The Long-Term Evolution of Social Organization

In the first chapter of this book, David Lane et al. point out that the Darwinian approach to biological evolution is insufficient for the description and explanation of the cultural and social transmission of many, if not most, of society’s characteristics. Instead, the chapter proposes that we shift from ‘population thinking’ to ‘organization thinking’ to understand socio-cultural phenomena. In essence, such thinking focuses on the role of information in shaping institutions and societies. In the second chapter, Dwight Read et al. outline a crucial stage in the evolution of human societies, which they call ‘The Innovation Innovation’. It concerns the beginnings of information processing by (small-scale) societies about societies. They outline, in a few steps, how human beings may have developed a conceptual apparatus to describe and to manage their own bio–social (kinship) relations. The main innovation in this story is the capacity to abstract from substantive observations of such relationships to concepts that encapsulate the underlying structure of these relationships. The current chapter continues the story, outlining how the innovation innovation transformed the world of our distant ancestors into that in which we live today. It focuses on the relationship between people and the material world, as it is the material world that has been most drastically, and measurably, transformed over the last several tens of thousands of years. In view of what we know about such distant periods, and in view of the space allotted to us here, it will not surprise the reader that we do so in the form of a narrative that is only partly underpinned by substantive data.1 We emphasize this because we do not want to hide from the reader