Major transitions in sociocultural evolution

Recent years have seen growing interest in applying the Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality (ETI) framework to human sociocultural evolution. Proponents argue that human societies exhibit features - such as multilevel organization, cooperation, and division of labour - sufficiently analogous to biological ETIs to warrant theoretical extension. This paper critically assesses such claims and argues that they rest on a fundamental misapplication of the ETI framework. Drawing on recent work in cultural evolution, I show that sociocultural systems typically lack the core conditions required for an ETI, including autonomous reproduction at the group level and the operation of natural selection in the reproductive mode. Attempts to relax these criteria risk undermining the coherence of the framework itself. I conclude that although the broader framework of Major Evolutionary Transitions may still have value for understanding sociocultural change, the specific explanatory structure of ETI theory does not transfer.