Links from the show:

* The Dance of Innovation: Infrastructure, Social Oscillation, and the Evolution of Societies

* Follow the Skeptic Research Center Team on Twitter

* The False Allure of Group Selection by Steven Pinker

* Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

* The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It

About my guest:

Kevin McCaffree is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. He is the author or co-author of three books, co-editor of Theoretical Sociology: The Future of a Disciplinary Foundation and series editor (with Jonathan H. Turner) of Evolutionary Analysis in the Social Sciences. In addition to these works, he has authored or co-authored more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and handbook chapters published on a variety of topics ranging from cultural evolution to criminology to the sociology of empathy.