INTRODUCTION

Those who agree with the centrality of evolution to the social sciences do so with two quite different meanings in mind. One is the gene-based biological. The other, as has been emphasized here and by others (e.g. Van Parijs 1981; Hull 1988; Luhmann 1995; Hodgson 1999; Ziman 2000; Wheeler, Ziman and Boder 2002; Lenski 2005) is the social learning-based sociocultural. Beyond either lies the incredibly complex tangle of how the two affect and interact with one another as well as with the learning/choices of individuals. While some modest progress has been made – there remain more questions than answers.

THE BIOLOGICAL

The genus Homo goes back about two and a half million years. For long it was believed that the last remaining species in this genus apart from us, Homo sapiens, was Homo neanderthalensis which died out in Europe about 25,000 years ago. What would seem to be the greatest scientific discovery of the early years of this new century was that of the remains of some members of a third Homo species, Homo floresiensis, small and very small-brained but tool-using, which may have survived up to 12,000 years ago on the island of Flores in Indonesia (Brown et al. 2004). While there was some disagreement about its species status as opposed to humans afflicted with a disease, the weight of evidence currently seems to be in favour of the former (Falk et al. 2005; Jungers et al. 2009).