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Accepted manuscript

Major Transitions in Sociocultural Evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2025

Arsham Nejad Kourki*
Affiliation:
Theoretical Biology Lab, The Francis Crick Institute, 1 Midland Rd, London, United Kingdom, NW1 1AT Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Ln, Cambridge, United Kingdom, CB2 3RH
*
Corresponding author: Arsham Nejad Kourki, Email: arsham.nejadkourki@crick.ac.uk

Abstract

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Recent years have seen growing interest in applying the Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality (ETI) framework to human sociocultural evolution. Proponents argue that human societies exhibit features—such as multilevel organisation, cooperation, and division of labour—sufficiently analogous to biological ETIs to warrant theoretical extension. This paper critically assesses such claims and argues that they rest on a fundamental misapplication of the ETI framework. Drawing on recent work in cultural evolution, I show that sociocultural systems typically lack the core conditions required for an ETI, including autonomous reproduction at the group level and the operation of natural selection in the reproductive mode. Attempts to relax these criteria risk undermining the coherence of the framework itself. I conclude that while the broader MET framework may still have value for understanding sociocultural change, the specific explanatory structure of ETI theory does not transfer.

Information

Type
Perspective
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press.