ABSTRACT
In their 1978 paper outlining their critique on the culturally dominant Human Exceptionalist Paradigm (HEP), Catton and Dunlap pointed out that ‘most Americans (until recently) ardently believed that the present was better than the past and the future would improve up on the present’ (Catton & Dunlap 1978: 43) and argued that sociologists analyzing human societies easily followed this same technologically optimist worldview. Central to Catton and Dunlap’s critique was the commonly held assumption that human cultural evolution would outpace biological change, and cultural adaptivity and associated technological innovations would be able to continue progress without limit, ‘making all social problems ultimately soluble.’ A tantalizing proposition for sociologists, as this superiority of human innovation elevated humans above nature in a society where there are no known limits to improvements of technology and organization, the relationship between a growing population and its earthly habitat could be sustained.
