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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. In a paper published in the Oxford ...
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 ...
My last blog, and the one before it, explored how leaving a legacy, whether it be a biological legacy—by having children—or a cultural legacy—through ideas and actions—may impact one’s sense of ...