose determinism. Insofar as man's physique was concerned, nothing hence- forth needed to become a fixed commitment to a certain climate. Whereas until then mutation had been the source of evolutionary adaptation, after this point invention had to fill its place.

There remains the problem of the possible determination of inventions by environment. It is easy to admit selection pressure as applying equally to cultural innovations and to genetically induced novelties, once they

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have appeared. But whereas no one seems to question the virtual random- ness of the process of genetic mutation in a living population — apart from some few mechanical, chemical, and radiational effects that bear on the frequency but not the character of mutants — random evolution of a culture is perhaps intuitively less acceptable. Culture, and emphatically its technical and organizational aspects, appears to show consistent growth and improvement (cf. Kroeber 1944, 1952), and to achieve them almost unerringly. It seems, to date at least, as if societies do not make as many blind mistakes as nature does in the course of producing and testing innovations. Hence we have to ask whether progressive culture change reflects particular determinate controls.

MENTAL ACTIVITY AND ENVIRONMENTALEM

Bodily adaptation and accommodation to the natural environment count for much less now than in the early Pleistocene, at least in the aggregate, despite the multiplicity of possible effects (e.g. of climate) enthusiastically alleged by Markham (1942), Huntington (1915), and others. The adap- tation to natural conditions of man-modified environment itself, specific- ally technics, is of greater consequence. Technical systems of objects, in and of themselves, may well respond to advancing change in their sur- roundings, or they may accommodate over limited amplitudes to fluctu- ations therein, but they do not exactly "evolve." We should not think of artifacts as adapting or adjusting. Technology does not command its own development, nor has it, strictly speaking, any pattern of internal descent from form to form. Its continuities reside entirely in the concepts of observers.

But human populations, and their habitats, evolve by regular descent and truly cumulative change. Ideas, too, may well exhibit a genuine evolutionary pattern — one notion growing from another toward a given culmination. This evolution of ideas is what generates the changes or initiatives for change within the technological domain. Is it legitimate to see the application of ideas within technology as consequent on a genu- inely evolutionary process external to technics? In what sense might this evolution be determined by environment?

Any idea evolves within an individual mentality. It can never be other- wise. Yet in order to belong to culture, and to contribute to the evolution thereof, we can agree that an idea must be diffused and therefore shared. Finally, if applied, it may enter into technics or some kind of group

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behavior. The evolution of culture involves a more complex process than simply a generation of ideas, but the character of culture must still depend on ideas, for the origin of which we may seek an explanation. Whereas a physicalist outlook, based upon the philosophical position that all phys- ical phenomena can be explained by purely physical determinants or influences, suffices to account, say, for the effects of climate on the indi- vidual organism or on its living space and livelihood, the physicalist conception of mind is vague, and except for a rare minority of patholog- ical subjects, is useless for explaining the genesis of a particular sort of idea.

What governs mental life? If chance alone determines it, we find an analogue to mutation in biology. But if it has a pattern that reflects some regular relationship with something else, that pattern possibly may prove intelligible. One potential source of mental patterns is the natural, and generally the physical environment. A conception of mankind as rational, even if incompletely so, entails the supposition that men learn — that is, that mind responds adaptively to environment. In recent years, many geographers — such as Lowenthal (1961, 1967), Brookfield (1969), and Saarinen (1969) — have reviewed the evidence for geographical percep- tion as a factor in behavior. The concept of culture, more particularly, has emphasized learning as a sharing of experience and insight among men. As earlier proposed, cultural evolution means adaptive change; that posi- tion would imply that such change occurs in consequence of insights into man's environmental circumstances. By definition, adaptive evolutionary change reflects its environmental circumstances, and so our mentalism ought to be environmentalist as well.

