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 ...
Scientists at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome and the University of Bordeaux in France report that human cultural know-how grew through a long, measured shift from casual ...
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. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...
Eli Elster does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...
Recent investigations into primate behaviour have underscored the importance of cultural evolution — the process by which behaviours and skills are socially transmitted and refined over successive ...
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 ...
It’s widely accepted conventional wisdom that when it comes to creative works—TV shows, films, music, books—consumers crave an optimal balance between novelty and familiarity. What we choose to ...