David Sloan Wilson

August 28, 2015

Change the Story. Survival of the Fairest Companies

July 30, 2015

The Case for Rescuing Tainted Words

September 10, 2015

Charles Darwin as the Father of Economics: A Conversation with Robert Frank

October 21, 2015

Man Bites Dog: Cultural Evolution According to a Cultural Anthropologist

December 10, 2015

Steering Toward the Omega Point: A Roundtable Discussion of Altruism, Evolution, and Spirituality

An introduction to the question: Is it possible to be spiritual and scientific at the same time?

January 3, 2016

Doing Well By Doing Good: A Report on Socially Responsible Businesses

Can businesses do well by doing good? Yes, according to this report headed by EI President David Sloan Wilson. The report provides a much needed alternative to the “Greed is Good” philosophy of orthodox economic theory, which has dominated the curriculum of business schools for over 50 years.

February 1, 2016

The New Atheism as a Stealth Religion: Five Years Later

The world appears to be tiring of the New Atheism movement, which burst upon the scene about five years ago with the so-called Four Horsemen: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens.

January 8, 2016

Cancer and the transformation of life: An Interview with Athena Aktipis

An insightful interview with Athena Aktipis on cancer research from an evolutionary perspective.

February 2, 2016

BBS, Brains, and the Pain of Altruism: An Interview with Barbara Finlay

The co-editor of the #1 academic Journal in the Behavioral Sciences shares her views on Evolutionary Psychology.

February 11, 2016

What Donald Trump & Company Need to Know About Evolution

Why should anyone care about evolution literacy when so many other issues clamor for our attention, such as the economy, inequality, climate change, terrorism, and the refugee crisis? The answer is that evolutionary theory can help us understand and provide solutions to each and every one of these issues.

April 7, 2016

Empowering the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

March 24, 2016

How’s Your Ancestral Health?

Are humans driven to behave in ways that are detrimental to our wellbeing by adaptations to past environments?

May 30, 2016

Evolutionary Biology’s Master Craftsman: An Interview with Richard Lenski

An interview with Richard Lenski, who has become world renowned for presiding over the longest running evolutionary experiment of all time, on the bacterium E. coli, which has now exceeded 65,000 generations.

July 11, 2016

When the Strong Outbreed the Weak: An Interview with William Muir

Muir’s experiments reveal a tremendous naiveté in the idea that creating a good society is merely a matter of selecting the “best” individuals. A good society requires members working together to create what cannot be produced alone, or at least to refrain from exploiting each other.

June 29, 2016

The Origin of The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: An Interview with Massimo Pigliucci

Are we witnessing a new synthesis for evolutionary theory?

September 12, 2016

Why Did Sociology Declare Independence From Biology (And Can They Be Reunited)? An Interview with Russell Schutt

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.

November 28, 2016

Saved by Evolution: How A Prison Inmate Turned Science Into A Meaning System

Gary Shepherd is much more than a self-taught scholar. He has actually been saved by science, in the same way that many people are saved by religion.

September 20, 2016

Evolutionary Medicine Comes of Age: An Interview with Randolph Nesse

The evolutionary outlook expands the perspective of health professionals from that of mechanics to that of engineers.

October 25, 2016

Toward A New Social Darwinism

The biggest victim of the stigmatized view of Social Darwinism has been all of us, by preventing the application of evolutionary theory to public policy until very recently.

November 1, 2016

When Evolutionists Acquire Superhuman Powers: A Conversation with Peter and Rosemary Grant

Two developments helped Peter and Rosemary Grant to peer into the genomes of finches. The first was the invention of tools to measure microsatellite DNA. With more than a dozen genetic loci they were able to characterize each finch with a unique DNA signature.

November 23, 2016

Giving Business the Darwin: An Interview with Mark Van Vugt

Business and management can benefit from an evolutionary perspective. The benefits for the economy and quality of life in the workplace could be huge.

December 5, 2016

Does God Exist? Actually, Yes

If an organism is a being, then so is a superorganism and the whole earth is certainly superhuman.

December 19, 2016

A Conversation with Kim Sterelny about the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis

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.

January 17, 2017

Orchestrating the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis Research Project: An Interview with Tobias Uller

Tobias Uller's projects revolve around the idea that plasticity – that is, environmental effects on phenotypes – can initiate and direct evolutionary diversification.

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.

February 27, 2017

Fear of Action

The application of provisional knowledge should also be provisional. But the wisdom of any course of action needs to be weighed against its alternatives.

March 28, 2017

The Truth about Fake Facts

The invention of fake facts was to compel us to behave for the benefit of our group, even when it might be against our private interests.

May 3, 2017

Learning from Religion about Social Cells

What can religion teach us about the nature of human social groups?

June 9, 2017

Marketing Evolution Webinar: It's the List, Stupid!

Robert Kadar gives an overview of his tried-and-tested methods for building audiences. He will also explain what "It's the List, Stupid!" means and why it's key to building successful organizations.

October 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.

December 21, 2017

Writing Evolution into Humanist Manifesto IV

It is the essence of Humanism to take responsibility for improving the human condition, using science and reason as our guides.

October 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.

November 13, 2017

Sexual Bullying and the Power of Norms

What previously was tolerated, if not actually approved, has become inadmissible, like imposing physical harm and theft of property. A norm is being created and enforced, much more strongly than before.

December 4, 2017

Truth-Telling and the Power of Norms

It is easy to imagine modern society falling apart due to the collapse of truth-telling norms. Nevertheless, thinking about norms from an evolutionary perspective provides grounds for hope.

December 22, 2017

Thinking Clearly About Collective Intelligence: A Conversation with Geoff Mulgan about his new book Big Mind

A conversation with Geoff Mulgan, founder of the think tank Demos and current chief executive of Nesta, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, on his new book "Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World".

January 12, 2018

Religious Epigenetics

How can conservative and progressive Christian denominations churches be so different from each other, despite sharing the same sacred text? For the same reason that skin and liver cells can be so different, despite sharing the same DNA.

March 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.

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.

April 4, 2018

The Business World Needs Multilevel Selection (MLS) Theory

MLS theory makes it crystal clear that unless competition is appropriately structured and refereed, it can do a lot more harm than good.

April 10, 2018

Learning from Gossip about Free Speech

Gossip is highly moral, sophisticated, and sensitive to context. Can we use this to improve our communication online and in society at large?

May 17, 2018

Moral Universals, Moral Particulars and Tinbergen’s Four Questions

Tinbergen’s four questions apply to any variation-and-selection process, including but not restricted to genetic evolution. Accordingly, they can be insightful for the study of moral universals and particulars as products of human genetic and cultural evolution.