Apr 4, 2019

The Potential Evolutionary Mismatches of Germicidal Ambient Lighting

Introducing germicidal blue light essentially creates a new environment that most bacteria appear to be mismatched to survive within. But we may be mismatched as well.

Apr 2, 2019

Is Cancer a Disease of Civilization?

Our cancer suppression mechanisms evolved for a world that is not the world we live in today.

Mar 22, 2019

The Darwinian Causes of Mental Illness

Why hasn’t natural selection eliminated -- or at least severely reduced the frequency of -- well-known risk alleles for major depression and other mental health conditions that compromise organismal fitness?

Mar 13, 2019

Generating Testable Hypotheses of Evolutionary Mismatch

Models of ancestral environments are hard to construct and as a result such hypotheses are plagued with speculation. Where can we draw the evidence from?

Mar 6, 2019

What All Theories of Social Evolution Share In Common

If prosocial behaviors are vulnerable to more self-serving behaviors in every group where both types of behaviors occur, then how can they evolve by natural selection?

Feb 28, 2019

It’s Time To See the Light (Another Example of Evolutionary Mismatch)

The biological clock prepares our bodies for predictable events, like sleep and energy intake. Misalignment of the biological clock may have serious metabolic consequences.

Feb 25, 2019

A Mother's Mismatch: Why Cancer Has Deep Evolutionary Roots

While cancer is not exclusively a disease of modern environments, many modern environmental changes influence our disease susceptibility.

Feb 22, 2019

Evolutionary Mismatch and What To Do About It

Feb 22, 2019

Functional Frivolity: The Evolution and Development of the Human Brain Through Play

Play is not frivolous but is an adaptation designed to guide proper cognitive development in human children.

Feb 19, 2019

Why Teleology is the Elephant in Evolutionary Theory’s Room

Feb 6, 2019

Can Evolution be Understood as a Conscious Process?

My approach is explored by considering Aristotelian Causal Categories, focusing on Final Cause. I then consider the possibility of understanding this question from an ‘internalist’ perspective.

Jan 30, 2019

One Culture, Two Cultures? How Many Cultures, How Long?

When asked “Can Evolution be Conscious?” reactions can occur aptly reflecting the “informal definition” (as stated in most dictionaries) of schizoid, that is, “having inconsistent or seemingly contradictory elements.”

Jan 23, 2019

Can Evolution Be Conscious of Itself? Yes, It Can!

Human beings are subject to the workings of evolution and are also aware of their role as shapers of the environment so as to consciously direct evolutionary change.

Jan 18, 2019

The Consciousness of Detachment and the Detachment of Consciousness

To speak of an evolution of consciousness as a natural event is to be committed to the idea that consciousness can be a further expression of something which is not yet consciousness but is a prerequisite for the possibility of consciousness.

Jan 15, 2019

Welcome to the Noösphere

An evolutionary teleological view would be that no matter where you are in the cosmos, that there is, under the right conditions, a direction toward more complex, organized structures (both physical and non-physical).

Jan 11, 2019

The Evolution of Consciousness Enables Conscious Evolution

Understanding the evolution of consciousness provides the scaffolding for evolutionary science itself to consciously evolve, and to help human individuals and groups do so as well.

Jan 7, 2019

The Origins and Evolutionary Effects of Consciousness

How consciousness evolved and how consciousness has come to affect evolutionary processes are related issues.

Dec 27, 2018

Science and Religion Need Not Be At War

My Agreement and Disagreement with Jerry Coyne.

Dec 18, 2018

Was Hamilton a Group Selectionist? A Conversation with Oren Harman

W.D. Hamilton is best known for developing Inclusive Fitness Theory. What is less well known is that Hamilton changed his mind about the relationship between his theory and group selection.

Dec 13, 2018

Conscious Evolution is a Category Mistake

No, evolution is not a conscious process, and to think so is an example of what philosophers call a category mistake, predicated on a fallacy of equivocation.

Dec 3, 2018

Was Darwin A Group Selectionist? A Conversation with Elliott Sober

You can’t talk about religious beliefs and practices as adaptations without addressing the issue of group selection.

Nov 28, 2018

Fighting for the Middle Ground: David Sloan Wilson Interviews Holly Dunsworth on the Ethics of Teaching Evolution

In a world that is being ripped apart by polarized views and fake news, scientific discourse might be the last bastion of constructive disagreement based on respect for objective knowledge.

Nov 19, 2018

It Is Unethical To Teach Evolution Without Confronting Racism And Sexism

Evolution educators—even if sticking to E. coli, fruit flies, or sticklebacks—must confront the ways that evolutionary science has promoted or inspired so many racist, sexist, and otherwise harmful beliefs.

Oct 9, 2018

Saving Social Constructivism

Social constructivism is on trial for being an academic fraud. Can it be rescued and does it have valid points to make about science after all?

Sep 27, 2018

The Obstetrical Dilemma, Dismantled: Human Childbirth is Not a Dilemma

Rather than being evicted from the womb before their heads are too big, a new hypothesis argues that human babies are born when their growth rates become too costly for their mothers’ metabolism to support.

Sep 10, 2018

The Evolution of Emergent Computation

Many systems in nature consist of a large number of relatively simple units that interact only locally, and without a central control, yet the system as a whole can produce intricate globally coordinated behaviors.

