Dec 8, 2022

Cultural Immune Systems as Parts of Cultural Superorganisms

When the concept of 'organism' is expanded to include groups as organisms, the concepts of both “mental” and “immunity” can be seen in a new light.

Jun 16, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection: 8. Anatomy of a Model

May 20, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection: 7. If You Make A Mess, Should You Clean It Up?

The only way to recover the simplicity is by cleaning up the mess that was made by falsely rejecting group selection in the 1960s.

Apr 26, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection: 6. Individualism

Individualism is the mistaken belief that individuals are somehow a privileged level of the biological hierarchy.

Apr 18, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection: 5. The Patriotic History of Individual Selection Theory

Apr 4, 2022

Evaluating Narratives of Conscious Evolution

Mar 9, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection: 4. The Great Reckoning

By the 1960s, everything that evolved by natural selection was interpreted as a variety of self-interest.

Feb 24, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection: 3. Naïve Group Selectionism

Pre-Darwinian notions did not come to an abrupt halt with the advent of Darwin's theory. They linger on.

Feb 17, 2022

What Will It Take To Decolonize Ecology?

Feb 15, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection: 2. The Original Problem

Darwin observed that groups of prosocial individuals will survive and reproduce better than groups of antisocial individuals.

Feb 8, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection

A prologue for the Twelfth Anniversary Edition.

Feb 8, 2022

Truth and Reconciliation for Group Selection: 1. Why It Is Needed

What happens when science doesn't work as it should? Such is the case for the controversy over group selection.

Feb 3, 2022

Towards a New Understanding of the Relationship Between Humans and Nature

It is a sad reality that recognition for many scientists depends on their nationality and how much exposure they have obtained from the Global North rather than the intrinsic quality of their scientific research.

Jan 17, 2022

Decolonizing Science and a World Turned Upside Down

To support a sustainable and inclusive world, the sciences must grapple with their embeddedness in systems of power and domination.

Jan 5, 2022

The Six Legacies of Edward O. Wilson

Edward O. Wilson, who passed away at the age of 92 on December 26, 2021, is widely recognized as a giant of the Arts and Sciences.

Oct 4, 2021

Stewarding the Cultural Evolution of Complex Systems: The Case of Regenerative Agriculture

A conversation with Prof. Nicholas R. Jordan, founder of Forever Green which is one of the most ambitious efforts to transition from conventional farming practices to regenerative agriculture

Jul 5, 2021

Remembering Richard Lewontin: A Tribute From a Student Who Never Got to Meet Him

We have lost one of the twentieth century’s deepest thinkers whose work will have a lasting impression on biology, science, and humanity as a whole.

Apr 20, 2021

Why Is A Polo Shirt Like A Peacock’s Tail?

Life history theory suggests that displays of luxury items provide signals with social goals.

Apr 12, 2021

Ronald Fisher Is Not Being ‘Cancelled’, But His Eugenic Advocacy Should Have Consequences

How should we remember scientists that altered our conception of the natural world but who also misused the tools of science to target marginalized populations?

Apr 7, 2021

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Psychopathology and Behavior Change

Apr 7, 2021

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Past, Present, and Future

Feb 9, 2021

Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain

Jan 29, 2021

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Small Groups

Prosociality requires not just figuring out what’s prosocial within the group, but also how a group fits into a larger, multigroup social organization that is also prosocial.

Jan 22, 2021

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Behavioral and Physical Health

Many social and personal problems are adaptive in the evolutionary sense of the word, but what if we could manage the process of personal evolution?

Jan 15, 2021

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Organizational Development

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize by creating a database of common-pool resource groups from a very diffuse literature. Can we do the same for business development?

Jan 11, 2021

Learning from Evolution about Free Speech

Jan 8, 2021

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Emotions and Empathy

How does felt emotion overlap with expressed emotion and its social functions? What is the impact of empathy and reading the emotions of others?

Jan 1, 2021

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Development and Adolescence

Are adolescent behaviors innately pathological or are they a result of the environment? Prominent scholars discuss both sides in this groundbreaking series.

Dec 22, 2020

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Symbolic Thought and Communication

Are there universal features of grammar and syntax?

Dec 18, 2020

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Learning

Can variation and selection within a lifetime be thought of evolutionarily?

