At the core of evolutionary science is a triad: variation, selection and replication, explains Binghamton University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences David Sloan Wilson, the founder of Binghamton University, State University of New York’s Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program. You can see this triad at work in culture as well, from economics and business, to engineering and the arts, and the functioning of society at all levels.

Knowing how cultural evolution happens also means we can harness it for the larger good, creating a more just and sustainable world. That’s a topic of “Multilevel cultural evolution: From new theory to practical applications,” a new article by Wilson recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences.

Co-authors include Binghamton alumnus Guru Madhavan, MBA ’07, PhD ’09, senior program director at the National Academy of Engineering; Michele J. Gelfand, professor of organizational behavior and psychology at Stanford University; University of Nevada Psychology Professor Steven C. Hayes, who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT); Paul W.B. Atkins, visiting associate professor of psychology with Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and co-founder of the non-profit ProSocial World with Wilson; and microbiologist Rita R. Colwell, former director of the National Science Foundation.

The wide-ranging article explores the three hallmarks of cultural evolution: prosociality, or behavior oriented toward the welfare of others; social control, which enforces prosocial behavior and penalizes those who behave selfishly; and symbolic thought, which relies on a flexible inventory of symbols with shared meaning.

Humans have evolved to live in small, cooperative groups, not as disconnected individuals. To be effective, however, society also requires structure.

Otherwise, strategies that are beneficial on the individual or small-group level become maladaptive: Self-preservation becomes self-dealing, helping friends and family becomes nepotism and cronyism, and patriotism fuels international conflict, for example.

“We have to have the global good in mind and everything that we do in some sense has to be coordinated with the good of the whole,” Wilson said.

A roadmap for evolution

Evolutionary concepts have been misused, however. Take social Darwinism, for example, which is often used to justify competition and harsh social inequities as “survival of the fittest,” a misunderstanding and misapplication of Darwinian theory. “Social engineering” also has insidious implications, Wilson noted.

“We need to ask: Is there anything about evolutionary theory that is especially dangerous in that regard? Or is it the case that anything that can be used as a tool can also be used as a weapon?” Wilson asked. “I think it’s the latter.”

These concepts become weapons when they are used as means of control, with little to no input from the people they impact, he explained. When people decide to use evolutionary principles to shape their own actions and goals, however, these principles are largely benign.

Checks and balances are at the core of multilevel cultural evolution to avoid power imbalances, making it the opposite of social Darwinism, which portrayed social inequities as necessary and inevitable. Social Darwinism actually has little to do with Darwin or his theories, Wilson points out; it’s a stigmatizing term associated with the moral justification for ruthless competition, and probably closer to the principles behind neoclassical economics.

But fields such as economics and business needn’t define themselves with the neoclassical “greed is good” ethos of Milton Freidman. Wilson points to the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom, who proved that groups can self-manage common-pool resources — avoiding the proverbial “tragedy of the commons” if they implement eight “core design principles.”

Wilson collaborated with Ostrom to show that the core design principles can be generalized, providing a key to successful governance for nearly all forms of cooperative activity.

“To begin, you need to have a good, strong sense of identity and purpose; that’s the first core design principle,” Wilson said.

Other principles involve the equitable distribution of benefits and resources, inclusive decision-making, transparent behavior, and levels of response to helpful and unhelpful behavior, as well as fast and fair conflict resolution, local autonomy and authority, and relationships with other groups.

These principles not only build better workplaces, neighborhoods and nations, they can also heal the mind. As social mammals, our minds interpret social isolation as an emergency situation, the authors note, and social support is key for the treatment of such conditions as anxiety and depression.

The tools used in therapy — particularly mindfulness — are also applicable on a societal level, encouraging adaptability and cognitive flexibility, which helps individuals recover from adverse life events. That’s true of groups as well, Wilson said.

Planting the seed

Creating a more prosocial world grounded in equity and cooperation isn’t some unreachable pipe dream.

“There are practical applications,” said Wilson, who established the nonprofit ProSocial World to plant these ideas outside of academia. “Right now, not in some far, distant future, we could be using these ideas to accomplish positive change.”

