I’ve been back from our vacation for several days, but have been prostrated with a nasty cold. On one hand it was glorious to enjoy being outside, bask in the sun, and swim in the ocean. But the toll vacations impose is much greater than the actual time spent away. You have to add day

Although publishing in PNAS is a bit of a pain (there are a lot of pesky formatting and other requirements) and expensive (in particular, we had to pay, so that you all could have free access to our article), the redeeming feature of this journal is that they practically guarantee goo

Over the last two weeks I did not have any time left for blogging. First, I have moved from Connecticut to Aarhus, where I will be for the next several months. Or, at least, this is where I will be based – I already have a lot of trips planned, all over Europe. Second, I have already

Both the Sci Foo Camp at the GooglePlex and the symposium at the Evolution meeting in Snowbird were extremely productive and enjoyable experiences. I’ll write about some of the sessions I went to at the Sci Foo later. BTW, my own session on the strange decline of cooperation in Americ

A year ago, together with Sergey Gavrilets and Laura Fortunato, we organized a conference at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis in Knoxville. The main theme was how we build and test theory of the evolution of social complexity. After the end of the confe

A recurrent idea in Steven Pinker’s essay is that group selection “adds little to what we have always called ‘history’.” I argue, on the contrary, that cultural multi-level selection (CMLS) provides a highly productive theoretical framework for the study of human history, including (a

When I was in graduate school at Duke University in the early 1980s I remember a young professor visiting from Michigan State who gave a talk about group selection. The professor was of course David Sloan Wilson, because at the time he was the only academic willing to stick his neck o