This revolutionary book identifies key pressures on the human species, tracing its development from its beginning. Written by a physicist, anthropologist, and political scientist, data from many different fields are analyzed and organized into a never before presented picture of the evolution of societies and of the biology of our species.

Foundations for Social & Biological Evolution contains twelve essays broken into two sections. The first section explores topics in social evolution, such as human sociogeophysics, long term processes in social change, and political spectroscopy. The second section presents topics in biological evolution, such as connections to geophysics, species extinction and continental erosion, how many species, and a model for the origins of life.

Ideas detailed in this book include:

how our species populated the Earth (including its laws of growth). how the process leads to settlement in place and urbanization. an examination of the commonality of the story of culture -- civilizational evolution over the entire Earth's surface for the past 15,000 years. the characterization of processes by which such systems operate.

In addition, it provides a theory for such dynamics and distinguishes it from Marxism and Positivism. That physically based theory, homeokinetics, is based on a horizontal reductionism to the principles of physical science as a common foundation for all complex systems.

In a completely analogous fashion, the second half of the book takes on the subject of biological evolution in which the major mechanisms are geophysical-geochemical drives for the living process and its emergence, accounting thus for both life's startup and demise on Earth. To make the case more compelling, the geophysical processes that drive life are Earth's available material substances and its formal fluid processes. Science as a discipline and as outlook, and the sociology of the society toward science are briefly touched on.

The way paleontology is taught today is much without physical underpinnings. Evolution has been presented in such a manner that many people think of it as a religious issue. Instead, all systems evolve as they capture small engine process cycles that act independently to drive them for a life span.

Life's origins are being taught as having occurred in an organic soup. However, an ocean of organic molecules could not have provided suitable niches for different experiments to have taken place until working systems evolved. Instead, the interface between solid, liquid, and gas (also known as the sediment/water/atmosphere interface) at continental margins is a more likely place. Large changes in populations and kinds match up with large changes a the continental margins.

Only a physicist, such as Arthur S. Iberall, has done and could look at evolution using such a vocabulary. The physical vocabulary actually makes more sense to scientists and the reading public in general.