On the Origin of Societies by Natural Selection

Jonathan H. Turner, Alexandra Maryanski

"No one is better than Turner and Maryanski at interpreting the evolutionary pathways from primates to humans and showing the long-term consequences of human origins for subsequent societies. The story integrates social network patterns, brain physiology, and humans’ uniquely broad palette of emotions; the result is the ability of humans to create strong ties among members of large and flexible groups, via emotion laden symbolism. What evolves is not just brain size, intelligence, or tool use, but a quasi-language of emotions which are read by others and which also reflexively organize the human self. The types of human societies over past thousands of years have been pulled between selective pressures of environment, institutional requirements, and ever-present human nature hard-wired during the divergence of humans from common ancestry with the apes. The openness of post-industrial market democracies, Turner and Maryanski argue, allow greater weight to the individualistic, mobility-prone, and community-choosing propensities of evolved human nature. This is evolutionary social science at its most sophisticated." —Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania “This provocative volume provides much food for thought.” —CHOICE "This is a valuable book, clearly written, that deserves to be read by practicing sociologists and also would be eminently suitable for graduate classes in social theory or social change.” —American Journal of Sociology

• 1: A Brief History of Primate Time on Earth; 2: The Weakness of Weak Ties; 3: Societal Protoplasm; 4: The Strength of Strong Ties; 5: The Emergence of Culture; 6: The Emergence of Human Society; 7: The Rise of Horticulture; 8: Agrarian Societies; 9: The Rise of Industrial and Post-Industrial Societies; 10: Strangers in a Strange Land