Apart from physicalist climatic theories of environmental determinism which have to do with births and deaths and health (including mental health and vigor), the related doctrine of possibilism associated partic- ularly with the French school of Vidal de la Blache, provided geographers with a view of man as rational within a world of intelligible possibilities — a view that is environmentalist, as Lewthwaite (1958) remarked, and also mentalist. For possibilism, cultural change is seen to follow upon discov- ery of inescapably obvious ideas through contemplation of the environ- ment. Adaptation and adjustment through cultural means, in this view, require insight and the recognition of environmental possibilities or pres- sures. Reflection and deliberation are implied, and choice involves con- jecture and prediction. The origin of such a technique as fire making, by this reasoning, might be explained by imaginative imitation of observed events in nature, or even by deliberate research in semiplayful contexts. A complex such as domestication likewise might have come about through

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some premeditated course of action, although not necessarily with practi- cal intentions.

The possibilist conception of cultural evolutionary theory permits of various motivations in man's adaptation to environment. It need not presuppose a purely utilitarian intention. If men adapt to their environ- ments by making more or less conscious and purposeful choices, their consciousness and purposes may well include symbolic, ritual, and cere- monial features. Cosmologies, as comprehensive explanations of human experience of environing reality, perhaps prescribe their own adjust- ments. The ritual origins of such evolutionary landmarks as animal domestication, urged by Hahn (1896), and urbanism, recently proposed by Wheatley (1971), command a certain plausibility. Methodologically, the importance of this version of possibilist environmentalism — in con- trast to environmental determinism — lies in its indication of a source of explanation in the progress of cosmological speculation, for which, unfor- tunately, material evidence is often meager. The growth of cosmologies may often be slighted in the reconstruction of prehistory.

SITES AND ROUTES

Environments affect diffusion of ideas. Two kinds of influence apparently are relevant: those that confirm or refute, establish or extinguish, the idea itself, and those that favor or obstruct its physical communication. Con- sider first communication. The contacts among peoples play a major role in spreading new ideas, and so it must have been for ages past. A kind of environmentalism is inherent in the idea, so prominent in Ratzel's (1882, 1891) anthropogeography, that topographical configuration or proximity and distance must condition cultural development. Most of Ratzel's ideas — not nearly so mysteriously environmental-determinist as is some- times alleged — lend themselves to statement as hypotheses about com- munication and its technical necessities, and in that guise call for no particular assumptions about controls of another order inherent in envi- ronments. Differences between Old and New World civilizations, or between Black Africa and the circum-Mediterranean world, are easiest explained with the help of such hypotheses. The known spatial patterns of the spread of many great inventions unmistakably attest to some necessities of spatial order. Little controversy need arise about the validity of these ideas of Ratzel, nor do they in themselves clarify the problem, strictly, of the origin of innovations. But nonetheless they have great

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logical bearing on the problem. Diffusion may figure as the alternative in a given place to independent local evolution or invention.

Historically, extreme differences of opinion have arisen among ethnol- ogists, geographers, and prehistorians upon this issue. If true invention be regarded as a very rare event, and the geographic process of diffusion as a commonplace one, then most if not all cultural evolution anywhere can be explained, as Graebner (1911) and other Kulturkreis spokesmen would have it, by relatively simple stages in a universal process of diffu- sion of a small number of basic inventions. All of cultural evolution might constitute a series of emanations from one great dominating center of invention. For such theories, the original inventions could stand as utterly unique and probably inexplicable events, all importance then attaching to the routes, times, and means of their diffusion.

Demonstrable relationships preclude alternative hypotheses. A known diffusion obviates environmental deterministic explanation of local pro- cesses of cultural innovation. We should not forget that the immense majority of local cultural developments at any time empirically show obvious derivation from elsewhere, and close resemblance and connection with adjacent situations. Only rarely can an actual invention be even a possibility. Furthermore, the laborious quest for absolute beginnings may in fact be futile, yielding scant enlightenment about the course of cultural development, even if initial accidents or small determinate responses can be found. Their propagation is what counts.

