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Sociobiology investigates social behaviors such as mating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, and the hive society of social insects. It argues that just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment , so also it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior.
Many anthropologists and social theorists now consider unilineal cultural and social evolution a Western myth seldom based on solid empirical grounds. Critical theorists argue that notions of social evolution are simply justifications for power by the élites of society. Finally, the devastating World Wars that occurred between 1914 and 1945 ...
Cultural evolution is an evolutionary theory of social change.It follows from the definition of culture as "information capable of affecting individuals' behavior that they acquire from other members of their species through teaching, imitation and other forms of social transmission". [1]
Human ethology is the study of human behavior. Ethology as a discipline is generally thought of as a sub-category of biology, though psychological theories have been developed based on ethological ideas (e.g. sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, attachment theory, and theories about human universals such as gender differences, incest avoidance, mourning, hierarchy and pursuit of possession).
Unilineal evolution, also referred to as classical social evolution, is a 19th-century social theory about the evolution of societies and cultures. It was composed of many competing theories by various anthropologists and sociologists , who believed that Western culture is the contemporary pinnacle of social evolution.
The theory of evolution by natural selection has also been adopted as a foundation for various ethical and social systems, such as social Darwinism, an idea that preceded the publication of The Origin of Species, popular in the 19th century, which holds that "the survival of the fittest" (a phrase coined in 1851 by Herbert Spencer, [1] 8 years before Darwin published his theory of evolution ...
Social evolution may refer to: Social change; Sociocultural evolution, the change of cultures and societies over time; Sociobiology, explaining social behavior in terms of evolution; Cultural evolution, an evolutionary theory of social change; Evolution of eusociality, the evolution of highly cooperative behaviors in animal species
The social brain (or Machiavellian) hypothesis posits that the emergence of a complex social environment (e.g., larger group sizes) served as a key selection pressure in the evolution of human intelligence. [29]