ABSTRACT
So much for past paradigms, earlier ways of explaining social change. What about the latest candidate? What are the special advantages and drawbacks of explaining these changes by natural selection?
Clearly it has the great advantage of treating human life as part of nature, not as something mysteriously set apart from it. It celebrates our continuity with the world we spring from rather than trying nervously to disown it. That continuity is a central fact of life. Human dignity does not call on us to claim to have been blank paper at birth, pure cognitive beings shaped only by something called Society or Culture and able to change the rest of the world as we please. That muddled notion of human freedom is still powerful in the social sciences, even if slightly less so than it used to be, so the evolutionary model does us a great service by insisting that culture itself is part of nature. It must be seen as somehow continuing natural patterns.