The interesting cases, therefore, present themselves when very similar new traits arise in places isolated from each other and with little possibility of intercourse. As wandering and intermarriage militate against genetic isolation of the local human group, diffusion and related migratory move- ments intrude upon autonomous adjustment of local cultures to environ- ment. Experience and ingenuity are shared. Trade equalizes resource allocation. Accordingly, one of the most fertile kinds of speculative expla- nation by determinists has focused on the predisposing circumstances for migration or diffusion. Much better arguments can be made for environ- mental limitations and incentives for communication and migration than for any environmental impulse toward invention. The crux of the question then becomes how conducive environmental conditions are to spatial propagation of the innovation.

POTENTIALS FOR DIFFUSION

Conditions for diffusion may serve to explain attested innovations intro·

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duced to given places, if not their ultimate beginnings. The category of conditions that impinge upon communication of a new idea, or actual movement of people, permits of probabilistic interpretation; conditions governing the establishment or extinction of the idea in any given spatial phase — and therefore continuity or interruption of the spatial process of its expansion — are capable of possibilistic assessment. In neither instance does a strict determinism seem to recommend itself.

Cultural evolution as exhibited by apportionment of great world areas at any period of history to culture regions reflects an unmistakable con- formity to major geographical controls. Before the maritime age, the major boundaries ran through oceans, deserts, and high mountain ranges. Cultural communities conformed to topographic sectors like the valleys of great rivers. Connections now express the existing maritime and inter- urban networks of communications.

Thus, in regard to cultural evolution, the possibilities of diffusion should first be judiciously canvassed, and the relative ease and likelihood of intercourse, according to the transportation media peculiar to the time, should be considered. A certain net propensity to travel (and in consequence, communicate) applies in any situation where a group of human beings move about. On a probabilistic basis, the random spatial movements of all individuals within a given population, over a sufficient time, will tend to establish a pronounced pattern of circulation that describes the mean relative cost-distance values from all their points of origin.

Suppose, instead of delving into mentalistic theories, that we merely assume that innovative thoughts occur at stated rates, and that they spread according to "potentials" in a field of forces that reflects the cost in trouble, time, or resources, of crossing any given distance, topograph- ically differentiated. Cost-distance governs the degree of interconnectivity. It is furthermore legitimate to suppose, in probabilistic terms, that cultur- al resemblance between any two selected points is ceteris paribus a func- tion of the subsisting interconnections patterned by cost-distance. The problems of "inspiration" or "creativity" that bedevil mentalism are then obviated. We simply postulate that new ideas are very frequent and occur at approximately the same rate everywhere. Attention shifts to their dis- semination. Such a viewpoint is reasonable, in the absence of any indica- tion of geographically differential creativity, such as would arise from particular superiorities of climate, race, or other elements.

The peculiar sort of retrospective, pseudocausal reasoning mentioned earlier that reads back from a known result toward its initial conditions, can apply to the search for cultural initiatives. A known distribution in

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time and space, considered in the context of a differentiated spatial field (especially when we know it at several of its stages), will tend to reveal the sequence and direction of diffusion, and the points whence given move- ments came. The "naive" space of ordinary distance does not serve such purposes, however, for the "distances" involved must register the com- plications and constraints produced by many other factors. Nor can the conclusions from such reasoning attain to certainty, for they must remain expressions of the probable and nothing more.

A good example of the application of distributional analysis to the reconstruction of a putative diffusion pattern, Sauer's study (1952) of agricultural origins and dispersals, has recently received from the research of Solheim and Gorman in southeastern Asia what may be independent confirmation of its startling claim for early planting cultures in that region. The thesis formerly had lacked all archaeological support (see Gorman's review elsewhere in this book). This instance demonstrates how altogether different lines of reasoning, employing quite distinct assump- tions and a different sort of evidence, converge at times on certain prob- lems and reinforce each other's results.

