Childhood Education
Early childhood education is an example of a system that isn’t working, despite everyone’s best intentions. Some of the foremost authorities on child development and education are already stressing the need for an evolutionary perspective. The Evolution Institute brought them together in a workshop held at the University of Miami on November 14-16, 2008, followed [...]
Risky Adolescent Behavior
High-risk activities in adolescence—unprotected sex, substance abuse, violence, and other forms of risky behavior—remain a pervasive and costly problem in Western societies, despite extensive efforts to prevent or reduce these activities through intervention programs. An evolutionary perspective provides a fresh alternative to the mental health model. In particular, risky behaviors might reflect adaptations to harsh environments [...]
Nature of Regulation
The regulation of large-scale human social interactions is arguably the most important public policy issue of our time. Current regulatory systems are not working, in part because of inadequacies in the economic theories upon which they are based. Experimental and behavioral economists are already drawing upon the fields of psychology and (increasingly) neurobiology to remedy [...]
EvoS Consortium
EvoS (for Evolutionary Studies, pronounced as one word) is a campus-wide evolutionary studies program that was initiated by David Sloan Wilson at Binghamton University in 2003 and received National Science Foundation support in 2007 to expand into a nationwide consortium. The vision of EvoS is to make evolutionary theory a common language that can be spoken [...]
Binghamton Neighborhood Project
The Binghamton Neighborhood Project uses the city of Binghamton, New York, as a “field site” for basic and applied research from an evolutionary perspective. Since evolution is fundamentally about the relationship between organisms and their environments, it is essential to study people from all walks of life as they go about their daily lives. This [...]
Evolutionary Religious Studies
Evolutionary theory provides a framework for understanding the nature of religion, along with all other aspects of the human condition. The Evolutionary Religious Studies (ERS) website is designed to promote the study of religion from an evolutionary perspective. It includes a “beginner’s guide”, a directory of scientists and scholars, and a model research project on [...]