The archaeological record of North America has long been a laboratory for evolutionary studies. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, culture historians would regularly turn to evolutionism as a source of archaeological explanations. Sometimes the explanations were broadly Darwinian in nature, with reference to processes such as selection and genetic transmission, and other times they were ...

Inclusive fitness maximization is a basic building block for biological contributions to any theory of the evolution of society. There is a view in mathematical population genetics that nothing is caused to be maximized in the process of natural selection, but this is explained as arising from a misunderstanding about the meaning of fitness maximization. Current theoretical work on inclusive fi...

Distinct types of collective intelligence are prominent over different countries. This study explores why some types of collective intelligence knowledge services flourish in some countries but not in others by employing an analogy related to Darwin’s evolutionary theory. This study uses geographical isolation theory and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory (such as the uncertainty avoidance i...

POPULAR understanding of the ‘Darwinian Revolution’ is dominated by the metaphor of a war between science and religion. We are used to being told that Darwin’s theory was perceived as a threat to the religious values that most Victorians accepted as the moral foundations of their society. The claim that we had evolved from the apes would undermine the assumption that the world of moral and spir...

Two field studies using 1,004 "lost letters" were designed to test the hypotheses that returned responses would be greater in small towns than from a city, that addressees' affiliation with a group either (1) opposed to physical education in schools, (2) supporting gay and lesbian teachers, or (3) advocating Creationism or Darwinism would reduce the return rate. Of 504 letters "lost" in Study A...

Sociobiology has made a resurgence in recent years, but has become enmeshed in political controversy. Indeed, much of the work in sociobiology has been used to justify repressive or racist measures. It is argued that the unfortunate alliance of some sociobiologists and politicians is a poor basis for discrediting the field itself; that a science of sociobiology is possible and, if we seek to kn...

As the prime unification of Darwinism and genetics, the Modern Synthesis continues to epitomize mainstay evolutionary theory. Many decades after its formulation, its anchor assumptions remain fixed: conflict between macro organic organisms and selection at that level represent the near totality of any evolutionary narrative. However, intervening research has revealed a less easily appraised cel...