Generalizing Darwinism to Social Evolution: Some Early Attempts

Richard Dawkins coined the term universal Darwinism (1983). It suggests that the core Darwinian principles of variation, replication, and selection may apply not only to biological phenomena but also to other open and evolving systems, including human cultural or social evolution. Dawkins argued that if life existed elsewhere in the universe, it would follow the Darwinian rules of variation, inheritance, and selection. He had earlier proposed the “meme” as the unit of cultural replication and selection (1976). This idea that Darwinism may have a broad applicability to other open and evolving systems has been developed in different ways by several contemporary authors, including Richard Lewontin (1970), Henry Plotkin (1994), Daniel Dennett (1995), and David Hull (1988, Hull et al. 2001). However, the idea that Darwinian principles apply to aspects of human and social evolution is much older and dates back to the time of Charles Darwin. Darwin himself speculated that his evolutionary principles of variation, inheritance, and selection might apply to the evolution of human language, as well as to moral principles and social groups (1859, 1871). A sequence of other authors followed suit but did not resolve the conceptual problems in defining what exactly we mean by social evolution, as something more than the evolution of a mere collection of human beings. Accordingly, we have to ask what units of social replication or selection are proposed in these accounts. And in what sense might they amount to more than merely an aggregation of individuals? These questions point to matters of social theory that are relatively neglected even in modern versions of universal Darwinism. One of the conclusions of