In my previous post, Historians and Historical Databases, I discussed how the Seshat Databank would be impossible without a close collaboration with historians and other humanities scholars. Today I want to give a specific example of how this collaboration works. For those who have no

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

I recently finished reading Why Did Europe Conquer the World? by Philip T. Hoffman. Hoffman proposes a new explanation for the perennial question, Why Europe? Why did that cultural and technological backwater, Western Europe, suddenly embarked on the path to global domination. By 1914

I still have a vivid recollection of the seminar that David Sloan Wilson gave to the Zoology Department at Duke University, where I was a graduate student in the early 1980s. In his typical enthusiastic fashion David gave a great talk about group selection, explaining why it’s an impo

  There are more problems with the Stratfor article on the geopolitics of Russia, than merely getting many of its facts wrong (see my previous post). Any interpretation of history and, certainly, any forecast of a possible future trajectory must be based on some theory, whether i

Two weeks ago I went to a studio in Amherst, MA, to participate in a BBC Forum on Hierarchy. It was broadcasted last week, and you can listen to it here. I arrived at the studio in plenty of time, but there were inevitable SNAFUs. First, I couldn’t get into the building (not sure why

Over the last two years I’ve written a number of blogs exploring the role of warfare in cultural group selection (you can see these blogs collected under the heading Ways of War in Popular Blogs and Series). Today I’d like to return to the question, What makes war productive as an eng

Thank you, Joe and all people who left comments. It has been an extremely thought-provoking discussion, so I thought it’s worth a separate blog to address the issues that most resonated with me. Let me start by repeating that the title, “War! What is It Good For?” was not mine, but Ia

I’ve just returned from California, where I spent last two weeks. I dislike long-distance air travel, and when I do it, I try to hit as many birds with the same stone, so to speak. This means bunching up as many talks and visits as possible. On this trip I started at Stanford, then we

The title of today’s blog (“The Truth is Born in Argument”) is a translation of a Russian saying (в споре рождается истина). For a long time I thought it was simply a Russian version of something that Ancient Romans would say, but as far as I can tell, there is no such Latin proverb (