ABSTRACT
Evolutionary analysis in sociology is as old as it is in biology, emerging decades before Darwin’s great work on selection as the key mechanism of speciation. When the unit of evolution possesses the capacity for thought, goal directness, decision-making, and hence agency, the nature of evolution changes beyond that conceptualized by Darwin and later by the Modern Synthesis. Human agents and the corporate units organizing their activities evolve, to be sure, but the nature of the evolution differs from that in biology, as do the selection dynamics driving this evolution. Evolution become more purposive and is not long blind; the units evolving shift from populations of phenotypes and underlying genotypes to sociocultural morphologies only loosely regulated by culture. These facts suggest limits on how far sociobiology and evolutionary psychology can go in explaining the complexity of evolving sociocultural formations, requiring new models of evolutionary dynamics that are somewhat different than those explaining biological evolution.
