Common pool resources comprise around 65 percent of Earth's surface and vast tracts of the ocean. While examples of successful governance of these resources exist, the circumstances and mechanisms ...

Recently, I was walking with some fellow parents after nursery drop-off when we came across a five-pound note lying on the pavement. We stood around it for a moment, a bit awkwardly, until someone ...

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 ...

Cultural changes operate on time scales so fast, they drown out any effect of a process that requires generations. Biological evolution is a “breadth-first” process: randomly generate huge numbers of ...

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 ...

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 ...

The killer whale on boat “violence” doesn’t seem to be going away. Last week, an orca (Orcinus orca) reportedly launched itself into a yacht off the coast of the North Sea. The event, which wasn’t ...

The trajectory of life on Earth has always been predicated by genetic evolution, but two scientists from the University of Maine argue that culture is now the main force shaping our lives. A new study ...