Evolution and social theory : the problem of culture (original) (raw)

AI-generated Abstract

The primary aim of this thesis is to establish that the central tenets of conventional social theory cannot be sustained in the light of modern evolutionary biological theory (the theory of inclusive fitness). In particular, it is argued that the central social scientific assumption of a radical separation between biology and culture raises insuperable problems for the formulation of the motivation of action, when the logical consequences of modern Darwinian biology are fully considered. At the same time, however, it is argued that recent attempts to apply evolutionary theory to the direct analysis of human social behaviour have been fundamentally unsuccessful, theoretically, but above all, empirically. The central problem which the thesis formulates, therefore, is of how to conceptualize human action as motivated in accordance with the expectations of evolutionary biology, whilst recognizing that such action does not necessarily conform either in its immediate subjectivity, or in its objective distal consequences, to the predicted patterns of inclusive fitness theory.

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