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

Dear friends, lovers of history, and those who care about the world we live in: Please join me in supporting an international project that seeks to understand how human societies evolve. I am donating $10,000 from my book revenues this year to Seshat: Global History Databank, and I ch

In my research I studied many historical societies that experienced structural-demographic crises. In each case there was a multitude of causes for the explosion of political violence, but I see two commonly recurring themes, fundamental problems that prevented people from finding a n

This is from a Reuters article yesterday: “Only half of Republicans would accept Clinton, the Democratic nominee, as their president. And if she wins, nearly 70 percent said it would be because of illegal voting or vote rigging, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Friday.” “

Apparently my blog posts on the historical roots of European dysfunction (see for example the last one, Visualizing Values Mismatch in the European Union) were noticed. I was approached by people who run Euromind and asked to contribute a short article to the edited volume they are pu

An article published this week by Nature is generating a lot of press. Using a sample of 93 Austronesian cultures Watts et al. explore the possible relationship between human sacrifice (HS) and the evolution of hierarchical societies. Specifically, they test the “social control” hypot

Thanks to a very interesting article by Denise Cummins in Evonomics I learned another great story to add to my growing set of case studies showing how the “greed is good” ideology destroys companies. In Ultrasociety I mainly talked about Enron, and Jeff Skilling’s role in its fall. Bu

Dear Branko, Thank you for your comment stemming from reading Ultrasociety. It’s a very clear and coherent statement of what many (if not most) mainstream economists believe, although they don’t usually care to formulate it as well as you did. Naturally, I disagree with it—my whole bo

My previous post was criticized in the comments on the grounds that I “confuse inequality with unfairness.” That’s actually not the case, and in the book I talk about different aspects of inequality (something I did not have a chance to develop in an 800-word blog post). But the point

One of the fundamental premises on which my argument in Ultrasociety is built is that structural inequality is detrimental to cooperative action. By structural inequality I mean large differentials in power. For example, between a slave and a slave-owner, or between a peasant and a lo