Warsaw Summit 1-2 June Forum Ruchu Europejskiego, European Movement International, Evolution Institute, and Collegium Civitas Place: Collegium Civitas, Palace of Science and Culture Evolution Institute Organizers: Nina Witoszek, Vice President, and Jerry Lieberman, co-founder and secretary-treasurer A native of Poland before becoming a Norwegian citizen and research professor) at the Centre for Development and the Environment at Oslo University, Nina is the recipient of the Norwegian Freedom of Expression Foundation Award for “bringing Eastern European perspectives to the public debate in Scan ..read more

The Evolution Institute has partnered with Cambridge University Press to bring you an exciting new publication series: Cambridge Elements in Applied Evolutionary Science. The following text was written by Dr. Emily Emmott, a Human Behavioral Ecologist at University College London and author of the first Element of this series titled Improving Breastfeeding Rates: Evolutionary Anthropological Insights for Public Health. If you are interested in the publication, you can go here to the Cambridge University Press Website.   ___________ I came to the topic of breastfeeding almost accident ..read more

This is our challenge: to move a world of almost 8 billion people, most involved in an economic system with tremendous inequality, a clear imperative to expand, and a chronic tendency to stagnate, toward some real rapprochement with earth. This is a monumental challenge. If nothing else, the Anthropocene idea is the truth of the moment encapsulated as a geological epoch. Yet it explains little of the cause. The question is how to explore social evolution in order to give insight appropriate to the historical moment. Engage for a moment in an exercise to reveal the complexity of social evolutio ..read more

The untenable trajectory of the human economic order on Earth risks unprecedented ecological decay and mass extinctions. Many people deny there is a crisis and pursue business-as-usual, and even those who acknowledge the need to change course can grasp for illusory “solutions” that ignore the depth of the crises, which is another form of denial. Instead, we should face reality: The other-than-human-world now has become almost entirely eclipsed by an unassailable “superorganism”—us, the human species—that continues to expand in evermore destructive fashion. I begin with how my own approach to t ..read more

Almuzara is about to publish a Spanish translation of my book Historical Dynamics. When they asked for a foreword to the Spanish edition, I realized that it has already been 20 years since I wrote Historical Dynamics. So this foreword serves as a kind of retrospective. Here’s the English version. Foreword to the Spanish Edition of Historical Dynamics Historical Dynamics (HD) was my first major work in the new field of Cliodynamics. In fact, it was in the last chapter of HD that I proposed to call this new discipline after Clio (the muse of History) and dynamics (the scienc ..read more

EI has been engaged in learning as much as possible about Norway since its Quality of Life workshop at the University of Memphis in 2011. There we considered what nations received high ratings on the UN Human Developed Index, learning that Norway was repeatedly the highest – with the least inequality according to the UN Gini coefficient. It is now a decade that we have been gathering information and insights on Norway’s world class QoL outcomes. We have had numerous workshops in Norway, conducted hundreds of interviews, published books and articles with our Norwegian colleagues at the Universi ..read more

Half a century ago the biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Since Dobzhansky’s time, evolutionary thinking has made its way into the human sciences to the extent that, I think it’s fair to say, many social and behavioral scientists today would feel comfortable saying that “nothing in psychology, anthropology, sociology, child development, education, public policy, culture, medicine, and mental health makes sense except in the light of evolution.” This is not to say that all scholars, practitioners, and public policymaker ..read more

Many of us feel trapped in a doomsday narrative where our species is defined by hunting, killing, war and destruction. Part of this narrative of violence is rooted in the stories and pictures we hear about our ancient ancestors which often focus on hunting. One of my goals, in designing educational materials around human evolution, is to include a wider array of images of the past. Beyond hunting I also show pictures of people caring for each other, making art, picking flowers, eating fruit, dancing and gathering around the fire. To change our future we need to go back and expand our vision of ..read more

In a previous post, we discussed the emerging collaboration the Evolution Institute has with Mondragon University. We explained how this was made possible by humans having a predisposition to be prosocial, and attributed this to human neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan. When this is culturally reinforced, “good” results can occur that contribute to cooperative behavior within groups which can then be extended between groups to create an enriched environment. Working for the past decade in the most underserved neighborhoods in Pasco County, the Evolution Institute has strived to build stro ..read more

In a recent Newsmax segment, host Rob Schmitt claimed that vaccines “kind of [go] against nature,” and that some diseases are “supposed to wipe out a certain amount of people.” Then, perhaps most aptly, Rob Shmitt states, “(…)that’s just kind of the way evolution goes. Vaccines kind of stand in the way of that.” Here are some fun reactions to the segment: Modern medicine, electricity, treated water, weather resistant buildings; the list of things that improve human well-being and quality of life that are also “against nature” is endless.  And jokes aside, this kind of dangerous misr ..read more