Life History Evolution : A Biological Meta Theory for the Social Sciences 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 1. Life History Theory: An Overview in the Abstract 2. Ellsworth Huntington’s Victorian Climatic Writings 3. Adapting within a Matrix of Flora and Fauna 4. Scratching Out a Living after the Neolithic Revolution 5. The Schedules of Mortality 6. Closing the Commons and Opening the Factory 7. John Maxwell Landers’ Four Horseman Spurring Humans Faster Along the Life History Continuum 8. The Role of Life History in Civilization Cycling 9. Epidemiological and Biogeographical Perspectives on Civilization 10. Extrapolating from Early Modern Iberia 11. Stemming the Tide of Sterility with an Atlas of World Cultures 12. Pre State Societies in the Hobbesian Trap 13. Ecological Anthropology and Cultural Materialism 14. Towards a Geography of Political Culture 15. From Tribe to Fief to City State to Nation to Empire 16. Weighing the Biological Ballast Informing Class Structure and Class Mobility 17. Bequeathing a Dual Inheritance to Life History Theory 18. Reframing Parental Investment and Offspring Attachment 19. Towards an Evolutionary Ecological Systems Theory