Education
Early childhood education is an example of a system that isn’t working, despite everyone’s best intentions. Some of the foremost authorities on child development and education are already stressing the need for an evolutionary perspective. The Evolution Institute brought them together in a workshop held at the University of Miami on November 14-16, 2008, followed [...]
Ethics After Darwin
Ethical inquiry requires assumptions about human nature. In the past, these assumptions have been based on intuition or scientific knowledge available at the time. Today, we are witnessing an explosion of knowledge about the nature of our species from an evolutionary perspective. “Ethics after Darwin” will bring authorities on evolution together with ethicists to consider [...]
Evolutionary Mismatch and What To Do About It
Finding the right interventions is important because restoring the ancestral environment is not always the most feasible or desirable option. Natural selection adapts organisms to their past environments and has no ability to foresee the future. When the environment changes, adaptations to past environments can misfire in the current environment, producing a mismatch that can [...]
Evonomics
There is widespread agreement that economic theory and policy must become based on a more accurate conception of human nature. Although economic and evolutionary thinking have been entwined throughout their histories, current economic theory is dominated by a mathematical tradition initially inspired by 19th century physics, whose assumptions are so constraining that Homo economicus bears [...]
Failed States and Nation Building
The rise of a centralized state that commands real authority throughout its territory can be seen as the reverse of the process by which a state loses its authority and gradually crumbles into a “failed state.” A key aspect of state building involves establishing the internal bonds that make it possible for a disparate congery [...]
Play: Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Outdoor Play
Our goal is to develop a blueprint for restoring neighborhoods as cooperative units and ideal environments for child development. A hidden problem of modern life is the lack of opportunity for self‐ directed outdoor play in children. In previous generations, kids used to run around in mixed age groups, creating their own entertainment, solving their [...]
Quality of Life from an Evolutionary Perspective
Evolution is supposed to adapt organisms to their environments, but the human species seems bent upon its own destruction. Everyone is familiar with the drumbeat of potential calamities: violent conflict…weapons of mass destruction…overpopulation…economic collapse…extreme inequality…environmental degradation…. We expect the workshop to result in a new agenda for basic scientific research, policy formulation, and policy implementation [...]
Risky Adolescent Behavior
High-risk activities in adolescence—unprotected sex, substance abuse, violence, and other forms of risky behavior—remain a pervasive and costly problem in Western societies, despite extensive efforts to prevent or reduce these activities through intervention programs. An evolutionary perspective provides a fresh alternative to the mental health model. In particular, risky behaviors might reflect adaptations to harsh [...]
Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution
Cultural evolution has long been loosely compared to genetic evolution, but only recently has this comparison been taken seriously. In books such as Evolution in Four Dimensions (Jablonka and Lamb 2006), learning and symbolic thought are treated as mechanisms of cross-generational inheritance that function in the same way as genetic inheritance mechanisms. The more we [...]
Social Evolution Forum
http://socialevolutionforum.wordpress.com/