For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the quest to unify the fragmented study of cultural evolution.
One of the few constants of human culture is that it is always changing — sometimes quickly, sometimes almost imperceptibly. The study of the ways cultures evolve has also been in flux and was, until recently, deeply fragmented. Psychology, biology, sociology, anthropology, history, economics, archaeology, and other fields have all taken up the topic, but often without common language to talk across disciplines — or a venue for key where conversations can take place.
When David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at SUNY-Binghamton and founder of the Evolution Institute, helped to organize a survey of 250 academics whose work touched on concepts of cultural evolution, one of his surprising discoveries was the fragmented nature of their professional networks: together they were affiliated with more than 400 academic societies. It was a stunning picture of the atomization of the field, and confirmation of Wilson and his colleagues’ belief that the best way forward for cultural evolution would be, ironically, yet another academic society to allow those various social networks to intersect.