ABSTRACT
It seems to us that Huxley has been premature in congratulating evolutionary biology on its explicit recognition of the difference between divergence and progress. Despite Huxley’s own efforts to make the distinction, and despite the fact that the distinction may well strike a biologist as commonplace should he pause to consider it, it is nevertheless not generally explicated by prominent biologists, and judging from confusion about the character of life’s evolutionary progress in recent literature, it is perhaps not fully understood. On the other hand, the distinction has long existed in the literature of evolutionary anthropology. E. B. Tylor, in the opening chapter of Primitive Culture, laid out the study of cultural evolution both “stage by stage” as well as “along its many lines.” Yet in this, as in so much else, twentieth-century anthropology did not heed Tylor’s advice. The dual character of the evolutionary process was not recognized, and this failing has become the very heart of current confusion and polemical controversy about such terms as “unilinear,” “multilinear,” and “universal” evolution, as well as about the difference between “history” and “evolution.”
