Editorial

Our journal seems to be almost the only one dedicated to the issues of social evolution. Already in the very first issue we pointed out that while dozens of journals dealing with organic evolution have the words ‘Biological Evolution’ in their titles, hardly a journal exists in the whole world which includes ‘Social Evolution’ in its title. This alone seems to be a compelling reason to establish a new journal specifically devoted to social evolution in title and contents.

The significance of studies in cultural and social evolution is rather evident. Currently one can observe an increasing interest to the problems of evolution in general and cultural evolution in particular. Moreover, the problems of inter-evolutionary and cross-evolutionary research also have great importance. Over the whole period of existence of our journal, we constantly appeal to the issues of evolution, but now we consider it necessary to compile a special issue. Here one can find a rather interesting spectrum of articles relating to cultural evolution in addition to the possibilities of productive comparison of social and biological evolution.

The study of evolution is considered to be one of the priority and productive directions of interdisciplinary research where representatives of natural and exact sciences as well as of the humanities can find contact points. The special issue of the journal under the general title ‘Analyses of Cultural Evolution’ publishes contributions revealing a wide range of topics under investigation: from universal problems of evolution up to the analysis of individual evolutionary laws in the development of society and culture.

The Journal ‘Social Evolution & History’ from the very beginning has set a goal to meet the needs of those seeking to understand how human societies developed in the past and continue to develop in the present. We believe that this special issue will contribute its share to this huge task. We would also like to express our special gratitude to Herbert Barry III for his consent to act as a Guest Editor for this special issue.

Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Leonid E. Grinin, and Andrey V. Korotayev