Culture and Energy Usage
Introduction
The earliest energy theorists were largely physical scientists, some of whom held that the growth and increasing complexity of society were largely synonymous with "progress," construed as a movement toward the higher, the better, and the more desirable. Nobel laureate chemist Wilhelm Ostwald (1907) was of this camp, although other eminent scholars such as the Nobel laureate physicist Fredrich Soddy (1912) and Alfred Lotka (1925), a founder of mathematical biology, also ventured ideas on the relation of energy and evolution yet made no explicit connection.
Energy theorists of cultural evolution are concerned with the whole sweep of cultural evolution, from prehistoric hunters and gatherers to modern industrial societies. This global, secular perspective is useful in assessing the relevance of ideas advanced to account for short periods of time in the history of particular societies. Those who propose an energy theory of cultural evolution emphasize the problem of causality-whether or not the amount of energy a society uses can be manipulated, and if so, to what extent, by what means, and to what effect (Nader and Beckerman, 1978).
In the social sciences, steps toward an energy theory of cultural evolution were made by British archeologists V.
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