In secularized modern Western societies, moral opposition to the liberalization of abortion, gay adoption, euthanasia, and suicide often relies on justifications based on other-oriented motives (mainly, protection of the weak, e.g., children). Moreover, some argue that the truly open-minded people may be those who, against the stream, oppose the established dominant liberal values in modern soc...

If, according to Gaetano Mosca, the Italian social thinker, we define elites as individuals and groups, that, as a result of the power they gain, they plan idea and, as a result of that, make decisions that are effective in the community action; thus, at the macro and national levels, the elites and experts of each country are considered as the most important and valuable treasure of the countr...

Modern excavations yielded a distribution of the house areas in the ancient Egyptian city Akhetaten, which was populated for a short period during the 14th century B.C. Assuming that the house area has a power law dependence of the wealth of its inhabitants allows us to make a comparison of the wealth distributions in ancient and modern societies.

The altruism of insect workers has puzzled researchers for decades. Inclusive fitness theory suggests that high relatedness has been key in promoting such altruism. Recent theory, however, indicates that the intermediate levels of relatedness found within insect societies are too low to directly cause the extreme altruism observed in many species. Instead, recent results show that workers are f...

The WHO's International Studies of Schizophrenia conclude that schizophrenia may have a more benign course in "developing" societies than in the West. The authors focus on this finding's most common corollary: cultural schemata are shaped by the transition from agrarian to industrial society. Developing societies are viewed as traditional, gemeinschaft cultures lacking the stigmatizing beliefs ...