The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection

A succinct and highly imaginative contribution to one of the great intellectual debates of our times.

W. G. Runciman (Author)

9780521136143, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 5 November 2009

266 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.44 kg

'Runciman's puzzle is how to bring together different levels of change and differentiation in human existence - from the biological to the social - under a single analytic framework, one that rests firmly on a Darwinian logic of selection. … Runciman … deal[s] ultimately with human freedom or lack of it. Our choices in life are constrained, on the one hand by the physical facts of our place in the natural world given our universal evolutionary heritage, and on the other hand by locally varying institutional facts that determine how our behaviour will be interpreted and judged by those around us. Fires and billboards made from dollar bills put the distinctions suggested by Runciman … into sharp relief by exploiting physical properties of artefacts while rejecting their institutional properties. ' The Times Literary Supplement

In The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection, W. G. Runciman presents an original and wide-ranging account of the fundamental process by which human cultures and societies come to be of the different kinds that they are. Drawing on and extending recent advances in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Runciman argues that collective human behaviour should be analyzed as the acting-out of information transmitted at the three separate but interacting levels of heritable variation and competitive selection - the biological, the cultural, and the social. The implications which this carries for a reformulation of the traditional agenda of comparative and historical sociology are explored with the help of selected examples, and located within the context of current debates about sociological theory and practice. The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection is a succinct and highly imaginative contribution to one of the great intellectual debates of our times, from one of the world's leading social theorists.

Preface
Prologue. The Darwinian legacy
1. The neo-Darwinian paradigm
2. Natural selection and evoked behaviour
3. Cultural selection and acquired behaviour
4. Social selection and imposed behaviour
5. Selectionist theory as narrative history
Epilogue. Sociology in a post-Darwinian world.

Subject Areas: Evolution [PSAJ], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC], Anthropology [JHM], Social theory [JHBA]