Mateo Peñaherrera-Aguirre

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

This book on presidential age is not about Alzheimer's Disease and associated pathologies of the aging brain. It is instead about the normally aging brain. Brains don’t simply develop and maintain their functionality into older adulthood unless otherwise impaired by neurocognitive disease. Were this the case, this book might be about leveraging prodromal biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases to screen prospective presidential candidates. Instead, the normal decline age brings to all human brains begs a different type of book—and a broader and more blanketed warning about electing increasingly older presidents.

This book applies multilevel selection theory to an examination of both the natural history of ideology, and how that natural history has unfolded through the course of civil history in the Western world. Its authors bring together research from across the fields of history, political science, genetics, neurobiology and social science to offer an unprecedented synthesis. Addressing natural history, Part I evolutionarily explains why political ideology is substantially genetic, correlates with personality traits, and is represented in brain regions associated with risk and emotional processing. Addressing civil history, Part II traces the evolution of political ideology across anthropological transitions from non-human primates to small-scale societies, and across historical transitions from autocratic states through to democratic societies with political parties peaceably transferring power and tolerating opposition. In this way, its authors aim to demonstrate that temperamental antecedents to political ideology that are biologically derived, evolutionarily explicable, and historically palpable. This book presents timely insights into issues the evolutionary history of hyper-partisanship that will be of interest to scholars across the fields of political science, political psychology, evolutionary psychology and history.

This book on presidential age is not about Alzheimer's Disease and associated pathologies of the aging brain. It is instead about the normally aging brain. Brains don’t simply develop and maintain their functionality into older adulthood unless otherwise impaired by neurocognitive disease. Were this the case, this book might be about leveraging prodromal biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases to screen prospective presidential candidates. Instead, the normal decline age brings to all human brains begs a different type of book—and a broader and more blanketed warning about electing increasingly older presidents.

This book embeds a novel evolutionary analysis of human group selection within a comprehensive overview of multilevel selection theory, a theory wherein evolution proceeds at the level of individual organisms and collectives, such as human families, tribes, states, and empires. Where previous works on the topic have variously supported multilevel selection with logic, theory, experimental data, or via review of the zoological literature; in this book the authors uniquely establish the validity of human group selection as a historical evolutionary process within a multilevel selection framework. Select portions of the historical record are examined from a multilevel selectionist perspective, such that clashing civilizations, decline and fall, law, custom, war, genocide, ostracism, banishment, and the like are viewed with the end of understanding their implications for internal cohesion, external defense, and population demography. In doing so, its authors advance the potential for further interdisciplinary study in fostering, for instance, the convergence of history and biology. This work will provide fresh insights not only for evolutionists but also for researchers working across the social sciences and humanities.

This book embeds a novel evolutionary analysis of human group selection within a comprehensive overview of multilevel selection theory, a theory wherein evolution proceeds at the level of individual organisms and collectives, such as human families, tribes, states, and empires. Where previous works on the topic have variously supported multilevel selection with logic, theory, experimental data, or via review of the zoological literature; in this book the authors uniquely establish the validity of human group selection as a historical evolutionary process within a multilevel selection framework. Select portions of the historical record are examined from a multilevel selectionist perspective, such that clashing civilizations, decline and fall, law, custom, war, genocide, ostracism, banishment, and the like are viewed with the end of understanding their implications for internal cohesion, external defense, and population demography. In doing so, its authors advance the potential for further interdisciplinary study in fostering, for instance, the convergence of history and biology. This work will provide fresh insights not only for evolutionists but also for researchers working across the social sciences and humanities.

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