Neo-Evolutionism: White, Steward, Sahlins, and Service’s Cultural Evolution

Anthropology’s evolutionary theories fell out of fashion for decades after Franz Boas and his students dismantled the sweeping, ethnocentric claims of nineteenth-century thinkers like Lewis Henry Morgan and Edward Tylor. Then, starting in the 1940s, a new generation of scholars decided the baby had been thrown out with the bathwater. They kept the core idea that societies change and grow more complex over time, but rebuilt it on firmer, more scientific ground. This revival is known as neo-evolutionism, and four names sit at its center: Leslie White, Julian Steward, Marshall Sahlins, and Elman Service. Each approached the question of cultural change differently, and together they reshaped how anthropologists think about progress, adaptation, and technology.

Leslie White and the energy theory of culture 🔗

Leslie White wanted anthropology to behave like a hard science, with laws and measurable variables instead of vague narratives. White taught at the University of Michigan and championed cultural evolution at a time when the idea was deeply unfashionable among his peers. His starting point was symbolic thought. Humans, and only humans, communicate through symbols: a pen stands for writing, a flag stands for a nation. This symbolic capacity is what allows culture to exist and accumulate independently of any single person’s biology or intelligence. White argued that once you accept culture as its own system, you can study it the way a physicist studies energy or matter, by looking for laws that govern how it changes.

The formula E×T=C 🔗

White’s central claim was that cultural development tracks energy use. He proposed that culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year increases, or as the efficiency of the tools used to capture that energy improves. He expressed this as a formula: E (energy) multiplied by T (the quality of tools) produces C (the level of cultural development). A society that has moved from human muscle power to domesticated animals, then to fossil fuels, then to electricity, has each time expanded the energy available per person, and each time culture has grown more elaborate as a result. For White, technology was not just one factor among many. It was the primary driver, with social organization and belief systems adjusting to fit whatever technological base a society had.

Where critics found gaps 🔗

The formula is elegant, but critics pointed out that it describes a correlation, not a full explanation. Knowing that energy use and cultural complexity rise together does not tell you why complex societies emerged in Mesopotamia or the Indus Valley but not elsewhere with similar energy potential. White’s model also struggled to account for cases where societies with comparable technology and energy access developed very differently. This gap is exactly what the next generation of neo-evolutionists tried to close.

Julian Steward and multilinear evolution 🔗

Julian Steward rejected the idea that all cultures march along a single path toward greater complexity. Steward argued that social systems arise from patterns of resource exploitation, which are shaped by how a people’s technology interacts with their specific natural environment. He is widely regarded as the founder of cultural ecology, the study of how environment and culture shape each other over time.

Steward sorted evolutionary thinking into three types: unilinear evolution, the old nineteenth-century idea of one universal sequence; universal evolution, White’s culture-wide laws; and multilinear evolution, his own approach, which looked for regularities across a limited set of comparable societies rather than claiming one law for all of humanity.

The culture core and periphery 🔗

Steward laid out this framework in detail in his book Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution, where he introduced the concept of the culture core. The core consists of the features most closely tied to subsistence, the socio-economic arrangements a group needs to extract a living from its environment. This relationship runs both ways. As a culture acts on its environment through farming, hunting, or herding, the environment itself changes, and the culture must adapt again in response. Steward studied the Shoshone of the Great Basin and showed that their population density tracked the distribution of pinon nut trees almost directly, a clear example of environment shaping social organization.

Peripheral features, by contrast, are less tied to environmental necessity. Religious practices, kinship terminology, and artistic styles can vary widely even among societies with similar cores, and this is what gives each culture its distinctive flavor.

Typologies of subsistence 🔗

Because most societies adapt to their environment in a limited number of recognizable ways, Steward grouped cultural cores into broad subsistence types: hunting and gathering, pastoralism, horticulture, agriculture, and industrial society. Within each type he hoped to trace a distinct evolutionary line, since the pressures facing a herding society are simply not the same as those facing an industrial one. In practice, building out fully separate evolutionary lines for every subsistence type proved far harder than the theory suggested, and this remains one of the lasting critiques of his framework.

Sahlins and Service: general and specific evolution 🔗

By the late 1950s, Marshall Sahlins and Elman Service set out to reconcile White’s and Steward’s positions rather than choose between them. In their book Evolution and Culture, Sahlins and Service argued that societies develop through specialized adaptations to their habitat and to neighboring societies, with variations in environment and historical contact driving cultural diversification. Their key move was to split evolution into two distinct processes that operate at the same time rather than competing with each other.

The tree metaphor 🔗

Specific evolution describes how a particular society adapts to its own habitat. An Arctic population develops the tools, clothing, and social patterns suited to ice and cold, while a Kalahari population develops an entirely different toolkit suited to arid scrubland. Neither adaptation is more advanced than the other; each is simply specific to its niche. General evolution, on the other hand, describes the broader trend across human history in which higher, more complex forms of organization tend to emerge from and eventually outcompete simpler ones. Sahlins described general evolution as the tendency of cultural and social systems to increase in complexity, organization, and adaptiveness to the environment. Sahlins and Service used the image of a tree to hold both ideas together: the trunk represents general evolution, the overall rise in complexity, while the branches represent specific evolution, the countless individual adaptations that spread outward from it.

Adaptation and adaptability 🔗

To sharpen this distinction, they introduced two related terms. Adaptation refers to a society’s success at surviving within a specific ecological niche, deeply tuned to local conditions. Adaptability refers to the capacity to spread across many different environments and outcompete other groups over a wider geographic range. Sahlins pointed to European gunpowder technology as a case of adaptability. It was not fine-tuned to any single environment the way, say, Inuit sealing technology was tuned to the Arctic, but its raw power let European societies expand across radically different climates and terrains during the colonial era. Sahlins called this pattern of spread adaptive radiation.

Neo-evolutionism compared to classical evolutionism 🔗

The differences between neo-evolutionism and its nineteenth-century predecessor are substantial. Classical evolutionists like Morgan and Tylor proposed a single universal ladder of progress, with every society assumed to be climbing the same rungs from savagery to civilization, and Western industrial society sitting comfortably at the top. This framework was criticized heavily for its ethnocentrism and its reliance on speculation rather than fieldwork, and it eventually collapsed under the weight of the Boasian critique.

Neo-evolutionists rebuilt the theory on empirical footing. White measured energy consumption. Steward compared societies with matched environments and subsistence types. Sahlins and Service distinguished adaptation from adaptability using concrete historical cases rather than abstract rankings. Crucially, none of these later thinkers ranked general and specific evolution against each other as better or worse, and they treated the spread associated with adaptive radiation as frequently harmful to the societies being displaced or colonized, a sharp break from the celebratory tone of nineteenth-century progress narratives. Where classical evolutionism saw one line of history, neo-evolutionism saw many lines, shaped by environment, energy, and historical contingency, all while still holding on to the idea that cultural change follows patterns worth studying scientifically.

What do you think? Does White’s energy formula still hold up when you consider today’s digital economies, where value often has little to do with raw energy consumption? And between adaptation and adaptability, which do you think has shaped more of human history?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leslie-A-White
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White's_law
3. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julian-Steward
4. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/ecological-anthropology/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilineal_evolution
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Sahlins
7. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/antp10/chapter/48/