Social life of human beings was utterly transformed during the Holocene. Agriculture, large-scale organized warfare, elites, rulers, bureaucracies, writing, and monumental architecture evolved independently in many world regions at markedly different times. These are truly universal f

The question of how we can learn useful lessons from history, which would help us navigate the troubled waters ahead has been much on my mind. You can find some of my thoughts on this subject in my review of Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome. It’s also an important theme

Sweden and Denmark are both Nordic countries speaking similar languages, sharing a lot of culture and a lot of common history. But they followed very different approaches to managing the Covid-19 pandemic. Denmark was among the first in Europe to shut down schools, restaurants and oth

We are now in the mid-game of the Covid-19 pandemic and it is a good time to take stock of where we are and where we might be going. It is already clear, for example, that the effect of the pandemic on demography is going to be slight—because much less than 1 percent of population wil

For me the greatest eye-opener in The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley by Victor Hwang and Greg Horowitt was a realization that starting your own innovative company is a deeply irrational decision. Considering the amount of effort (and often your own money) t

One of the chief reasons I became an advocate of the Cultural Multilevel Selection (CMLS) theory is that it wonderfully clarifies the relationship between competition and cooperation. Competition between groups (up to whole societies) fosters within-group cooperation. Competition with

The level of dysfunction characterizing our political elites has reached a new high yesterday when the Senate failed to agree to a House-passed bill to keep the United States government funded for another month. Although the Republicans have the majority in the Senate, they don’

One hardly ever sees news from Austria or Czechia* in the American press. Yet recent developments in these two small European countries have big implications for the continuing viability of the European integration process. The Austrian People’s Party poster: Kurz: Now. Or never

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