ABSTRACT
In this brief concluding chapter, I stress some of the underappreciated aspects of SEP’s power. First, evolutionary theorizing more effectively organizes and integrates a wider body of social facts (i.e., idea, behavior, and social outcome) than non-evolutionary theorizing. Second, evolutionary theorizing provides a more integrative, coherent, parsimonious, endogenous, and thus foundational explanation for a more diverse and often seemingly contradicting body of social facts than non-evolutionary theorizing. Third, evolutionary theorizing synthesizes many competing and often seemingly incompatible theoretical approaches, a feat that non-evolutionary theorizing is hard-pressed to achieve. As a result, evolutionary theorizing often transcends and even dissolves many prominent debates between different theoretical approaches in social sciences. Finally, evolutionary theorizing generates predictions about what has evolved out there in the biotic world or the social world (but is yet to be discovered) that cannot be generated by non-evolutionary theorizing. I then conclude with a passage that shamelessly paraphrases Darwin’s famed ending.
