Abstract

It has been argued repeatedly that the modern study of social and cultural evolution took its inspiration and form from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and Descent of Man. In 1920, Robert H. Lowie observed that it was after evolutionary principles had been accepted in biology that they were applied to social phenomena, and that Lewis Henry Morgan was among the first to make the application. Sir James George Frazer, at about the same time, dated the birth of anthropology from the promulgation of the evolution theory of Darwin and Wallace in 1859 and maintained that “this conception of evolution … supplies a basis for the modern science of anthropology.” Harry Elmer Barnes similarly traced the development of anthropology from the theory of organic evolution and advised the student that he “need not concern himself with the history of method in sociology before the entry of Darwinian concepts.”