Network

The Applied Cultural Evolution (A.C.E.) Network is an international network of researchers and practitioners applying the science of cultural evolution to encourage beneficial social change around the world.

The network has more than 150 members across 26 countries. We welcome researchers and practitioners interested in applying the science of cultural evolution to encourage beneficial social change:

Apply here to join!

Global Partners

Current Efforts

1. Completing our educational infographics for public consumption
2. Publishing our synthesis paper on applied science of beneficial social change
3. Growing a network across many topic domains with content and activities
4. Developing a cooperative and shared leadership model
5. Developing institutional sustainability within the Cultural Evolution Society

History

2026. Cultural Evolution Society makes a moves toward making application of cultural evolution a focus at the 2026 Cultural Evolution Society meeting in Rabat, Morocco.

2025. Evolve and Sustain becomes the Applied Cultural Evolution (ACE) Network. I make a fun tattoo logo for those who feel that the effort deserves to feel like a bad-ass biker gang. I have stickers if you want them.

2024. Rebecca Koomen and I present the results of our Sustainability Applied Working Group, at the Cultural Evolution Society Transformation Fund Capstone meeting in Durham. Our process is represented in the following live-scribe infographic:

2022. Rebecca Koomen and I lead the Cultural Evolution Society’s Sustainability Applied Working Group (AWG) with funding from the Cultural Evolution Society Transformation Fund (CES-TF) from the John Templeton Foundation. We host a 2 year process of global online workshops to explain, test, and develop tools for applying cultural evolution with practitioners and stakeholders in Business, NGO, Government, Education, Community and Grassroots groups. The project culminates in a workshop at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig in early 2024.

2022. Maja Schlüter and I lead a working group at the KLI in Austria on Evolutionary Theories for Social-Ecological Change. COVID-19 causes havoc. We publish an paper on how to integrate evolutionary theory with social-ecological systems research.

2019. Evolve and Sustain grows to over 100 members.

2018. We publish the SESYNC workshop papers in a special issue on Applying Cultural Evolution to Sustainability Challenges in Sustainability Science.

2016. At the first meeting of the Cultural Evolution Society in Jena, Germany, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and I held and impromptu meeting of interested researchers and Evolve and Sustain became the unofficial communication tool for the Society’s Sustainability Working Group.

2014. Jeremy Brooks and I lead a working group at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), to explore social-environmental change using the theory and empirical data.

2014. Marco Janssen, Karolina Safarzynska and I lead a working group at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis to build mathematical models of the cultural evolution of environmental behavior (NIMBioS). Two models from that project are Reducing global inequality increases local cooperation: a simple model of group selection with a global externality [paper], and Adoption as a social marker: Innovation diffusion with outgroup aversion [paper]

2013. I hosted a workshop at the Schoodic Institute, where we wrote the framework paper: A multilevel evolutionary framework for sustainability analysis in Ecology and Society.

2013. Jeremy Brooks, Vicken Hillis and I started an email list for researchers interested in developing cultural evolution as an applied framework for solving environmental and sustainability challenges. It was called Evolve & Sustain.