This View of Life
Magazine

When encountering a person we do not look at their feet, torso, or shoulders; we are compelled to first look at them in the face and instantly judge them.

Robert Paul is one of a very few cultural anthropologists who is contributing his extensive ethnographic knowledge to the modern study of cultural evolution.

‘Ruthless’ and ‘demanding’ are two descriptors of Amazon's working environment, sink or swim. But Amazon is not alone. Can evolutionary biology shed some light on why competition in the workplace does not alway produce the best outcomes?

In Barbara Oakley's popular MOOC, Learning How to Learn, they used dozens of insights drawn from evolutionary findings to help induce learners to stick with, and learn from, online materials. Knowledge of evolution, in other words, helped them build the world’s most popular course.

cultural practices, just like biological and psychological traits, are incomprehensible unless we understand their evolutionary origins and raisons d’être.

You don’t need much in the way of normative assumptions to convert facts into values. Consider the assertion: "All else being equal, more wellbeing is better than less." Who could object? It’s all but definitionally true.

Besides racial prejudice, what else are there behind xenophobia? Among the evolved human instincts, we can find at least two for the anti-immigration sentiment: territoriality and the endowment effect.

If you want to think about language and evolution, about language and experience, about language and almost anything, or about almost anything in language, then start, or start all over again, with Daniel Dor’s The Instruction of Imagination.