ENVIRONMENTAL SCREENING

An idea's viability, of course, depends not on the means of its commu- nication alone. In the process of diffusion, described formally as a succes- sion of temporal-spatial phases, the idea has to pass at each phase from the donors to the receptors accessible to them. We may calculate the probability of acceptance and further propagation of an idea on the part of the respective receptors — the transition probabilities — according to the compatibility of the idea with local cultural and natural circumstances and the dispositions of the receptors. If the innovative impulse is repeat- edly presented to a representative variety of possible receptors, then this probability becomes fairly specific and reliable.

Although cost-distance may express a moderate diversity of variables, it shows an overall consistency. But factors that contribute to environ- mental screening take a great variety of forms. In formal terms, given an initial innovative impulse and the potential spatial field for its commu- nication, what may be called the net environment for each point of recep- tion (once cost-distance values are assigned) either rejects or accepts the impetus. Environment, in this case, includes personal and social as well as natural conditions. This concept of diffusion does not require complete, determinate articulation in each phase between the idea diffused and the

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circumstances of receptors. Some degree of latitude applies to possibilities for acceptance and incorporation of the new idea into the environment. Environmentally screened transitions decide what portion of the poten- tially accessible cost-distance field is attained in a given phase by the diffusing impulse.

The voluminous literature on diffusion surveyed by various geogra- phers of late (Gould 1969; Brown and Moore 1969; Hägerstrand 1967; Hudson 1972) provides a wealth of formulations of the process, but no easy rule for coping with the problem of transitional probabilities. In fact, the same formidable issues that becloud environmental determinism might appear to arise here again. A combination of probabilistic and possibil- istic reasoning avoids these pitfalls. The adoption of the innovation will presumably ensue, sooner or later, according to this approach, if environ- mental possibilities are such as somehow to allow it. Various recipients may be contacted in turn, and their several dispositions may affect the outcome, so that if one or more possibilities for it do exist, over some time random processes of introduction and attempted application of the new idea effectuate its establishment in one or a number of different versions in the new location. The propensity of human beings to travel, invoked above, insures repeated random exposures of potential receptors to the innovation, and guarantees in turn that once naturalized, the idea will henceforth undergo a further propagation at the hands of donors from the new area, again exhibiting the probable effects of random but repeated onward contacts and environmental screening. A random pro- cess operating in a field of possibilities thus explores and, given time, will actualize some of those possibilities, if not all of them.

Consider the examples furnished historically by the spread of grain crops. The diffusion of grain growing saw the introduction of the various wheats and barleys, from different but related origins, to peripheral regions, and at certain margins the gradual screening out of these in favor of some associated weeds like oats and rye, or conceivably certain millets. Sometimes climatic barriers intervened, but sometimes cultural prefer- ences appear to have decided the election of a certain species or variety for planting. The possibilities were multiple, and active interchange involving numerous and various encounters prompted exploitation of them, until the middle latitudes of the Old World had acquired a well- diversified pattern of grain agriculture, sensitively adjusted to environ- ments and cultures. Something similar must have happened, also, in the case of rice or maize in other areas, and in countless other cases of diffusion.

Environmental screening of diffusions carries with it another important

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effect, as the foregoing instance also shows. Innovations change en route. Ideas evolve while they move, and successive passages from one kind of environment to another may subject emerging variants to a powerful selection process leading to considerable differentiation as the impulse spreads. Slight random changes cumulate when shaped into a trend, and various environments eliminate some features altogether while preserving or intensifying others. Conjointly, the originally distinct diffusions of a number of ideas (or genetic lines of crops) may, under the pressures and incentives of particular environments, result in fusions and mutual mod- ifications. Such a situation appears most clearly in the case of linguistic material, notably words that incorporate more than one remote influence. (The evolution of a language furnishes a wealth of suggestive indications concerning the possible course of cultural evolution in general.)