It’s important to avoid what Wilson calls the archipelago of knowledge and practice, consisting of “many islands with little communication.” Otherwise, ideas and solutions may become trapped in separate silos.

In essence, the EvoS’ speaker series functions that way for students, mingling lectures on bacteria with Neanderthals, morality, the arts and more. Students are exposed to ideas they may not have otherwise encountered, which introduces new paths and possibilities. The same can happen in the larger society, too.

While technological changes can spread from one culture to another over decades or centuries, Wilson hopes to spark societal change more quickly. He draws upon the concept of catalysis in chemistry: Added in small amounts, a catalytic molecule hastens the rate of change, he explains.

As catalytic agents, individuals may inspire changes that would otherwise take decades or not happen at all. And this catalysis can happen in ordinary ways, by leaning into the small-group community mindset that fuels our humanity.

Consider a community garden, for example: Reaching out to different community gardens and sharing knowledge can only benefit everyone involved, Wilson said. And those connections don’t need to consist of dull meetings; they can involve social interactions such as parties and potlucks, which bring people together and encourage them to make connections.

“Imagine repeating that in every walk of life, in our schools or businesses, on every scale from small groups to cities,” he explained.

First discovered 60 years ago, quasars can shine as brightly as a trillion stars packed into a volume the size of our Solar System. In the decades since they were first observed, it has remained a mystery what could trigger such powerful activity. New work led by scientists at the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire has now revealed that it is a consequence of galaxies crashing together.

The collisions were discovered when researchers, using deep imaging observations from the Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma, observed the presence of distorted structures in the outer regions of the galaxies that are home to quasars.

Most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres. They also contain substantial amounts of gas — but most of the time this gas is orbiting at large distances from the galaxy centres, out of reach of the black holes. Collisions between galaxies drive the gas towards the black hole at the galaxy centre; just before the gas is consumed by the black hole, it releases extraordinary amounts of energy in the form of radiation, resulting in the characteristic quasar brilliance.

The ignition of a quasar can have dramatic consequences for entire galaxies — it can drive the rest of the gas out of the galaxy, which prevents it from forming new stars for billions of years into the future.

This is the first time that a sample of quasars of this size has been imaged with this level of sensitivity. By comparing observations of 48 quasars and their host galaxies with images of over 100 non-quasar galaxies, researchers concluded that galaxies hosting quasars are approximately three times as likely to be interacting or colliding with other galaxies.

The study has provided a significant step forward in our understanding of how these powerful objects are triggered and fuelled.

Professor Clive Tadhunter, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Physics and Astronomy, said: “Quasars are one of the most extreme phenomena in the Universe, and what we see is likely to represent the future of our own Milky Way galaxy when it collides with the Andromeda galaxy in about five billion years.

“It’s exciting to observe these events and finally understand why they occur — but thankfully Earth won’t be anywhere near one of these apocalyptic episodes for quite some time.”

Quasars are important to astrophysicists because, due to their brightness, they stand out at large distances and therefore act as beacons to the earliest epochs in the history of the Universe. Dr Jonny Pierce, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, explains:

“It’s an area that scientists around the world are keen to learn more about — one of the main scientific motivations for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was to study the earliest galaxies in the Universe, and Webb is capable of detecting light from even the most distant quasars, emitted nearly 13 billion years ago. Quasars play a key role in our understanding of the history of the Universe, and possibly also the future of the Milky Way.”

Mild traumatic brain injury — concussion — results from a blow or jolt to the head. It can occur as a result of a fall, a sports injury or from a cycling accident or car crash, for example. But despite being labelled ‘mild’, it is commonly linked with persistent symptoms and incomplete recovery. Such symptoms include depression, cognitive impairment, headaches, and fatigue.

While some clinicians in recent studies predict that nine out of 10 individuals who experience concussion will have a full recovery after six months, evidence is emerging that only a half achieve a full recovery. This means that a significant proportion of patients may not receive adequate post-injury care.

Predicting which patients will have a fast recovery and who will take longer to recover is challenging, however. At present, patients with suspected concussion will typically receive a brain scan — either a CT scan or an MRI scan, both of which look for structural problems, such as inflammation or bruising — yet even if these scans show no obvious structural damage, a patient’s symptoms may still persist.