Dec 15, 2020

Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: Introduction

This groundbreaking series of conversations seek to integrate Evolutionary Science and Contextual Behavioral Science with a larger audience.

Aug 31, 2020

The Coronavirus in Evolutionary Perspective

Humans evolved social potential to cooperate with others will eventually ignite a collective response to fight COVID-19 around the globe.

Aug 4, 2020

Bringing Neuroscience and Sociology into Dialogue on Emotions to Better Understand Human Behavior

What this potential marriage suggests is there are great possibilities for research, particularly around social relationships.

Jun 15, 2020

The Cheating Cell: An Interview with Athena Aktipis

Understanding why and how both Twitter bots and cancer cells create conflict in different kinds of cooperative social systems may help us find new strategies to bring both kinds of disruptive behavior under control.

Mar 23, 2020

How Coronavirus Bypasses Our Behavioral Immune System (And What We Can Do About It)

The evolved emotion of disgust neutralizes many pathogens by helping us avoid what makes us sick. We need to adapt our behavioral immune system to counter new threats.

Mar 7, 2020

Evolving a Major Transition in the Internet Age

The theory of major transitions provides an all-encompassing framework to explore both the opportunities and challenges facing humanity in the Internet Age.

Dec 11, 2019

The Virtue of Extremism is its Enhancement of the Ordinary

To better understand extremism, we need to look not only at the evils perpetrated but also at the admirable aspects of ourselves.

Oct 3, 2019

Seven Reasons Why Most Major Depression is Probably Not a Brain Disorder

If most MD, as it is currently diagnosed, is not a disorder, should we keep calling it Major Depression?

Sep 10, 2019

Blurring the Line Between “Others” – A Practical Application of Cultural Multilevel Selection Theory

Through a cultural multilevel selection perspective, seeing an individual “other” as human can shift the level of selection from within subgroups at a lower level to between groups at a higher level.

Aug 28, 2019

The Darwinian ‘Struggle for Existence’ is Really About Balance

Darwin made it clear that the term "struggle for existence" was not to be taken literally but should rather be understood in a large and metaphorical sense.

Aug 21, 2019

Girls Who Grow Up Without Their Father Start Their Periods Earlier, Or Do They?

New research challenges the idea that girls who grow up in households without a father tend to start their periods earlier than girls whose fathers live with them.

Jul 25, 2019

The Human Social Organism and a Parliament of Genes

Ten thousand years of cultural evolution has impressively expanded the scale of human cooperation to levels that could not have been imagined by our distant ancestors.

Jul 22, 2019

Master Class: A Conversation with Jonathan Birch About the Equivalence of Theories of Social Evolution

The controversy over group selection that emerged in the 1960’s seemed as if one theory could be rejected in favor of another, but it was really more like monolingual people declaring each other to be confusing and wrong.

Jul 4, 2019

Darwinizing the Federalist Papers: Preamble

The Federalist Papers argued for the creation of a more perfect UNION based on Enlightenment values that predated Darwin. Here we add 200+ years of scientifically refined thought.

Jun 21, 2019

A Blurred Future: How Our Eyes Are Changing To Meet Modern Visual Demands

Certain genetic makeups may predispose an individual to become nearsighted in a specific environment but it is not guaranteed. Myopia is not a destiny, it is an adaptation.

Jun 13, 2019

Is Shame a Bug or a Feature? An Applied Evolutionary Approach

Shame seems to have two separate components. One, the corrective feedback for us by which to monitor social behavior. The other, the more troublesome one, is putting oneself down as an incompetent person.

Jun 7, 2019

What Bret Weinstein Gets Wrong About Group Selection

May 22, 2019

Public Health and Evolutionary Mismatch: The Tragedy of Unnecessary Suffering and Death

The current anti-vaccination movement is a result, in part, of the innate cognitive biases inherent in our nervous systems that evolved to deal with problems in a very different premodern world.

May 16, 2019

How to Eliminate Going to the Dentist

May 10, 2019

Group Selection in Every Way Except Using the Words: A Critique of "The Goodness Paradox" by Richard Wrangham

Wrangham's new book on the evolution of cooperation gets many things right. But he errs in thinking that he can develop his thesis without invoking group selection.