ENVIRONMENTAL PREDISPOSITIONS

The behavior that operates in the finding of compatible conditions for phenomena takes place within a realm of possibilities, some of them of natural provenance and some of them in whole or part man-made. If we know in advance (or retrospectively) the character and requirements of a given innovation as it moves, we may discern those situations where, once it arrives, it may become acclimatized. The prediction of this kind of fitness of a place to new ideas must depend upon the identification of minute particulars of both the innovation and the environments, but sometimes this procedure does prove feasible. More frequently than oth- erwise, the stipulated limiting conditions for the occurrence of phenom- ena provide a means of such prediction. Thus, a simulation of the spread of grains might be effected by compiling data on the geographic distribution of relevant factors, such as critical isotherms for the species concerned, crucial soil properties, or existing techniques of cultivation. The field of possible expansion for each crop appears quite clearly in such simula- tions where, of course, this geographic information has in fact assisted in determining the very limits here invoked; the reasoning is often circular, predicting what has already happened, on the basis of its having happened.

The probabilistic concepts introduced above allow for chance occur- rence of ideas at equal rates at any point. They further postulate a fixed propensity to travel and exchange. Cost-distance sets controls on the diffusion of ideas in differentiated geographic fields, and continuity in diffusion rests upon the receptivity to the impulse of given environments reached by it. If a particular notion — quite hypothetically — has arisen

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here and there repeatedly throughout the time of man on earth, it neces- sarily has had to wait for certain propitious conditions in order to diffuse and become widely established. At first environmental barriers may have contained it; then environmental change facilitated its dissemination. Although the assumption that all ideas exist in embryo through all the ages, or arise repeatedly, may be unrealistic, this issue is irrelevant. What matters is the postulation that the spread of new ideas attests a changed environment.

Types of limiting (and facilitating) conditions vary. The crucial changes opening the way to new disseminations may involve: alterations in the mode of perception on the part of a people, consequent on cultural developments; modifications of technics, again a cultural acquisition; transformations of environment by man; variations in the natural con- ditions, either casual or secular — and of course, mutations in the idea that diffuses, or in the ways of implementing it. The foremost influence for receptivity to change, accordingly, appears to stem from previous diffusions that have modified the local culture, or through it, the environ- ment. Only rarely, seemingly, would natural environmental change con- tain the key.

Environmental determinism, therefore, after having been watered down to such a minor theme as the foregoing one of favorable natural condi- tions opening the way for new ideas, remains a part of valid reasoning. Certain times occur in history when circumstances change in such a way as to favor rapid evolution. Progressive change takes place, we might infer, when natural conditions come about that favor the acceptance and establishment of new ideas — not necessarily of local origin — that institute a better adaptation of a culture to its environment. But redoubt- able objections to a purely automatic supposition of this kind abound, as will be evident. Only rarely will environmental determinism offer an attractive explanation of events. Its fallacy lies in unwarranted metaphys- ical assumptions that induce a specious confidence in full foreknowledge or retrospective certainty.

With all due caution, we may embrace a functional interpretation of the growth and geographical adjustment of human cultures that almost (but only almost) demands the invocation of environmental determinism. The structural-functional anthropology that followed the pronounce- ments of Radcliffe-Brown (1948) was predisposed to this expedient, because it looked for close, or "best," adjustments of societies to habitats. Ideas emerge in abundance; only the impediments of nature (i.e. cost- distance) prevent their penetrating everywhere; where they reach, they are selected insofar as circumstance requires — not merely allows — them

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to be adopted. Whatever their inception, their vocation is assured and understandable.

Even the nonfunctionalist schools of anthropology regard some cultur- al features of a people as less successful than others, or less adaptive; some make a place for "irrational" behavior and beliefs. Such categories are a pale but true reflection of environmentalist ones: adaptation is their criterion and cue. Is it realistic to deny that house types, livelihood activ- ities, or clothing tend to show conformity to climate, raw materials, and other geographic features? Hardly so! Culture does consult environment. The primary objection to the doctrine of environmental determinism rather cites the multiplicity of rational adjustments possible to given concrete habitat conditions. Ethnographic evidence profusely illustrates the multiplicity of viable adjustments to a given habitat. There are better and poorer adaptations, to be sure, but more than one of each can be conceived, and often demonstrated. As rationale, environmental deter- minism furnishes a useful literary tool, but as a method of exact prediction it deceives.

