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Gerhard Lenski's ecological-evolutionary theory of human societies, originally presented and tested in Power and Privilege (1966) and Human Societies (1970), makes a number of general and specific predictions about the impact of subsistence technology on the fundamental features of societies, as well as identifying constraints that the techno-economic heritage of currently industrializing societies continue to exercise on their development trajectories. This paper reviews the strategies adopted for presenting and for testing the theory, critically analyzes and extends some important results of its empirical tests, and explores issues confronting the future development and presentation of the theory.

Prompted by the lack of attention by sociologists and the challenge of materialist explanations of warfare in "precivilized" societies posed by Keeley (1996), this paper tests and finds support for two materialist hypotheses concerning the likelihood of warfare in preindustrial societies: specifically, that, as argued by ecological-evolutionary theory, dominant mode of subsistence is systematically related to rates of warfare; and that, within some levels of technological development, higher levels of "population pressure" are associated with a greater likelihood of warfare. Using warfare measures developed by Ember and Ember (1995), measures of subsistence technology originally developed by Lenski (1966, 1970), and the standard sample of societies developed by Murdock and White (1969), this study finds evidence that warfare is more likely in advanced horticultural and agrarian societies than it is in hunting-and-gathering and simple horticultural societies, and that it is also more likely in hunting-and-gathering and agrarian societies that have above-average population densities. These findings offer substantial support for ecological-evolutionary theory and qualified but intriguing support for "population pressure" as explanations of cross-cultural variation in the likelihood of warfare.

Some scholars have argued that we are witnessing a new social revolution—social "informatization"—that is comparable in scope and impact to that of the Industrial Revolu‐tion of the eighteenth century. Others have argued that it is a much more modest phase in the ongoing development of communication and information‐processing technology. While there are a number of reasons for disagreement about what exactly "informatization" is, and what its impact will be, two are paramount: (1) conceptual imprecision, and (2) issues of measurement. Using factor analysis, this study aims to clarify its conceptualization, and, then, rather than focusing on a single dimension (e.g., technological or economic), it will develop a comprehensive multiple‐indicator measure that captures the economic, technological, and size (stock) dimensions of social informatization. We find that this measure of social informatization strongly correlates with the general level of socioeconomic development. This result implies that social informatization may be a more continuous and cumulative process than a disjunctive or discontinuous "revolution."