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The social effects of evolutionary thought have been considerable. As the scientific explanation of life's diversity has developed, it has often displaced alternative, sometimes very widely held, explanations. Because the theory of evolution includes an explanation of humanity's origins, it has had a profound impact on human societies.
Neo-evolutionism discards many ideas of classical social evolutionism, namely that of social progress, so dominant in previous sociology evolution-related theories. [68] Then neo-evolutionism discards the determinism argument and introduces probability, arguing that accidents and free will greatly affect the process of social evolution. [68]
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.
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] Cultural evolution is the change of this information ...
These self-amplifying effects, known as the economies of scale, give rise to selection effects which have a quantitative nature, unlike the qualitative effects described by the theory of memetics. On the whole, cultural selection theory embraces the inherent complexity of cultural change and vouches for a systemic, rather than deconstructionist ...
The idea of progress was at once a social, political and scientific theory. The theory of evolution, as described in Darwin's The Origin of Species, provided for many social theorists the necessary scientific foundation for the idea of social and political progress. The terms evolution and progress were often used interchangeably in the 19th ...
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]
Neoevolutionism as a social theory attempts to explain the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution while discarding some dogmas of the previous theories of social evolutionism.