..."By seeing the rise of drama this way, we can circumvent the positivistic bias—also called cultural Darwinism—which is innate in prior models and predicates an orderly accretion of events leading to the perfected "final form" of a species. Punctuated equilibrium doesn't demand that we seek any underlying logic behind the change from epic to lyric to drama..Rejecting cultural Darwinism brings additional benefits. For instance, no longer must the earlier forms of art that the original dramatists borrowed and reconfigured in creating their new ones be seen as "primitive" drama or failed attempts to make theatre. Epic and lyric poetry were simply different genres of literature playing to a different age, perfectly mature and viable forms of artistic expression for their day [...] Finally, a punk eek approach to the question of the early evolution of drama explains one more troublesome feature of the historical record, the prominence of dithyramb. Tragedy's rise was not inevitable [...] rather, it is a unique phenomenon, unlikely to have happened outside of Athens in the 500s BCE or without the agency of visionary men with tremendous sensitivity to the tastes and sensibilities of their day... If Aeschylus, for instance, had decided to become a dithyrambist instead of a tragedian—that is, if instead he had seen in dithyramb the potential for artistic expression that he saw and realized in tragedy—we could very well be talking about the triumph of dithyramb and asking ourselves what this "goat-song" genre was for which there is all but no evidence and, according to Aristotle, was the forerunner of the crowning achievement of Greek art in the Classical Age, the magnificent dithyramb."