Socioecology Research Today

In 2010, formicologist E.O. Wilson proposed his theory of group selection as the explanation for the evolution of complex altruistic social behaviors. As described by Paul Bloom in the New York Times Book Review, it is “the notion that a gene for helping behavior can thrive even if it’s disadvantageous for the individual—so long as [...]

Political scientist Clive Hamilton from the Charles Sturt University in Canberra Australia has published a new book Earthmaster: playing God with the climate. I have not yet read the book but I have listened to an extended interview this morning given by Amy Goodman in which Dr. Hamilton presents the book’s thesis that geo-engineering is [...]

The area known as Central America and the Caribbean includes the least developed countries in the Americas. In an effort to understand the population dynamics of this region a little better, I spent some time examining this group of nations as if they were a single genographic unit. Geographically, the region encompasses a large circle [...]

Shedding light on conflict ridden areas of the world is one of the applications of y-dna genography. Today, due to the increasing tensions in the area, the focus should be northeast Asia: namely, the PRC, both Koreas (considered as a single unit), Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines. These nations are united by being places where [...]

We often evaluate ecosystems according to their natural biodiversity. However we rarely see these metrics applied to human populations. Supposing we wanted to evaluate the human diversity of nations. How could this be done. Among the several methods that come to mind is the use of a genetic proxy for diversity, the y-dna haplogroup. Using [...]

Military conflict is flaring in Mali, with France and the AU already or planning to join the fray. Whenever a crisis such as this is imminent, SRT offers the genographic angle in an attempt to help identify potential underlying causes to the conflict.   Geographically, Mali consists of a Southern region, the Sahel, and then [...]

In my book Ecocide, I speculated that the goal of environmental sustainability should be the minimization of entropy in our use of materials and energy. There has been a fair amount of discussion over the past several years on the subject of the Law of Maximum Entropy Production (LMEP) and I want to take a [...]

62 years, many human tragedies, and 7 Nobel prizes later, the tangled web known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains knotted. In the spirit of bringing some new ideas to this problem I mention a few that would help the people of that region regain their futures. Clearly, the status quo is no way to live, [...]

The Kurds, like the Palestinians and the Hebrews, are an ancient indigenous peoples of the Greater Arabian peninsula. Their world population of about 30 million exceeds the Palestinian world population (8.2 million) and the Hebrew world population (14 million). Their ancestral homeland encompasses portions of Eastern Turkey (15.4 million), Northern Syria (1.8 million), Northern Iraq [...]

Over the past several years I’ve read a few novels wherein one, or more, of the main characters is a scientist and the plot involves the conduct of scientific research. I am so struck by the negative portrayal of scientists and scientific research in these works that I feel I must raise the issue of [...]