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

As long-time readers of this blog know, I am not only a scientist, but also a scientific publisher. I founded and indie imprint Beresta Books in 2015 to publish academic and popular non-fiction books that do not fit comfortably within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The main, but

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

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

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

Last weekend we were visiting my stepson and his family in New Hampshire. He has an interest in astronomy, and he suggested that after dinner we go out and watch the International Space Station (ISS). You can get a schedule of ISS appearances on the NASA site. We went outside to a cle

  I’ve written before that the new discipline of Cultural Evolution is going through a phase transition. Now we are about to take the next logical step, and start the Society for the Study of Cultural Evolution. The decision was made at a workshop on Advancing the Study of

Institutions – this was the common theme in the two workshops, in which I participated during the last two weeks (in Frankfurt and Knoxville). It is clear that institutions play an immensely important role in the rise of complex societies. But what precisely do they do? And how can we

In a news article published by this week’s Science magazine, Wealth may have driven the rise of today’s religions, Lizzie Wade writes: Today’s most popular religions all have one thing in common: a focus on morality. But the gods didn’t always care whether you are a bad person. Resear

The previous blog set the framework for a discussion of the evolution of the state in Egypt, and promised that I would next consider some of the theories proposed by Egyptologists. First, though, let’s put this theoretical discussion in a broader context. At a very broad level, most t