ABSTRACT
The United States is in many ways the most differentiated and powerful of contemporary national societies, and there is, of course, a sense in which it is the product of an extended network of events leading backward into prehistory. This chapter reviews some of the commoner arguments about the idea of sociocultural evolution and asks whether, indeed, "major theoretical and empirical advances" have made the contemporary brand more useful than the product marketed by Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century. It suggests that evolutionary thinking has contributed little to those insights — indeed that it has, if anything, constricted them and inhibited their flowering. Intergenerational transmission involves different kinds of processes — biochemical in the one case, socio-cultural-psychological in the other — and is much more "determinate" in biology than in the sociocultural realm, where selection and adaptation are more Lamarckian than Darwinian.
