ABSTRACT
Evolutionary analysis has been part of sociology from its very beginnings; and indeed, the discipline has as long a provenance with evolutionary analysis as does biology. Yet, at the end of sociology’s first hundred years after Auguste Comte gave the discipline its name, evolutionary analysis was virtually abandoned for several decades until the mid-1960s. The early stage models of societal evolution were ethnocentric, viewing western European society as the pinnacle of societal development and pre-literate societies as “primitive” by comparison, even as they inspired much sociological thinking about the evolution of societal formations. The rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s insights about the genetic basis of evolution, coupled with the eugenics movement and notions of selective breeding, killed off the sociological analysis of evolution by 1925. The result has been a very suspicious, if not hostile, reaction by many sociologists to efforts by some to bring biology and evolutionary analysis back into the discipline and, in particular, any view that biology has effects on human behavior and the organization of sociocultural formations. The rise of sociobiology in biology and the early proclamations that a science of society can be subsumed as a subfield into biology in a “new synthesis” certainly did not help efforts to bring evolutionary analysis back into sociology. Indeed, it fueled long-standing fears stemming from sociology’s collective insecurities about reducing sociology to another discipline—whether biology, psychology, or economics.
