The social sciences share a mission to shed light on human nature and society. However, there is no widely accepted meta-theory; no foundation from which variables can be linked, causally sequenced, or ultimately explained. This book advances "life history evolution" as the missing meta-theory for the social sciences. Originally a biological theory for the variation between species, research on life history evolution now encompasses psychological and sociological variation within the human species that has long been the stock and trade of social scientific study. The eighteen chapters of this book review six disciplines, eighteen authors, and eighty-two volumes published between 1734 and 2015-re-reading the texts in the light of life history evolution.

Autorentext

Steven C. Hertler is a licensed examining psychologist and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the College of Saint Elizabeth, USA.

Aurelio José Figueredo is Professor of Psychology, Family Studies and Human Development, and serves as Director of the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory within the Graduate Program in Cognition and Neural Systems at the University of Arizona, USA.

Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre is a PhD student in the Cognitive and Neural Systems Program, and a researcher in the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory at the University of Arizona, USA.

Heitor B. F. Fernandes is a PhD student at the University of Arizona, USA, where he functions as part of the Anxiety Research Group, and the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Lab.

Michael A. Woodley of Menie is Fellow with the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.

Inhalt

Life History Theory: An Overview in Abstract
Part I: Huntington, Crosby, and Baker
Ellsworth Huntington's Victorian Climatic Writings3. Alfred W. Crosby: Adapting within a Matrix of Flora and Fauna4. The Historical Geography of Alan R. H. Baker: Scratching Out a Living after the Neolithic Revolution
Part II: Price, Malthus, and Landers
Richard Price: The Schedules of Mortality6. Thomas Robert Malthus, Stratification, and Subjugation: Closing the Commons and Opening the Factory7. Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death: John Maxwell Landers' Four Horseman Spurring Humans Faster Along the Life History Continuum
Part III: Toynbee, McNeill, and Casey
Arnold Joseph Toynbee: The Role of Life History in Civilization Cycling9. William H. McNeill: Epidemiological and Biogeographical Perspectives on Civilization10. James Casey: Extrapolating from Early Modern Iberia
Part IV: Murdock, Keeley, and Harris
George Peter Murdock: Stemming the Tide of Sterility with an Atlas of World Cultures12. Lawrence H. Keeley: Pre-State Societies in the Hobbesian Trap13. Marvin Harris: Ecological Anthropology and Cultural Materialism
Part V: Montesquieu, Mann, and Goldthorpe
The Baron de Montesquieu: Towards a Geography of Political Culture15. Michael Mann and Societal Aggregation: From Tribe, to Fief, to City-State, to Nation, to Empire16. John Harry Goldthorpe: Weighing the Biological Ballast Informing Class Structure and Class Mobility
Part VI: Cattell, Bowlby, and Bronfenbrenner
Raymond B. Cattell: Bequeathing a Dual Inheritance to Life History Theory18. Edward John Mostyn Bowlby: Reframing Parental Investment and Offspring Attachment19. Uri Bronfenbrenner: Towards an Evolutionary Ecological Systems Theory