Evolution, the theory that has already proven itself for understanding the rest of life, is equally relevant for understanding the human condition. With understanding comes the capacity for improvement. Thus, evolutionary theory can be used to improve the quality of human life in a practical sense.

I have dedicated the...

A flurry of recent activity indicates that evolution is beginning to occupy center stage in economic debates--and not a moment too soon.

Recently published books include Robert Frank's The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good (in which he predicts...

America famously leads the world in its denial of evolution and politicians tremble at the word for fear of losing the vote. Even those who accept evolution typically associate it with fossils, dinosaurs, and nature documentaries. Here's an idea that's new for almost everyone -- using Darwin's theory as a...

In T&R XIV I showed that prejudice against group selection is impervious to evidence from laboratory experiments. It is also impervious to evidence from the wild.

I will focus on one of many examples that can be provided. In 1995, Robert Heinsohn and Craig Packer published an...

In the storybook portrayal of science, theories are tested by experiments, which are conducted in laboratories so that the conditions can be rigorously controlled.

How would group selection be tested in the laboratory? Let's begin with the thousands of selection experiments that have already been conducted in the laboratory...

John Horgan, whose article on evolution and war was the subject of my last blog, has written a blog in reply and informed me of a second article that he has written on the subject. Since I accused him of flunking Evolution 101, I shouldn't be...

War has been part of the human condition throughout recorded and archeological history. Violent between-group conflict is also part of nature, from epic battles between ant colonies, to the territorial conflicts of lion prides, to the raiding parties of chimps.

Is war part of our nature? That question has...

Evolutionary psychology, once the darling of the public media, has been dumped in a recent Newsweek article by journalist Sharon Begley. Return accusations are beginning to fly from evolutionary psychologists, who accuse Begley of willful distortions and scientific incompetence (e.g., 1,2).

As usual for romantic quarrels,...

Pity people who become icons. Once they represent an important idea in the minds of others, they can't change their iconic status, even when they change their own minds.

Such was the fate of William D. Hamilton, the legendary founder of inclusive fitness theory, which was dubbed kin...

Meet Athena Aktipis--evolutionist, mother of two, and salsa dance instructor in her spare time. Perhaps it was the dancer in Athena that caused her to teach multilevel selection by having the students get up and move.

Each student is given a wooden stick with an A (for Altruistic)...

Richard Dawkins did not invent naïve gene selectionism (see T&R X) but he spread it far and wide with the publication of The Selfish Gene. Let's follow his logic, beginning on page 6 of the 1989 paperback edition:

This book will show how both individual selfishness and individual...

Naïve group selectionism (see T&R III) is the unquestioning belief that adaptations can evolve at all levels of the biological hierarchy--for the good of individuals, groups, species and even ecosystems--without requiring special conditions. Many people are prone to naïve group selectionism, today no less than in the past. That...

The haystack model (see T&R VIII) includes many assumptions but one was especially biased. Recall that each haystack is colonized by a single fertilized female bearing four genes coding for docility or aggressiveness--two of her own and two from her mate. Maynard Smith assumed that if even one of...

Group selection was decisively rejected on theoretical grounds, according to the patriotic history of individual selection theory. Richard Dawkins declared in 1982 that group selection had "soaked up more theoretical ingenuity than its biological interest warrants" and compared further inquiry to the futile search for a perpetual motion machine. Richard...

One memorable Christmas morning, as our kids were gathering around the tree, I was on my way upstairs to get a sweater when I smelled something really bad. I knew that smell. Our cat had diarrhea and had deposited a wet one somewhere. I walked all over the house trying...

Most people are prepared to admit that we are influenced by our cultures in ways that we don't understand. As a proverb puts it, the hardest thing for a fish to see is water. Part of the "water" of Victorian culture was an assumption of European superiority. Darwin was progressive...

One reason that I don't spend a lot of time bashing religion is because there are so many other flagrant departures from factual reality to pick on. Take the patriotic history of nations--the leaders who can do no wrong, the noble "us" and evil "them"--who needs supernatural agents when we...

By the 1960's, evolutionary theory had settled into a comfortable paradigm called the Modern Synthesis. With other major issues apparently settled (go here for an update on the Modern Synthesis), the issue of group selection began to occupy center stage. George C. Williams was not the only critic...

In their book Darwinism Evolving, David J. Depew and Bruce H. Weber make the interesting point that pre-Darwinian notions did not come to an abrupt halt with the advent of Darwin's theory. Instead, they often became repackaged in superficially Darwinian terms.

That certainly applies to notions of adaptation...

Consider some standard examples of design in nature: the aerodynamic wing of the bird, the concealing coloration of the moth, the dense fur of the polar bear. Darwin's insight was to explain these adaptations as a product of natural selection: individuals vary, some survive and reproduce better than others, and...