Dr Emmanuel Stamatakis from the Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Division of Anaesthesia at the University of Cambridge said: “Worldwide, we’re seeing an increase in the number of cases of mild traumatic brain injury, particularly from falls in our ageing population and rising numbers of road traffic collisions in low- and middle-income countries.

“At present, we have no clear way of working out which of these patients will have a speedy recovery and which will take longer, and the combination of over-optimistic and imprecise prognoses means that some patients risk not receiving adequate care for their symptoms.”

Dr Stamatakis and colleagues studied fMRI brain scans — that is, functional MRI scans, which look at how different areas of the brain coordinate with each other — taken from 108 patients with mild traumatic brain injury and compared them with scans from 76 healthy volunteers. Patients were also assessed for ongoing symptoms.

The patients and volunteers had been recruited to CENTER-TBI, a large European research project which aims to improve the care for patients with traumatic brain injury, co-chaired by Professor David Menon (head of the division of Anaesthesia) and funded by the European Union.

In results published today in Brain, the team found that just under half (45%) were still showing symptoms resulting from their brain injury, with the most common being fatigue, poor concentration and headaches.

The researchers found that these patients had abnormalities in a region of the brain known as the thalamus, which integrates all sensory information and relays this information around the brain. Counter-intuitively, concussion was associated with increased connectivity between the thalamus and the rest of the brain — in other words, the thalamus was trying to communicate more as a result of the injury — and the greater this connectivity, the poorer the prognosis for the patient.

Rebecca Woodrow, a PhD student in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience and Hughes Hall, Cambridge, said: “Despite there being no obvious structural damage to the brain in routine scans, we saw clear evidence that the thalamus — the brain’s relay system — was hyperconnected. We might interpret this as the thalamus trying to over-compensate for any anticipated damage, and this appears to be at the root of some of the long-lasting symptoms that patients experience.”

By studying additional data from positron emission tomography (PET) scans, which can measure regional chemical composition of body tissues, the researchers were able to make associations with key neurotransmitters depending on which long-term symptoms a patient displayed. For example, patients experiencing cognitive problems such as memory difficulties showed increased connectivity between the thalamus and areas of the brain rich in the neurotransmitter noradrenaline; patients experiencing emotional symptoms, such as depression or irritability, showed greater connectivity with areas of the brain rich in serotonin.

Dr Stamatakis, who is also Stephen Erskine Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge, added: “We know that there already drugs that target these brain chemicals so our findings offer hope that in future, not only might we be able to predict a patient’s prognosis, but we may also be able to offer a treatment targeting their particular symptoms.”

In new 3D computer simulations, astrophysicists modeled black holes of varying masses and then hurled stars (about the size of our sun) past them to see what might happen.

When a star approaches an intermediate-mass black hole, it initially gets caught in the black hole’s orbit, the researchers discovered. After that, the black hole begins its lengthy and violent meal. Every time the star makes a lap, the black hole takes a bite — further cannibalizing the star with each passage. Eventually, nothing is left but the star’s misshapen and incredibly dense core.

At that point, the black hole ejects the remains. The star’s remnant flies to safety across the galaxy.

Not only do these new simulations hint at the unknown behaviors of intermediate-mass black holes, they also provide astronomers with new clues to help finally pinpoint these hidden giants within our night sky.

“We obviously cannot observe black holes directly because they don’t emit light,” said Northwestern’s Fulya Kıroğlu, who led the study. “So, instead, we have to look at the interactions between black holes and their environments. We found that stars undergo multiple passages before being ejected. After each passage, they lose more mass, causing a flair of light as its ripped apart. Each flare is brighter than the last, creating a signature that might help astronomers find them.”

Kıroğlu will present this research during the virtual portion of the American Physical Society’s (APS) April meeting. “Tidal disruption events of stars by intermediate-mass black holes” will take place on April 25, as a part of the session “Medium: Cosmic Rays, AGN & Galaxies.” . The Astrophysical Journal has accepted the study for publication.

Kıroğlu is an astrophysics graduate student at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and member of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). She is advised by paper co-author Frederic Rasio, the Joseph Cummings Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Weinberg and member of CIERA.

