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 ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...

It’s widely accepted conventional wisdom that when it comes to creative works—TV shows, films, music, books—consumers crave an optimal balance between novelty and familiarity. What we choose to ...

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.

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 ...

Human evolution has often been depicted as a process of adaptation, where natural selection and genetic changes drive species toward better-suited traits for survival in their environments. But this ...

This post is in response to How Culture Makes Us Smarter By Steve Stewart-Williams Ph.D. Are we big-brained mammals who have out-evolved ourselves? 'The evidence for the hypothesis that cultural ...

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 ...