Category: Arts

Events:

November 1, 2023

Prosocial Commons Book Club: Two Plays with Evolutionary Themes (The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard and The How and the Why by Sarah Treem)

Weekly book club for two plays with evolutionary themes: The Hard Problem by Tom Stoppard and The How and the Why by Sarah Treem.

August 24, 2023

Examined Lives: Evolutionary Aesthetics (Session 35)

What is the role of evolutionary theory in explaining aesthetics in nature and in human culture? How might we explain our own aesthetic experiences?

Articles:

June 4, 2024

Artistic Expression’s Evolutionary Salience

It is important to reframe the arts (even redefine them) as necessary for human survival.

May 28, 2024

The Road So Far…the Road Ahead: Evolution and the Arts

Where are we now and what are some unanswered questions that are avenues for future work ahead?

April 30, 2024

What Darwin Understood About Humor

Darwin’s thoughts on humor presaged our modern scientific understanding of its nature and its cultural manifestations

April 23, 2024

Making the Stone Stony: How the Arts Can Help Us Navigate Cultural Evolution

Stories are essentially relational: while we might read them alone, they move us in relation to each other and create relationship in us.

April 2, 2024

Hollywood Climate Movies and The Potential of Tragedy

Filmic tragedies about climate change would be a better genre than melodrama to help promote perspective and purpose for the ethical and political difficulties ahead.

March 26, 2024

Why Do Humans Enjoy Fictional Stories?

The imaginary worlds we create and consume are not cultural anomalies, but rather direct manifestations of our cognition.

March 12, 2024

The Arts as a Communal Signaling Device

Why did early hunter-gatherers engage in the arts when that time could have been more profitably spent dealing with the demands of survival?

March 5, 2024

Evolution, Human Nature, and Imagination

The human capacity for creating an imaginative virtual world has been the culminating adaptation of the long human trajectory of gene-culture coevolution.

March 4, 2024

Which Way, Evolution & the Arts?

Understanding the nature of the arts from an evolutionary perspective is more than an academic pursuit.

June 8, 2023

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.

September 26, 2022

Evolutionary Science in Joyce’s Ulysses

James Joyce developed a writing technique that mirrored advances in the evolutionary science of his day and these insights are present in his novel.

December 21, 2018

A School, Camp, and Retreat Center Informed by Evolutionary Science

October 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.

April 20, 2017

Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind

The logic of cultural evolution is identical to that of biological evolution, even if the details differ.

April 11, 2017

How Noble in Reason: Shakespeare Reveals the Primacy of Emotions in Human Nature

January 5, 2017

The Riddle—and the Range—of Art: Brian Boyd on the Evolution of the Arts from the Pleistocene to the Present

The celebrated literary scholar Brian Boyd takes us on a tour of an amazing museum exhibit and other happenings at the interface of art and evolution.

August 8, 2016

Darwin’s Bridge to the Humanities: An Interview with Joseph Carroll

Bringing together cutting-edge scientists and scholars across this range, Darwin's Bridge gives an expert account of consilience and makes it possible to see how far we have come toward unifying knowledge about the human species, what major issues are still in contention, and which areas of research are likely to produce further progress.

July 8, 2016

What we make and do can evolve with no end in sight

A simple, but powerful law, The Law of Effect, suggests that organisms tend to repeat the successful behaviors they perform and to refrain from repeating the unsuccessful ones.

April 23, 2016

What did Shakespeare understand about the human mind?

Shakespeare understood, implicitly, what modern psychology has found: that human beings have a habit of making decisions based more on their intuitions and emotions than on their cognitive reasoning.

November 24, 2015

Baba Brinkman: Rapping Up Evolutionary Theories of Religion

In his recent release The Rap Guide to Religion, the rapper Baba Brinkman presents a lyrical précis of the major contemporary theories of the evolution of religion: from theory of mind to cultural evolution.

May 21, 2015

Tom Stoppard’s Hard Problems

May 2, 2015

The Playwright And The Scientist: A Conversation Between Tom Stoppard And David Sloan Wilson

October 5, 2013

The Festival of Bad Ad Hoc Hypotheses (BAH!)

A celebration of well-argued and thoroughly researched but completely incorrect evolutionary theory.

January 25, 2013

Religion vs Evolution Explanatations: Don’t Be Afraid to Tell a Great Story

Evolution designed humans to see the world in fictional story mode.

December 1, 2012

Off-Broadway Show Explores The Science of Mating and Online Dating

Evolution needs a new storyteller—more precisely, a new generation of storytellers.

July 25, 2012

Alice’s Evolutionary Restaurant

A Bit about the Founding Editor of <em>The Evolutionary Review.</em>

May 4, 2012

Consilience Conference Celebrates Unity of Knowledge In Biology, Social Science, and Humanities

Two controversies lurk beneath an impressive display of interdisciplinarityRecently, we at <em>Evolution: This View of Life</em> had the pleasure of attending and covering the first annual conference on “Consilience”—or the unity of the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. The conference, of which we at ETVOL hope to see many future iterations, was organized and hosted by Joseph Carroll of the University of Missouri in St. Louis.

April 19, 2012

Westoll Shows Us the Duality of Man by Looking Through the Eyes of Chimpanzees

It will change the way you reflect about man's relationship to the chimpanzee.

March 2, 2012

The Chimpanzee Manifesto: Artist, Nathaniel Gold

Evolutionist and artist collaborate to communicate science and art.

February 22, 2012

Survival of the Beautiful

Scientists and Artists Ponder the Aesthetics of Evolution

February 11, 2012

Part 1: Not Just a Just-so Story

“We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.”There are many criticisms of the evolutionary view of human nature, and most of these have been the subject of ongoing debate and commentary. In this series of posts, of which this is the first installment, I will address one of the most pervasive objections, particularly among secular humanists and even some scientists: the notion that we’re telling “just-so stories” about human nature.

February 9, 2012

What’s in a Song? All You Need Is Love… and then some!

Could the lyrics to hit songs contain more embedded references to reproductive success – and the kinds of problems our ancestors would have faced to attain it?

February 7, 2012

Chauvet and Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Perhaps no other surviving artifacts of human prehistory are cloaked in beauty and mystery quite like the cave paintings at Chauvet, Lascaux.