While astrophysicists have proven the existence of lower- and higher-mass block holes, intermediate-mass black holes have remained elusive. Created when supernovae collapse, stellar remnant black holes are about 3 to 10 times the mass of our sun. On the other end of the spectrum, supermassive black holes, which lurk in the centers of galaxies, are millions to billions times the mass of our sun.

Should they exist, intermediate-mass black holes would fit somewhere in the middle — 10 to 10,000 times more massive than stellar remnant black holes but not nearly as massive as supermassive black holes. Although these intermediate-mass black holes theoretically should exist, astrophysicists have yet to find indisputable observational evidence.

“Their presence is still debated,” Kıroğlu said. “Astrophysicists have uncovered evidence that they exist, but that evidence can often be explained by other mechanisms. For example, what appears to be an intermediate-mass black hole might actually be the accumulation of stellar-mass black holes.”

To explore the behavior of these evasive objects, Kıroğlu and her team developed new hydrodynamic simulations. First, they created a model of a star, consisting of many particles. Then, they sent the star toward the black hole and calculated the gravitational force acting on the particles during the star’s approach.

“We can calculate specifically which particle is bound to the star and which particle is disrupted (or no longer bound to the star),” Kıroğlu said.

Through these simulations, Kıroğlu and her team discovered that stars could orbit an intermediate-mass black hole as many as five times before finally being ejected. With each pass around the black hole, the star loses more and more of its mass as its ripped apart. Then, the black hole kicks the leftovers — moving at searing speeds — back out into the galaxy. The repeating pattern would create a stunning light show that should help astronomers recognize — and prove the existence of — intermediate-mass black holes.

“It’s amazing that the star isn’t fully ripped apart,” Kıroğlu said. “Some stars might get lucky and survive the event. The ejection speed is so high that these stars could be identified as hyper-velocity stars, which have been observed at the centers of galaxies.”

Next, Kıroğlu plans to simulate different types of stars, including giant stars and binary stars, to explore their interactions with black holes.

The robot fish was fitted with a twisted and coiled polymer (TCP) to drive it forward, a light-weight low cost device that relies on temperature change to generate movement, which also limits its speed.

A TCP works by contracting like muscles when heated, converting the energy into mechanical motion . The TCP used in this work is warmed by Joule heating — the pass of current through an electrical conductor produces thermal energy and heats up the conductor. By minimising the distance between the TCP on one side of the robot fish and the spring on the other, this activates the fin at the rear, enabling the robot fish to reach new speeds. The undulating flapping of its rear fin was measured at a frequency of 2Hz, two waves per second. The frequency of the electric current is the same as the frequency of tail flap.

The findings, published at the 6th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft 2023), provide a new route to raising the actuation — the action of causing a machine or device to operate — frequency of TCPs through thermomechanical design and shows the possibility of using TCPs at high frequency in aqueous environments.

Lead author Tsam Lung You from Bristol’s Department of Engineering Mathematics said: “Twisted and coiled polymer (TCP) actuator is a promising novel actuator, exhibiting attractive properties of light weight, low-cost high energy density and simple fabrication process.

“They can be made from very easily assessable materials such as a fishing line and they contract and provide linear actuation when heated up. However, because of the time needed for heat dissipation during the relaxation phase, this makes them slow.”

By optimising the structural design of the TCP-spring antagonistic muscle pair and bringing their anchor points closer together, it allowed the posterior fin to swing at a larger angle for the same amount of TCP actuation.

Although this requires greater force, TCP is a strong actuator with high work energy density, and is still able to drive the fin.

Until now, TCPs have been mostly used for applications such as wearable devices and robotic hands. This work opens up more areas of application where TCP can be used, such as marine robots for underwater exploration and monitoring.

Tsam Lung You added: “Our robotic fish swam at the fastest actuation frequency found in a real TCP application and also the highest locomotion speed of a TCP application so far.

“This is really exciting as it opens up more opportunities of TCP application in different areas.”

The team now plan to expand the scale and develop a knifefish-inspired TCP-driven ribbon fin robot that can swim agilely in water.