The Return of Science: Evolution, History, and Theory

In this collection of essays, historians discuss the applications of evolutionary theory to cultural, social, economic and political phenomena. William H. McNeill presents a magisterial statement about the convergence of the sciences toward an evolutionary worldview. Several contributors offer support for this thesis. Anthropologist Donald Brown and archaeologist Albert Naccache bring together the realms of biology and culture in examinations of evolved human features and modes of evolution. Demographer Noel Bonneuil and neuroscientist Alonso Pena apply mathematics to historical evolutionary processes such as the decision-making of human agents and cultural diffusion. The collection also contains the warnings of biologist Richard Lewontin and his co-author, philosopher Joseph Fracchia. They and historian David Gary Shaw review the misuses of evolutionary theory and the dangers that still attend its applications to history. Stephen Berry, another biologist, and historian Bruce Mazlish probe the limits of the notion of history as evolution. Historians Martin Stuart-Fox, Philip Pomper and Doyne Dawson address the vexing problem of defining the units of historical evolution and applying them in historical study.