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This paper applies methodological relationalism, leaning on a pragmatist theory of action of classical Deweyan origin, supplemented among other things with Alva Noë's enactivism, to analyze the development of communication technologies as a part of human cultural evolution. Tool‐use and technologies are understood as skillful human activities that form hubs of organized activity in developed human communities. Appreciating the quite slow pace of evolution, the article adopts, all told, a two million year time frame. Six epochs of cultural evolution are distinguished, linked to the introduction of communication tools and technologies as skillful human activities that serve the members of growing communities in the ecological niche at hand. The first two epochs arose from forms of communication serving local, small‐sized hunter‐gatherer bands; the second couple arose with technologies apt for building nation‐wide communities and culture; and the latest two have been propelled by global communication networks, having an impact on billions of people. Finally, certain peculiarities of the presently unfolding World Wide Web epoch, connected in particular to this era's exceptionally efficient behavior modification, are compared with earlier epochs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars increasingly deny that they are strictly biological. Instead, these scholars argue that they are socially constructed. One challenge is to square the notion of social kinds with the apparent perception of those categories. I argue that we do not perceive social categories such as race. Instead, racial categories are visually encoded based on visible markers that are proxies for social kinds. Thus, I argue that the assumption of seeing social categories commits us to a flawed theory of visual essentialism: the idea that some social kinds are visible properties that are biologically determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological, economic and evolutionary paradigms of human agency have often seen social agents either as the rational controllers of their fate or as marionettes on the strings of historical, functional or adaptive necessity. They found it therefore difficult to account for the variability, intentionality and creativity of human behaviour and for its frequently redundant or harmful results. This paper argues that human agency is a product of evolution, but that genetic variation and inheritance can only provide a limited explanation of its complex nature. The primary evolutionary problem which human agents face while they are alive is not to adapt to stable environments, but to respond flexibly and creatively to a contingent, uncertain world. Variation and selection therefore take two connected but distinct forms, one external, genetic, and inherited across generations, the other internal and cognitive, and operating during the lifetime of individuals. An examination of this lived part of evolution provides a better understanding of key properties of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What can sociology learn about the logic of social behaviour from the field of cultural evolution? How can sociology enrich cultural evolutionary theory? In this article, I present and examine cultural evolutionary theory by specifying its various proposed mechanisms, such as cultural drift, biased transmission and cultural selection (including cultural group selection), and by investigating concrete examples of social phenomena to which the theory has been applied. My findings are three‐fold. First, cultural evolutionary mechanisms should not be dismissed by sociologists but instead, given their strong explanatory power in certain cases, incorporated into their basic theoretical toolkit. Second, one mechanism, i.e. cultural selection, can even underpin a more nuanced and micro‐founded sociological functionalism that avoids some of the errors of structural functionalism. This, however, should not be celebrated too soon as the applicability of cultural selection is more limited than cultural evolutionists acknowledge. Third, drawing on historical sociology and comparative politics I also uncover further important sociological limitations of the cultural evolutionary approach that should be heeded by the latter. I focus on two: (1) its inapplicability to cases of intentional decision‐making and strategizing, and (2) its inability to subsume the phenomenon of social power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]