A conversation about how Cultural Evolution helps us understand the rise of complex societies in human history A week ago I gave an Evolution Institute webinar about how our “ultrasocieties”—huge cooperative groups numbering in hundreds of millions of people and more—evolved over the

Today is the second and final round of presidential elections in France. The two contenders are Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. Macron is the candidate of the established elites. You cannot get more elite in France: he earned a master’s of public affairs at Sciences Po, and h

It’s been a long haul. Six years ago we launched the project that we eventually named Seshat: Global History Databank. Three years ago, following a series of workshops that designed the overall structure of the databank, we started collecting data. By January 2015 we had 30,000 record

Following a lead from Mark Koyama’s twitter I arrived at the blog of Scott Summer, where I learned that heterodoxy is making inroads into that bastion of academic Economics, the American Economic Review. Despite the date of the post (April 1), it seems to be a serious, even pass

Part I here. One of the most interesting passages in Listen, Liberal is Frank’s characterization of the Republicans as the party of 1 percent—nothing new here—and the Democrats as the party of the 10 percent—which is the interesting part, and a new idea, at least to me. What does he m

Ironically, it used to be the crazy fringe on the Right that were the breeding grounds for conspiracy theories (“birthers”, “Clinton death list”). Now mass hysteria and conspirology are sweeping the crazy … Liberal mainstream? Earlier this month Glenn Greenwald wrote a very important

A senior colleague from my ecology days wrote to me with a request for a PDF reprint of an article I published in 1991. The article came out in Ecology, the flagship journal of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). When I published it, Ecology was an independent journal produced by

As is well known, all major forecasters confidently predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the presidential elections of 2016. On the morning of the election day (November 8th 2016) at 10:41 am, when a number of American voters had already cast their votes, FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Si

In a recent blog post P. D. Mangan discusses the implications of the metabolic theory of cancer and the ideas of Dr. Laurent Schwartz, French physician and oncologist, who has been using this theory to treat cancer patients. Whether this theory is correct, or not, time (and the scient