Jul 26, 2018

Mismatch: An Interview with Mark van Vugt

Human psychology evolved over millions of years in relatively stable environments in small-scale communities. But, in the modern world, evolutionary mismatch can occur where a trait adapted for one environment is out of place where we live today.

Jul 9, 2018

Sex Roles Are Flexible in Chimpanzees and Bonobos. What Does That Say About Human Evolution?

A new study shows that chimpanzees and bonobos are far more similar in their gender roles than previously thought. In order to understand the range of complexity in our evolutionary cousins’ social lives, perhaps we first need to recognize the range of complexity that exists in our own.

Jun 20, 2018

The Biological Scars of Separation

The deliberate separation of migrant children from their parents is not only cruel and unnecessary but has the potential for long-term negative effects on their mental and biological health.

Jun 12, 2018

Can Monkeys Be Gay? What Homosexual Behavior in Primates Can Tell Us About the Evolution of Human Sexuality

Recent observations of homosexual behavior in male spider monkeys adds to our knowledge of these behaviors and may help us answer questions about the evolutionary functions homosexual behaviors may play.

May 17, 2018

Quantum Chimpanzees: Do Watched Primates Change Their Behavior?

In particle physics, the mere act of looking at an electron changes its direction of movement. Could observing primates also change the outcome of what is observed?

Apr 17, 2018

Constructing Our Niches: The Ultimate/Proximate Relationship Relative to Codes and Standards

Apr 17, 2018

Constructing Our Niches: The Ultimate/Proximate Relationship Relative to Codes and Standards

Apr 6, 2018

The Mathematics of Kindness

Altruistic behavior seems abundant in nature, but how did it evolve? George Price had the answer nearly fifty years ago.

Mar 29, 2018

Systems Engineering as Cultural Group Selection: A Conversation with Guru Madhavan

Systems engineering can be seen as an exceptionally pure form of artificial cultural group selection, which explicitly treats a physical or a social system as the unit of selection and employs highly refined processes for evolving the system’s component parts.

Mar 20, 2018

Punk Evolutionist: An Interview with Greg Graffin

Did you know that Greg Graffin, founder of the legendary band Bad Religion, is also a deep evolutionary thinker? Here’s the back story.

Mar 5, 2018

Constructing Our Niches: Exploring the Relevant Ultimate Design Features

When evolutionary theory is used in the building and construction industry we can better design our workspaces to increase cooperation and productivity.

Jan 29, 2018

Evolution as a Problem Solver in Computer Science

In computer science, there are many problems that are known to be "hard." What this means is that there is no efficient method to solve such problems exactly. However, we can use a clever computer algorithm to evolve an approximate solution, using ideas from real biological evolution.

Jan 19, 2018

Constructing Our Niches: Introducing the Importance of Cooperation and Ultimate Vs. Proximate Design Features

Collective and sustainable behavior is partially dependent on maintaining higher levels of cooperation among those involved, from the boardroom to the global stage.

Nov 7, 2017

Eye Origins: How Evolution Could Produce a Sophisticated Eye

Each eye is beautiful and elegant in its own right, and each eye we look at offers us a new way to appreciate the wonders of evolution.

Nov 1, 2017

Constructing Our Niches: Evolution’s Relevance to Modern Human Society

Human behaviors, the physical objects we create and use, as well as their associated intellectual traditions are part of our collective toolkit for adapting to the larger social/cultural and physical environments we live within.

Oct 23, 2017

How Star Trek: Discovery Gets Genetics Wrong, But Is Still Worth Watching Anyway

Discovery has made a genome-sequencing error into Star Trek canon. But it's hardly out of line with what came before. As much as it pains this Trekkie biologist to admit, the franchise has long had a fairly shaky grasp on the details of genetics and biological evolution.

Oct 16, 2017

Learning from Arizona State University about Inter-Disciplinarity: A Conversation with Robert Boyd

Inter-disciplinarity is something that most universities want but might not be able to achieve without organizational change.

Oct 10, 2017

Completing Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: A Conversation with Kevin Laland

At the heart of Kevin Laland's new book is a “cultural drive” mechanism, whereby selection for accurate, efficient information transmission shaped the evolution of the primate brain and intelligence.

Sep 18, 2017

The Origin of Life: A Selfish Act or a Cooperative Effort?

Life arose as a cooperative effort among diverse molecule types in catalytically closed and self-sustaining chemical reaction networks. There is grandeur in this view of (the origin of) life.

Aug 23, 2017

Evolution Makes Us Flexible Because Life Is Unpredictable

A genome that can respond to environmental feedback and operate in many possible, unpredictable conditions would be even more likely to survive and reproduce than a rigid one.

Aug 22, 2017

We Are Not Hard-Wired

Genetics and environment are inextricably intertwined. There is no organism without a genome, but there is also no such thing as an organism without an environment.

Aug 15, 2017

The Science of Sex Differences Is Complicated (and Biased)

If you only know a little bit about human biology, it might sound simple. XX or XY? Ovaries or testicles? Estrogen or testosterone? But in reality, there’s a wider range of developmental possibilities.

Aug 2, 2017

Does Conflict Drive Cooperation?

The relationship between inter-group violence and within-group cooperation is one that seems endemic across human societies, and it continues to be given greater attention by a range of scientists.

Jul 25, 2017

Teaching Evolution Requires More Than Evidence, It Takes Empathy

It is possible for people to be highly knowledgeable and reject evolution for reasons beyond evidence. When that happens, it is important to listen in order to understand why so we can bridge those gaps.