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p.5 Action consists of the structures and processes by which human beings form meaningful intentions and, more or less successfully, implement them in concrete situations... We prefer the term "action" to "behavior" because we are interested not in the physical events of behavior for their own sake but in their patterning, their patterned meaningful products... and the mechanisms and processes that control such patterning... meanings and intentions concerning acts are formed in terms of symbolic systems (including the codes through which they operate in patterns)
p.9 The cultural system structures commitments vis-a-vis ultimate reality into meaningful orientations toward the rest of the environment and the system of action, the physical world, organisms, personalities, and social systems.
p.21 Among change processes, the type most important to the evolutionary perspective is the enhancement of adaptive capacity, either within the society originating a new type of structure or, through cultural diffusion and the involvement of other factors in combination with the new type of structure, within other societies and perhaps later periods.
p.22 If differentiation is to yield a balanced, more evolved system, each newly differentiated sub-structure... must have increased adaptive capacity for performing its primary function, as compared to the performance of that function in the previous, more diffuse structure.
p.23 When somewhere in a variegated population of societies there emerges a developmental "breakthrough," the ensuing process of innovation will, I suggest, always approximate our paradigm of evolutionary change. Such a breakthrough endows its society with a new level of adaptive capacity in some vital respect, thereby changing the terms of its competitive relations with other societies in the system
p.109-110 To be an evolutionist, one must define a general trend in evolution... Our perspective clearly involves evolutionary judgments... I have tried to make my basic criterion congruent with that used in biological theory, calling more "advanced" the systems that display greater generalized adaptive capacity.
p.111 One need not develop a truly advanced general analysis of the main processes of social change in order to make general claims about the structural patterning of evolutionary development.
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