The Theory of Cultural and Social Selection

W. G. Runciman has been a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge since 1971 and of the British Academy, as whose President he served from 2001–2004, since 1975. He holds honorary degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh, London, Oxford and York. He is an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

• Preface; Prologue. The Darwinian legacy; 1. The neo-Darwinian paradigm; 2. Natural selection and evoked behaviour; 3. Cultural selection and acquired behaviour; 4. Social selection and imposed behaviour; 5. Selectionist theory as narrative history; Epilogue. Sociology in a post-Darwinian world.

'Runciman's puzzle is how to bring together different levels of change and differentiation in human existence - from the biological to the social - under a single analytic framework, one that rests firmly on a Darwinian logic of selection. … Runciman … deal[s] ultimately with human freedom or lack of it. Our choices in life are constrained, on the one hand by the physical facts of our place in the natural world given our universal evolutionary heritage, and on the other hand by locally varying institutional facts that determine how our behaviour will be interpreted and judged by those around us. Fires and billboards made from dollar bills put the distinctions suggested by Runciman … into sharp relief by exploiting physical properties of artefacts while rejecting their institutional properties. ' The Times Literary Supplement