Toward a sociology of evolution in the Anthropocene–Shared intentionality and cooperation through understanding minds

Abstract

Sociology has a long tradition of diagnosing contemporary societies, but little theoretical and empirical instruments for analyzing the long-term evolution of human coexistence. This goes hand in hand with a bias to disregard insights of evolutionary theory and research. The main argument here to develop is that a sociology of evolution should enter at the core of our discipline. This becomes even more important in the era of the Anthropocene as a new geo-chronological period of the planet's evolution that is characterized by substantial human influencing of planetary ecological mechanisms and could be found in earth sediments. If human intervention in the planet has reached such a scale that its future fate is no longer shaped mainly by natural cosmological laws, but by human intervention, then sociology has to broaden its temporal and substantive perspective; it should reflect more explicitly on the relationship between nature, culture, and technology. In what follows, we plead for giving evolutionary sociology, especially the long-term evolution of human coexistence between nature and culture, a greater place in sociology. To this end, we address three points. First, we ask why sociology is not concerned with the co-evolution of other creatures, but almost exclusively focused on the development and social change of humans over the short period of the last few centuries. Second, we argue that, with respect to the nature-culture relationship, sociology has essentially followed a questionable scientific division of labor, according to which the natural sciences deal with natural phenomena and sociology with sociocultural phenomena. Finally, we address the debate on the Anthropocene and distinguish between two ways of responding to the challenges it poses, namely with more technology or with more culture.