Volume 18, Issue 3, Septiembre 2003
Peter T. Saunders
Pages 259-272
Bricks Without Straw
Darwinism in the Social Sciences
The so-called evolutionary social scienccs are based on the belief that Darwinism can explain the living world and that it therefore should be able to explain other complex systems such as minds and societies. In fact, Darwinism cannot explain biological evolution. It does make an important contribution, but this is towards understanding adaptation, which is a major problem in biology but not in the social sciences. Darwinism has much less to offer to the social sciences than to biology and the shortcomings it brings with it are much greater.