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Cultural Evolution
Art isn't a side note in human history; it's the main text.
Wherever automation rises, religiosity falls.
The history of cartography might have been very different if the Latin version of Muhammad al-Idrisi's atlas had survived instead of the Arabic one.
The arsons were no accident, archaeological evidence suggests.
Metaphors like the Great Chain of Being can lead people to misunderstand evolution and humanity’s place in the web of life.
Your expectations form the way you experience the world.
Gods and angels have been replaced with hi-tech extraterrestrials.
John Templeton Foundation
Evolutionary pressures drove the formation of tribes who encoded their values in myths and symbols. Was this cooperation cursed?
4mins
Ancient societies revered dreams. Modern science tells us why.
Piano Sonata No. 23 offers a window into the way culture became an instrument of Soviet state policy.
Far from being a “dead” pursuit that focuses on old ideas, modern philosophy proposes and debates important, new concepts. All of us can learn from it.
How humans came to feel comfortable among strangers, like those in a café, is an under-explored mystery.
John Templeton Foundation
Mongol forces never fully conquered the continent, but they played a key role in its historical development.
Most people care what others think of them. In many situations, that can be leveraged for the common good.
Fortune cookies emerged from one of America’s darkest moments.
6mins
What beavers and earthworms can teach us about working with, not against, Mother Nature.
In order to figure out how English might evolve in the future, we have to look at how it has changed in the near and distant past.
7mins
Find food, have sex, not die. That’s pretty much all we need to do — but why do we make it so complicated?
The 1,200-year-old "Book of Ingenious Devices" contains designs for futuristic inventions like gas masks, water fountains, and digging machines.
5mins
Expert Michael Spitzer explains how culture can “tune” your musical taste.
Ancient humans crossed the Bering Strait land bridge from Asia into North America. But some of them went back.
Far from practicing witchcraft, the experimentation of medieval alchemists helped bring about the Scientific Revolution.
If comedies do get made today, they usually bypass the big screen and go straight to streaming platforms.
"The Da Vinci Code" popularized the idea that Christians stole much of their theology. It's wrong, especially regarding Christmas.
If aliens are driven mostly by biological imperatives, humanity could be in big trouble if we ever meet technologically advanced beings.
The most important events in history have nothing to do with politics or wars.
We don’t know when or how music was originally invented, but we can now track its evolution across space and time thanks to the Global Jukebox.
You want your baby's name to be unique, but so does everyone else.
The “scientific Buddha” and the idea of Buddhist exceptionalism with regard to science are modern creations.