But as Greek culture advanced, the Greek worldview evolved. By the Periclean Age, Greek plays were portraying humans challenging the gods. After all, they had been given the secret of fire by their patron, Prometheus. As the Greeks' worldview with its attached system of values evolved, it guided them toward a smarter, braver lifestyle. They began trying to explain reality in ways that left room for people to understand and manipulate the events in their world, not cringe away from them. Once their worldview included those possibilities, they began to create practical action plans that enabled humans to cause, hasten, or forestall more and more events in the world. They tried out the daring action plans, and when some worked, more daring plans followed. (Edith Hamilton articulates these ideas well.²)

         

It is important to see that human individuals and groups will normally not attempt any action they think of as taboo. Ancient tribes who happened upon an action that seemed contrary to, or outside of, what was appropriate for humans in their worldview only grew upset and fearful. Whether the action got results or not, the only thing most of those people wanted to learn was how to avoid putting themselves in the same situation again. They sought to avoid it for fear of bringing the gods’ wrath down on them. Once in a long while, a genius might question his society’s worldview and even describe an alternative one, but he often paid dearly for such audacity—by being ostracized or put to death.

                                                                      

                           

                                Euripides, Greek tragic playwright (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

However, changes in a society’s worldview and then in the society’s values and morés can also evolve more gradually, helped by many lesser geniuses. By the Golden Age of Athens, philosophers, writers, and artists were offering works that only a few centuries earlier would literally have been unthinkable. Their worldview had evolved to allow for at least some degree of human free will. The works of Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Euripedes, and Pythagoras could only have been produced under a worldview in which a person could conceive of actions challenging the orthodox beliefs of the tribe and even the forces of the universe, even though the challenge might only rarely succeed. 

At the same time, their neighbours, the Spartans, were evolving their society, the perfect military state. The clash called the Peloponnesian War became inevitable, and Athens lost. A few years later, the Macedonians out-did the Spartans, and after another generation or two, the Romans ended the matter by conquering them all. 

In each case, a worldview, a set of attached values, and a set of behavior patterns, all blended into a culture, were tried against that culture's neighbors and proved just a little bit more vigorous. Evolution by constant testing and gradual increments, the same as in the genetic domain, kept bringing a new human social system to the top of the cultural food chain. Harsh. Real. 

And note also how cultural evolution by variation and selection of memes rather than genes is tenuous and scary, but also much faster and more responsive than is evolution by the genetic model. We can adapt to a changed set of weather patterns and grow a new kind of crop and live off of it because we can watch, form concepts, build mental models of reality and re-boot our way of life. In a generation or two. Not blindingly fast, but much faster than the genetic mode of evolution. Human. 

For better or worse, we not only adapt to changes in our environment (which always come), we also do it in a few generations. In the genetic, Darwinian mode of evolution, a few generations-long time span is nearly meaningless. In the human, cultural mode of evolution, what we call an "era" can be less than five generations. That kind of change very much fits the term we often use to describe it, namely the term revolutionary.