Bridging ecological and social systems coevolution: A review and proposal

Social and Natural sciences have, for the most part, ignored the existence of interlinked/interdependent evolutionary processes between cultural and biotic systems, both embedded in an overall dynamic biophysical environment. In this paper, we explore the potential of filling this gap by further developing a common coevolutionary framework based on earlier work in ecological economics. Our main concern is to contribute to the understanding of socioecological. coevolution in two ways: (1) to find a general framework that accommodates advances in the explanation of sociocultural evolution in social sciences and, (2) to identify the specific mechanisms that could link this knowledge to what is known in the biological sciences. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.