ABSTRACT
Political evolution is a metatheory that attempts to explain qualitative changes in political systems and organizations as they are revealed in the increased complexity of social and political organization. Exemplars of the political evolution paradigm also appropriate and synthesize ideas and constructions from other paradigms to help explain political change. Evolutionary models suggested by E. R. Service, Morton Fried, and Y. A. Cohen have been especially influential in understanding political evolution. E. R. Service established a typology that included bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and eventually states. Fried developed a model of egalitarian, ranked, and stratified societies. Y. A. Cohen suggested an evolutionary scheme based on levels of sociotechnological adaptation that he related to hunting and gathering, horticultural, pastoral, agricultural, and industrial societies. The genetic pulse refers to those material and sometimes mental forces of evolution, such as warfare, technology, psychological predispositions, population growth, and religious ideologies.
