I appreciate Ron Deibert's seconding what I had to say about social evolution.
However, let's be careful. "Descent with modification" is certainly an
appropriate way to think about many aspects of social evolution. Yet not many
social scientists that I know of try to link social evolution to biological
usages of the concept. Those who do think of social evolution in
bioevolutionary terms tend to be biologists, evolutionary ecologists, or
something like that. A good example would be Boyd and Richerson. In my
opinion, their ideas are of limited use. As I try to show in Chapter 8 of my
Social Evolutionism, social evolutionists have their own agenda and need not
try to copy bioevolutionary theory. I had a running e-mail debate with
Richerson a couple of years ago and we didn't agree on much.
Stephen Sanderson