A recurrent idea in Steven Pinker’s essay is that group selection “adds little to what we have always called ‘history’.” I argue, on the contrary, that cultural multi-level selection (CMLS) provides a highly productive theoretical framework for the study of human history, including (a

What was the quality of life for people living in historical and prehistoric societies? One particularly important dimension of quality of life is freedom from violent death. How high was the probability of being murdered by another person? Modern statistics that express violent death

Last year I had an interesting conversation with someone I’ll call the Washington Insider. She asked me why my structural-demographic model predicted rising instability in the USA, probably peaking with a major outbreak of political violence in the 2020s. I started giving the explanat

Yesterday the top science journal Nature published a bomb-shell article, but my feeling is that biologists haven’t yet realized the explosive nature of the report. I’ll explain, but first we need to make a lengthy excurse into the history of the group selection idea. Whether group sel

Writing in Scientific American, John Horgan states, “10,000-Year-Old Massacre Does NOT Bolster Claim that War Is Innate. A new report on a massacre of hunter-gatherers in Africa is consistent with the claim that war, far from being an inborn trait that evolved millions of years ago, i

Ultrasociality—our capacity to cooperate in societies of millions of genetically unrelated individuals—is a huge puzzle. Readers of this blog know that trying to solve this puzzle has been the central question of my research into social and cultural evolution. Some time back I resolve

  Suppose there are two countries, comparable in all aspects of quality of life, except in one of them there are 13,400 intentional homicides every year, and in the other the number is 56. Which one would you prefer to live in, if you had the choice? The reason I am asking this q

  In the current issue of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution the anthropologist Sarah Mathew reviews War, Peace, and Human Nature, edited by Douglas Fry. Fry is one of the large group of anthropologists and other social scientists who have be

A comment to the guest blog by Scott Atran cast doubt on whether he, “a Euro-American white male,” is even capable of transcending his ethnocentrism. I immediately stepped in and cut this discussion short, because I know too well how destructive such arguments can be. But it doesn’t m

I periodically get asked, what do I think about the controversy over Steven Pinker’s Better Angels? Truth is, I did not find anything particularly new in the book. For those of us interested in the role of war in social evolution most of the empirical material he goes over is quite fa