Abstract

Social evolutionary theories have been roundly discredited since their original racist and sexist formulations during the nineteenth century. Given recent advances in evolutionary biology and anthropology, is it now possible to reconstruct alternative paradigms of social evolution in scientifically defensible terms? This chapter proposes a novel framework involving four analytically distinct but empirically nested levels (and logics) of evolution. Above the biological level, with its logic of natural selection, it follows recent scholarship on the cultural level (with a non-reductive logic of cultural selection). But then it adds two further non-reductive and emergent levels: a political level, grounded in a ‘logic of domination’, followed by an economic level, driven by a ‘logic of capitalist competition’ to track human evolutionary history up to the present day. The chapter considers the implications of this model for the process of human niche construction. It interrogates the respective roles of (quasi-Darwinian) selection between units and internal transformation within units as operative evolutionary mechanisms. It explores the role of agency in the evolution of human societies, and how this relates to the more systemic selectional and variational processes. It concludes with an assessment of the intellectual benefits that such retrodictive accounts of longue durée evolutionary history might bring to the social sciences.