The best parts of Sanderson's book are the early sections, where he reviews and critiques the major existing paradigms of sociology, including functionalism, Marxism, and sociobiology.

CHOICE

Stephen Sanderson's The Evolution of Human Sociality provides a serious and wide-ranging treatise on sociobiology, its relationship to other styles of social explanation, and its pertinence to various domains of social life. Sanderson has given us a highly commendable work, and one that would surely benefit our discipline if its contentions were widely read and seriously engaged.

Contemporary Sociology

Stephen Sanderson's most recent book provides a powerful corrective to the current fragmented state of sociological theorizing. Sanderson's principal aim is to construct a viable theoretical foundation for sociology. He attempts a synthesis of ideas drawn primarily from conflict, exchange, cultural materialist, and sociobiologial theoretical premises. He then employs these tools to assess several topics that are of continuing interest to sociologists—the nature of human sexuality, gender relations and the family; the evolution of systems of economic behavior; the nature and transformation of dominance orders in human societies; and the nature of the politics of war. But the value of his contribution is found in the variety of topics and the scope of empirical evidence that he is able to handle successfully by reference to his synthesized theoretical principles.

- Timothy Crippen, Mary Washington University,

This ambitious book is chock full of telling criticisms and worthy efforts at interdisciplinary synthesis. I hope that sociologists read it and take it seriously, and any evolutionist who is willing to push on despite finding nits to pick will get a lot out of it, too.

Quarterly Review Of Biology