One of my favorite big-think papers of recent years tries to explain humanity’s societal evolution, “The computational power of a human society: a new model of social evolution” by David H. Wolpert ...

Would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? The famous question, though implausible, reflects a ...

Learn how ants traded individual protection for collective power — and what it reveals about how complex societies evolve.

With the world experiencing the worst pandemic since 1918, people may be wondering whether our way of life is secure. Looking at how civilizational breakdown has happened before can help us understand ...

Amid hundreds of origin stories for hundreds of world societies, religion offers a tidy explanation for why humans started working together. It tells us that people with a common belief in a ...

The appearance of moralizing gods in religion occurred after—and not before—the emergence of large, complex societies, according to new research. This finding upturns conventional thinking on the ...

He was right. But Churchill never imagined a government that would add 10,000 year after year. That’s what we have in America. We have 160,000 pages of rules from the feds alone. States and localities ...

Some ants thrive by choosing numbers over strength. Instead of heavily protecting each worker, they invest fewer resources in ...

Scientists used a drone and a multi-agent computerized system for complex social structure modeling to test, for example, whether individuals in a herd of feral horses synchronize according to their ...

Complex societies were thought to only exist among mammals, including humans, other primates, elephants, giraffes and dolphins. But a new study shows that vulturine guinea fowl, a bird with ...

Step aside, honeybees, there’s a new pollinator in town. Hollis Woodard of University of California, Riverside shares the intricate life cycle of bumblebees, whose queens spend most of their life ...

With the world experiencing the worst pandemic since 1918, many people may wonder if civilization is as secure as it might be. History offers insight into this question. Civilizational breakdown is a ...