Evolutionary Theories in the Social Sciences
Latest notes and announcements from the field
The Economist reports ingenious new research by Roger Dunbar to test the grandmother hypothesis, namely that women after their menopause, will invest a lot more time and energy to ensuring that their daughters have offspring. He analyzed 2 billion phone…
Read more →Johann Peter Murmann has published an inductive case study entitled Coevolution of Industries and Important Features of Their Environments. Using a comparative historical method and drawing on evidence from five countries over a 60-year period, this paper spells out how…
Read more →David Sloan Wilson argues that to gain real knowledge of humanity, every field needs to drink from the “cup” of evolutionary theory. But he argues that behavioral economics as practiced today pays too little attention to evolutionary theory. Read the…
Read more →Berkeley geology Professor Walter Alavrez and one of his former students, Roland Saekow, have created a cool software to visualize all of history–yes you have heard it right. It takes you from the big bang to history on the human…
Read more →Edge.org just held a noteworthy conference on the THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY. In his NY column The Moral Naturalists David Brooks wets your appetitive to watch the contributions of leading scholars in the new field of evolutionary morality. All…
Read more →Edge.org published a stimulating interview with W. Brian Arthur on his new book, The Nature of Technology. After autobiographical comments that may not interest all readers, Arthur gives an overview how the economy evolves as a consequence of postiive and…
Read more →Howard E. Aldrich, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, David L. Hull, Thorbjoern Knudsen, Joel Mokyr, and Viktor J. Vanberg have jointly published an article “In defence of Generalized Darwinism” in the Journal of Evolutionary Economics. The article is more nuanced the previous…
Read more →“If ever there was a scientific theory that is fundamentally historical, that purports to explain change over time, it is evolution through natural selection and its corollary, humankind’s dual inheritance. Yet I have to admit that my fellow historians, teaching…
Read more →Stephen Toulmin, author of Human understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts has died. Read the obituaries by Michael Ruse in the Chronicle of Higher Education and William Grimes in the New York Times.
Read more →Steven Shapin, Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard, takes the occasion of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday to review in the London Review of Books the influece of Darwin in science as well in general culture.…
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