Darwinism and the Behavioral Theory of Sociocultural Evolution: An Analysis

This paper challenges the widely held view that the social sciences are theoretically impoverished disciplines which have failed to develop anything comparable to the paradigms used in the natural sciences. More precisely, the aim is to demonstrate that the synthesis of an abstract, Darwinian model of systematic adaptation and the bahavioral principles of social learning produces a theory of sociocultural evolution having the logical structure and explanatory power of the theory of natural selection presented in On the Origin of Species.