From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture ...

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 ...

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 ...

It is a basic understanding in anthropology that the course of human evolution differs fundamentally from that of other animals due to its heavy reliance on cultural rather than biological adaptation.

Think of evolution, and you might think of Darwin's finches and natural selection. But according to researchers writing in the journal BioScience, it is not our genes that are determining our current ...

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 ...

The struggle for power between women and men — the so-called battle of the sexes — is as complex as it is longstanding. But can theory initially developed to explain animal behavior also help us ...

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 ...

Recently, I was walking with some fellow parents after nursery drop-off when we came across a five-pound note lying on the pavement. We stood around it for a moment, a bit awkwardly, until someone ...

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 ...