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.

Uses a novel approach wherein the works of leading and founding geographers, demographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists are re-read using life history evolution

1. Life History Theory:  An Overview in AbstractPart I: Huntington, Crosby, and Baker2. Ellsworth Huntington's Victorian Climatic Writings3. Alfred W. Crosby: Adapting within a Matrix of Flora and Fauna4. The Historical Geography of Alan R. H. Baker: Scratching Out a Living after the Neolithic RevolutionPart II: Price, Malthus, and Landers5. Richard Price: The Schedules of Mortality6. Thomas Robert Malthus, Stratification, and Subjugation: Closing the Commons and Opening the Factory7. Famine, Pestilence, War, and Death: John Maxwell Landers' Four Horseman Spurring Humans Faster Along the Life History ContinuumPart III: Toynbee, McNeill, and Casey8. Arnold Joseph Toynbee: The Role of Life History in Civilization Cycling9. William H. McNeill: Epidemiological and Biogeographical Perspectives on Civilization10. James Casey: Extrapolating from Early Modern IberiaPart IV: Murdock, Keeley, and Harris11. George Peter Murdock: Stemming the Tide of Sterility with an Atlas of World Cultures12. Lawrence H. Keeley: Pre-State Societies in the Hobbesian Trap 13. Marvin Harris: Ecological Anthropology and Cultural MaterialismPart V: Montesquieu, Mann, and Goldthorpe14. The Baron de Montesquieu: Towards a Geography of Political Culture15. Michael Mann and Societal Aggregation: From Tribe, to Fief, to City-State, to Nation, to Empire16. John Harry Goldthorpe: Weighing the Biological Ballast Informing Class Structure and Class MobilityPart VI: Cattell, Bowlby, and Bronfenbrenner17. Raymond B. Cattell: Bequeathing a Dual Inheritance to Life History Theory18. Edward John Mostyn Bowlby: Reframing Parental Investment and Offspring Attachment19. Uri Bronfenbrenner: Towards an Evolutionary Ecological Systems Theory