Evolutionary Theory Revisited: A Non-genetic Darwinian Approach to Comparative Historical Analysis

• In Event: Methodological Issues in Comparative Historical Analysis

Abstract

More than a century and a half after Darwin published The Origin of Species, we still lack any consensual understanding of just how human social order emerged out of biological evolutionary processes. From Darwin’s day to the present, scholars have been polarized between two competing approaches to this question. The first camp depicts social change as a “Lamarckian” directed process of collective cultural learning. A second camp has insisted that individual genetic endowments are the principal factor explaining human social behavior. Departing from these rival social Lamarckian and genetic reductionist viewpoints, I argue that there is a hitherto unrecognized Darwinian selection mechanism operating in human social evolution itself. The primary driver of human evolution, I argue, is the emergence of what Max Weber termed “social closure”—that is, ways of defining the membership and boundaries of one’s group that are proposed by individuals and then (probabilistically) accepted by others.

Author

• Stephen E. Hanson, College of William and Mary