THE FEASIBILITY OF CHOICES

A negative determinism, in accord with limits known for given distribu- tions, would arouse no controversy. An impulse spreads until it reaches limits. The possibilities for positive incorporation of a new idea within existing habitats are so diverse and numerous, however, that the stipula- tion of limits seldom proves convenient. Nor, given numerous conditions that distinguish a particular environment, can some uniquely suited innovation be foreseen. Always more than one solution to a problem may develop, more than one reaction may exploit an opportunity presented.

The defect of environmental determinist reasoning, even at its best, concerns its basic logic. A set of conditions necessary for the occurrence of a certain phenomenon may or may not also be sufficient for it. Further- more, a condition that suffices to produce (or guarantee occurrence of) a phenomenon may or may not invariably co-occur with it, that is, count as a necessary condition for it. Environmental determinism never could attain to statements of the type "if and only if ...". Accordingly no test of constancy of co-occurrence of "effects" and "causes" could develop. Concretely, the doctrine could not assert empirically vulnerable (testable) claims of necessary implication such that a particular environmental con- juncture would hypothetically be accompanied, wherever and whenever it appeared, by some specific cultural result. The environmental deter-

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minists did not promise to discover what conditions would always insure the invention of agriculture, or the discovery of fire, or the preference for warm clothing, or human slavery. Nor did they ever describe in detail the processes supposedly sufficient to implement the influence they claimed.

In fact, the chief proponents of this thesis fell back on mentalism — either proposing that certain climatic conditions (for instance, frequent cyclonic storms) stimulate mental activity, to which they attributed all differential progress; or that particular conditions revealed themselves at crucial moments in a way that forced insight on men, and so led to inventions (such as the putative domestication of wild animals, confined along with men by the secular increase of regional dessication into rare oases).

From a logical standpoint, the possibility remains that for every situa- tion (or rather, for every long chain of successive situations), one partic- ular adaptation (or again, a chain of such ordained ones) will in the end prove to have served maximum advantage. But optimality is always rel- ative. There exists no reason to suppose that long-run maximum advan- tage dictates always what the short-run largest gain demands, nor any indication that what happens in reality will correspond to either one. Evaluations of "success" will differ in accordance with the time span contemplated. The doctrine that whatever happens is determined by all that precedes it leaves us without much practical understanding, because we cannot know the infinite details of what has gone before. But even if we did, we have no reason to suppose that what preceded an event would always manifest the most efficient, economical determinants at every point most adequate to bring about the current state of things. So even a com- prehensive and absolute environmental determinism, like any sort of strict determinism, might not enlighten us much, whether it be "true" or not.

The choices that become "inventions" may not figure as momentous in the minds of those who make them. A small idea succeeds in practice, spreads and still succeeds, and metamorphoses to some degree while spreading. At last it reaches limits set by some environment, or fails to find new pathways for diffusion. Entangled with a host of other novel notions, it does not impress receptors as exceptional, but somewhere it, or some associated new idea, becomes the key to a protean achievement like "toolmaking" or "agriculture" or "irrigation" or "the internal com- bustion engine." These entities may often not exist for their inventors. Nor, perhaps, do the moments of the vital transfers of ideas involved have any prominence as "historical events." All transpires in the flow of life and time.

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The invention or discovery of anything important, then, must emerge out of small acts and happenings, reflecting very minor, often unobserved environmental changes. Recognition of importance in a new idea or arti- fact or method constitutes, itself, inventive insight. The small events con- cerned, however, fall increasingly within the sphere of culture; as human groups condition their surroundings more and more, ever greater influ- ences issue from their handiwork to bear on further evolution of their culture and environment. The role of nature in the determination of their progress lessens as their own proficiency increases. But the cultural effects facilitate development in just as complicated and obscure a fashion as do the natural ones.

The crux is this: if every moment is determinate, its determinants are infinite. How can the course of history be known beforehand?

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