Category=JH
Category=JMAL
Category=PSAJ
comparative study of human societies
cross-cultural analysis
cultural anthropology
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
eq_society-politics
ethnographic comparison
kinship patterns
social stratification
structural functionalism
Product details
- ISBN 9782881243172
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 1989
- Publisher: Gordon & Breach Science Publishers SA
- Publication City/Country: NL
- Product Form: Hardback
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In 'The Evolution of Social Systems' J.P. Scott for the first time combines genetic theories of evolution, system theory and theories of behavioural evolution to explain the evolution of social behaviour and organisation. He proposes that caregiving has evolved from self care, to care of fertilised eggs, to developing embryos, to hatchlings. Care may then be extended to adult offspring, collateral relatives and to unrelated others. Humans, Scott shows, ae unique in the degree to which caregiving behaviour is extendable to nonrelated humans, other animals as pets, and even to plants. He concludes that social organisation is based on caregiving as well as processes such as unconscious physiological cooperation, site attachment, sexual behaviour, defensive behaviour, competition and conflict. Competition is thus not the sole mode of evolution. This view challenges some of the conventional sociobiological theories of the evolution of altruism. The book's broad interdisciplinary scope and social relevance has significant import for the general reader as well as for researchers and students in evolution, animal behaviour, ecology, psychobiology, and the human sciences of anthropology, political science and sociology.
John Paul Scott received a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Chicago under Sewall Wright and devoted his subsequent career to the study of heredity and the development of social behaviour. For twenty years he directed the research program on genetics and social behaviour at the Jackson laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Afterwards he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioural Sciences at Stanford and is currently Regents Professor of Psychology Emeritus at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Scott was instrumental in the founding of the Animal Behavior Society and was a co-founders and first president of the International Society for Research on Aggression. He served as president of the International Society for Development Psychobiology and as president of the Behaviour Genetics Association from which he received the 1987 Dobzhansky Award for Eminent Research. Scott has written or edited nine previous books, including Animal Behavior, Aggression, Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog (with J.L. Fuller), and Critical Periods.
