Highlights
• Proposes A New Framework for Framing Evolutionary Approaches to Complex, Asymmetrically Structured Societies.
• Draws on Gene/Culture ‘Dual Inheritance Co-evolutionary Theories from Evolutionary Anthropology.
• Extends This Bi-Level Theory to Incorporate a Third Level, Encompassing Polities Divided by Class and Ruled by Elites.
• Further Extends This Tri-Level Theory to Incorporate a Fourth Level Encompassing Modern, Economically Expansive Capitalist Societies.
Abstract: Evolutionary anthropologists have been remarkably successful in developing ‘dual inheritance’ theories of gene/culture coevolution that analyze the interaction of each of these factors without reducing either one to the other’s terms. However, efforts to extend this type of analysis to encompass complex, class-divided hierarchical societies, grounded in formal laws, political institutions, and trajectories of sustained economic development have scarcely begun. This article proposes a provisional framework for advancing such a multi-level co-evolutionary analysis that can encompass multiple forms of social organization from simple hunting/foraging groups to agrarian states and empires, up through the global capitalist system of our own day. The article formulates tools to conceptualize some of the ways in which ‘selection’ and ‘adaptation’ operate at every level to bring genes, cultures, states, and market exchange into provisional alignment with one another. It considers some of the ways in which modes of production’, ‘modes of coercion’ and ‘modes of persuasion’ interact complexly, at different societal levels.
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How far can human nature, history, and society be explained in evolutionary terms? The question has long been controversial and has generated some of the most heated debates in the history of the social sciences. During the nineteenth century, many grandiose, sweeping claims were made in the affirmative, only to see the influence of such views decline in subsequent decades. Criticized for the racist, sexist, and elitist assumptions in which they were grounded, such evolutionary theorizing was further undermined by the modern synthesis in twentieth century biology, which focused on the role of genetics in shaping physical characteristics, implicitly leaving the study of human social behavior, social development, and organization to the non-evolutionary social sciences. During the 1960s and 70s, the rise of sociobiology threatened to up-end this consensus by proposing genetic explanations for behavior, but the biological reductionism of its leading promoters was vigorously resisted, and the traditional division of labor between the sciences of nature and of nurture continued to prevail. In evolutionary psychology and in human behavioral ecology, Darwinian processes are widely invoked, but in the remainder of the social sciences little attention to them is paid (Kevles, 1985; Degler, 1991; Segerstråle, 2000).
A major exception to this generalization can be found among a group of self-styled evolutionary anthropologists, who have devised a hybrid paradigm for bio-social theory that promises a completely novel way of restoring the evolutionary approach to human affairs. Eschewing any unilateral recourse to biological determinism, these evolutionary anthropologists have focused on the ways in which culture and biology interact. While certainly recognizing that human behavior is rooted in our heredity, they are concerned to understand how culture has co-evolved with our innate psychology, and how the two have mutually constructed one another in a manner that is unique among life forms. As they have pioneered this new approach to the nature/nurture conundrum, the evolutionary anthropologists have givenus the opportunity to break through a major impasse that has habitually tripped social scientists up. When we begin to apply their methods to the study of complex, asymmetrically structured societies, however, (such as those in which most humans through recorded history have lived) certain key modifications will need to be made. In this paper, I briefly outline these modifications and explore some of the ways in which they may be able to fortify the foundations on which a comprehensive evolutionary social science could be built.
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Yet, none of these solutions proved to be permanent, as the conditions of competition and wealth creation changed. In the post-1975 period, full-scale globalization has unleashed forces that are now generating both massive economic growth, and also new types of destabilizing crisis. World trade and real Gross World Product have tripled during this period, approximately doubling real global per capita incomes during a periodwhen the rate of population increase has been slowing down. At the same time, these gains have been distributed very unevenly, as wages of less skilled workers in the developed countries have stagnated, pools of deep poverty and underdevelopment continue to fester (especially below the equator), and even in the richest countries, some 20% of the national income, and 35% of the national wealth,is monopolized by the top one percent. On every continent, irresistible surges of de-regulation and regressive taxation have jeopardized the viability of the welfare state, even as vast waves of migration have roiled labor markets everywhere around the globe. The result has been to exacerbate previous inequalities, and to disempower organized labor, pitting workers against one another, and fuelling the cultural politics of conflicting religions, ethnicities, and identities. Both dramatic economic growth and spectacular social dislocation have, overthe past generation, become the orders of the day (Piketty, 2014; Stiglitz, 2017; Data from Wikipedia entries on ‘World Population’, ‘Gross World Product’, and ‘Wealth Inequality in the United States’).
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