Darwinian Sociocultural Evolution
Solutions to Dilemmas in Cultural and Social Theory

Addresses today's major dilemmas in social scientific theory from the modern Darwinian sociocultural evolutionary approach.

Marion Blute (Author)

9780521745956, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 14 January 2010

250 pages, 5 b/w illus. 5 tables
22.8 x 15 x 1.2 cm, 0.41 kg

Social scientists can learn a lot from evolutionary biology - from systematics and principles of evolutionary ecology to theories of social interaction including competition, conflict and cooperation, as well as niche construction, complexity, eco-evo-devo, and the role of the individual in evolutionary processes. Darwinian sociocultural evolutionary theory applies the logic of Darwinism to social-learning based cultural and social change. With a multidisciplinary approach for graduate biologists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, social psychologists, archaeologists, linguists, economists, political scientists and science and technology specialists, the author presents this model of evolution drawing on a number of sophisticated aspects of biological evolutionary theory. The approach brings together a broad and inclusive theoretical framework for understanding the social sciences which addresses many of the dilemmas at their forefront - the relationship between history and necessity, conflict and cooperation, the ideal and the material and the problems of agency, subjectivity and the nature of social structure.

1. Introduction
2. History: where did something come from?
3. Necessity: why did it evolve?
4. Competition, conflict and cooperation: why and how do they interact socially?
5. The ideal and the material: the role of memes in evolutionary social science
6. Micro and macro I: the problem of agency
7. Micro and macro II: the problem of subjectivity
8. Micro and macro III: the evolution of complexity and the problem of social structure
9. Evolutionism: the old, the new and the future of the social sciences.

Subject Areas: Evolution [PSAJ], Biology, life sciences [PS], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]