Life History Evolution

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 2015re-reading the texts in the light of life history evolution.

Uses a novel approach wherein the works of leading and founding geographers, demographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists are re-read using life history evolution Highlights the untold unity among the social sciences, showing that the various disciplines which fall under the term are connected by more than just an interest in human nature Proposes that life history evolution is an integral element throughout the social sciences

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

1. Life History Theory: An Overview in the Abstract.- 2. Ellsworth Huntington's Victorian Climatic Writings.- 3. Adapting within a Matrix of Flora and Fauna.- 4. Scratching Out a Living after the Neolithic Revolution.- 5. The Schedules of Mortality.- 6. Closing the Commons and Opening the Factory.- 7. John Maxwell Landers' Four Horseman Spurring Humans Faster Along the Life History Continuum.- 8. The Role of Life History in Civilization Cycling.- 9. Epidemiological and Biogeographical Perspectives on Civilization.- 10. Extrapolating from Early Modern Iberia.- 11. Stemming the Tide of Sterility with an Atlas of World Cultures.- 12. Pre-State Societies in the Hobbesian Trap.- 13. Ecological Anthropology and Cultural Materialism.- 14. Towards a Geography of Political Culture.- 15. From Tribe, to Fief, to City-State, to Nation, to Empire.- 16. Weighing the Biological Ballast Informing Class Structure and Class Mobility.- 17. Bequeathing a Dual Inheritance to Life History Theory.- 18.Reframing Parental Investment and Offspring Attachment.- 19. Towards an Evolutionary Ecological Systems Theory.