Humans really do rule the world. We took over fast and far, more than any other wild vertebrates. We inhabit nearly every ...

Scientists at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and the University of Bordeaux in France report that human cultural know-how grew through a long, measured shift from casual ...

Common pool resources comprise around 65 percent of Earth's surface and vast tracts of the ocean. While examples of successful governance of these resources exist, the circumstances and mechanisms ...

Knowing how cultural evolution happens also means we can harness it for the larger good, creating a more just and sustainable world, according to a new article. Evolution goes beyond the genetic code ...

Jonathan R. Goodman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations ...

In Part One of this series, we saw that culture doesn't suffer from the problem that Darwin's theory of natural selection successfully solved: the problem of how change accumulates in biological ...

Of the 8.7 million species on Earth, why are human beings the only one that paints self-portraits, walks on the Moon and worships gods? For decades, many scholars have argued that the difference stems ...

Eli Elster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

Cultural changes operate on time scales so fast, they drown out any effect of a process that requires generations. Biological evolution is a “breadth-first” process: randomly generate huge numbers of ...