VER THE PAST twenty years, major headway has been made in biocultural evolution through the mapping, in varying ways, of cultural process onto a neo-Darwinian model. It is as if now, late in the twentieth century, we have completed a full loop in the spiral, taking us from the organic models made popular by Spencer, to a new level of apparently organic models, derived from the neo-Darwinian thinking.' Like many attracted to this biocultural2 area, I have found the Darwinian paradigm indispensable. However, over the quarter century during which most of the work concerning the human social process has appeared, I have found myself at first vaguely, then increasingly, discomforted by how it was being used. In dealing with Darwinism, however, I must confess to feeling like a jumbo jet passenger who, while obviously knowing nothing about piloting the aircraft, is disturbed by smoke coming out of the engines. The smoke that I see is that some really central characteristics of culture and human society as we have come to understand them over more than a century of anthropological study, are not only being ignored, but are being deformed.