Category: History

September 12, 2024

Fiction and the Fourth Sexual Revolution

Literature and other forms of fiction are integral when human communities scrutinize their mating regime and negotiate new practices, such as with the West’s three sexual revolutions of 1200, 1750, and 1968.

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

November 20, 2023

Terrorism and the Apocalyptic

Apocalyptic ideas motivate much of the most virulent political violence in the world, stirring what can be called the “fundamentalist mindset.”

November 16, 2023

The Extremist in Historical Perspective: Lessons from the Era of Anarchist Terrorism

Terrorism is used by those who do not have the means to pursue more conventional or moderate strategies to achieve their goals.

July 11, 2023

Ten Thousand Years of the Third Way: A Conversation with Peter Turchin

Our emergence as a species and the last ten thousand years of human history demonstrates how positive cultural change has taken place.

May 23, 2023

Pragmatism as the Third Way of Entrepreneurship: A Conversation with Trygve Throntveit

Positive systemic change must be the target of selection. Alternative social practices must be oriented toward the target of selection.

March 30, 2023

Italy’s Tradition of Self-Organized Services

As the cultural and economic environment in Italy has changed, the character of the cooperative movement has changed. Social and community cooperatives have played a key role in channeling these changes.

February 7, 2023

Witch-Hunting: A Lethal Cultural “Virus”?

New research suggests there may have been Darwinian mechanisms behind the evolution of witch-hunting phenomena.

January 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.

July 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.

April 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?

March 11, 2021

Greek Democracy as a Major Evolutionary Transition: A Conversation with Josiah Ober

By understanding classical Greece as a Major Evolutionary Transition is that it can place the very concept of democracy on a stronger theoretical foundation.

October 12, 2020

Evolutionary Biologists Need to Know about Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum

August 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.

August 1, 2019

Morality Regulates Our Social Physiology

Darwin knew humans can’t survive or thrive individually. Indeed the relation between people and groups is akin to that between genes and bodies.

July 5, 2019

On the Origin of Socialist Darwinism

Socialist Darwinism is the idea that natural selection promotes societies that cooperate as moral communities.

December 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.

November 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.

December 22, 2017

Scientific Historians Find Common Pathway in Complex Social Formations Shared by Every Region around the Globe

Understanding how we got to our modern world is the critical first step in showing us where we are heading; a new article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers new answers to these critical questions, taking a systematic, scientific look at how complex societies from around the world have developed over the last 10,000 years.

July 10, 2017

The Evolution of Darwinian Empathy

The Darwinian understanding of empathy consistently built from his initial hypothesis to establish an empirical framework by the mid-1960s.

April 27, 2017

This View of History Webinar: A Conversation With Peter Turchin

Peter Turchin discusses his new book "Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth". Ultrasociety chronicles 10,000 years of human history from an evolutionary perspective, shows how warfare paradoxically caused us to become the greatest cooperators on earth, and begins to point the way toward a future without war.

January 25, 2017

The Freemasons: Prosocial Groups of the Enlightenment Era. A Conversation with Margaret C. Jacob

How can cooperative forms of governance overcome disruptive self-serving behaviors? The history of Freemasonry may hold the answer.

January 10, 2017

Cultural Anthropology and Cultural Evolution: Tear Down This Wall! A Conversation with Robert Paul

Robert Paul is one of a very few cultural anthropologists who is contributing his extensive ethnographic knowledge to the modern study of cultural evolution.

September 26, 2016

Was Dewey a Darwinian? Yes! Yes! Yes! An Interview with Trevor Pearce

February 22, 2016

Was Hitler a Darwinian? No! No! No!

Robert J. Richards examines the widely held view that Darwinian thinking was somehow responsible for the atrocities of the Hitler regime during World War II.

July 5, 2015

Truth and Reconciliation for Social Darwinism

The term "Social Darwinism" is associated primarily with the moral justification of inequality, resulting in policies such as withholding welfare for the poor, colonialism, eugenics, and genocide. We would like to confront this legacy directly.