The social sciences share a mission to shed light on human nature and
society. However, there is no widely accepted meta-theory; no foundation
from which variables can be linked, causally sequenced, or ultimately
explained. This book advances "life history evolution" as the missing
meta-theory for the social sciences. Originally a biological theory for
the variation between species, research on life history evolution now
encompasses psychological and sociological variation within the human
species that has long been the stock and trade of social scientific
study. The eighteen chapters of this book review six disciplines,
eighteen authors, and eighty-two volumes published between 1734 and
2015-re-reading the texts in the light of life history evolution.