On Current Theories of the Evolution of Social Behavior and Social Systems: Evolution in Terms of Genetic-Systems Theory

We now come to the crucial topic of this book: biological evolution and its relationship to social organization. Evolution is an historical subject and consequently poses all the problems and difficulties that face historians, with the additional one that there are no written records of biological history. The closest approximations are fossil remains, what the older naturalists called the record of the rocks. Even that is largely missing with respect to social behavior and organization, which have left very few traces in the sediments of geological strata.