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Human society was compared to a biological organism, and social science equivalents of concepts like variation, natural selection, and inheritance were introduced as factors resulting in the progress of societies. The idea of progress led to that of a fixed "stages" through which human societies progress, usually numbering three – savagery ...
Social selection is a term used with varying meanings in biology. Joan Roughgarden proposed a hypothesis called social selection as an alternative to sexual selection. Social selection is argued to be a mode of natural selection based on reproductive transactions and a two-tiered approach to evolution and the development of social behavior. [1]
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 ...
Human beings, writes social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, are not genetically programmed to be members of this or that social order. You can take a human infant and place it into any kind of social order and it will function acceptably. What makes human society so distinctive is the fabulous range of quite different forms it takes across the ...
The cultural selection theory faces many objections due to the lack of evidence to support the adaptation of natural selection in the structural mechanisms of cultural systems. Major objections against the cultural selection theory stem from Lamarckianism , genotype-phenotype distinction , common hereditary architecture, biological analogue for ...
The Lamarckian social philosopher and evolutionist Herbert Spencer, ironically the author of the phrase "survival of the fittest" adopted by Darwin, [13] used an argument like Cuvier's to oppose natural selection. In 1893, he stated that a change in any one structure of the body would require all the other parts to adapt to fit in with the new ...
Research in the theory concludes that newborns are born into the world with a unique genetic wiring to be social. [140] Circumstantial evidence supporting the social pre-wiring hypothesis can be revealed when examining newborns' behavior. Newborns, not even hours after birth, have been found to display a preparedness for social interaction ...
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [40] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.