|
aa2db9b
|
The altruistic gene doesn't help just any randomly chosen individual. In a sense, it helps copies of itself in a different individual. Generally speaking, full siblings share 50 percent of their genes, so if I can help more than two of my sisters, even at the expense of sacrificing myself, then, on average, such behavior will be favored by natural selection. Hence the famous quip by the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane. When asked wh..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
a36d3bd
|
It takes at least 100 human generations for agricultural societies to develop into states,
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
6cee6ac
|
We know that, over the past 10,000 years, larger polities consistently outcompeted smaller ones, with the result that 99.8 percent of people today live in countries with populations of one million or more.
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
c69bda5
|
Why was cultural group selection the key to the transition from forager to farmer? Because you cannot switch to farming when everybody else in your community is foraging. The whole group needs to shift together. It requires a new set of cultural norms and institutions shared by all. The most important such institution would have been property rights over the food that you have grown.157 The
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
2746294
|
Patrick Kirch concludes: "By the time of initial contact with Europeans, Hawaiians had taken the older Polynesian concepts of chiefship and rank, and subjected them to a form of hypertrophy, the logical extension of which was that their rulers, their kings, were now held to be divine. This was not simply a quantitative extension of the Ancestral Polynesian ranking system; it was truly a qualitative change by which Hawaiian society had enter..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
90cc9d2
|
The transition from egalitarian small-scale societies to archaic states did not happen as soon as people settled down in farming villages. Polynesians colonized Hawaii around 800 CE, and it took around eight centuries for archaic states to emerge.144 What's more, the Polynesians already had a lot of the cultural elements needed to develop a centralized, hierarchical society. Because agriculture arrived on the Pacific islands around 1500 BCE..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
612b851
|
Ashoka not only exhorted others to cultivate Dhamma, he practiced what he preached. He abolished human and animal sacrifice. He "made provision for two types of medical treatment: medical treatment for humans and medical treatment for animals." Wherever medical herbs suitable for humans or animals are not available, I have had them imported and grown. Wherever medical roots or fruits are not available I have had them imported and grown. Alo..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
f31c6a3
|
But while Ashoka is unusual in his exceptional degree of care for the wellbeing of his subjects, he is not unique. In fact, he represents a new trend: all across Eurasia, rulers were getting interested in what today we would probably call social justice. In
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
0c87272
|
This is not to deny that there have been plenty of wicked kings in the past 2,500 years. Most likely they were in the majority. Nevertheless, the new trend was that rulers were at least supposed to be good. And many did try to govern in ways that benefited the common people, not just the ruling class. This remarkable turnaround happened virtually simultaneously in the Mediterranean, the Near East, India, and China. Why? The answer, simply p..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
eb828d5
|
Around 2,500 years ago, we see qualitatively new forms of social organization--the larger and more durable Axial mega-empires that employed new forms of legitimation of political power. The new sources of this legitimacy were the Axial religions, or more broadly ideologies, such as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (and later Christianity and Islam). During this time, gods evolved from capricious projections of human desire (who as..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
95151a1
|
Such perfection endures. For more than two millennia after horse-riding was invented, the warhorse remained the most important military technology bar none. A plentiful supply of horses was critical even in the 19th century, well after firearms had replaced the bows and arrows. Have you ever wondered why Napoleon, who won all of his battles until 1812, lost one battle after another in 1813 and 1814, leading to defeat and abdication? The sur..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
d24da94
|
In other words, theorists like van der Leeuw envision that a switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture creates a virtuous circle between problem-solving capacity and societal size, gradually leading to an increase of the scale of cooperation. I
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
3a8d625
|
find it difficult to believe that economic or information-processing advantages were the primary drivers of the transition to large-scale societies. Archaic-style states of which we have direct knowledge, such as Hawaii, did not have complex economies or specialized decision-making procedures (to deal with what kinds of problems?). The chiefs were involved with war and ritual; the economy worked well enough when left to the commoners. In an..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
dbc1793
|
Two very clear indicators are the appearance of lavishly furnished burials and large, elaborate private residences. Skeletons can tell us that one segment of population ate much higher-quality foods and enjoyed better health than the rest. Based on such indicators, we know that large differentials between the rich and powerful few and the rest arose within a few thousand years of agriculture in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mexico, and the And..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
664ec6b
|
Our oversized brains evolved, in large part, to detect and resist manipulation by those who want to get ahead at our expense.
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
38f486d
|
For tens if not hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture, human societies had very effective social norms and institutions for controlling bullies. Why would they suddenly (in a few thousand years) replace them with institutions that gave the upstarts legitimacy?
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
304035a
|
moral of this mathematical digression is that, on flat plains, with warriors using projectile weapons, any numerical superiority that an army can achieve over its enemy is magnified out of all proportion. In other words, Lanchester's Square Law yields an enormous return to social scale. If the opposing forces use a mix of ranged and shock weapons, numerical superiority will still be amplified, although not as much as with purely projectile ..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
0eba5ea
|
This is how upstarts succeed--by avoiding arrogance and cultivating modesty. But even more important, they need to demonstrate to the people that the hierarchical social order is preferable to the alternative. In the Roman case, it was the fatigue of persistent internal wars that led to the re-establishment of monarchy. Monarchies
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
9f9c52c
|
Let's step back from this debate and consider how it affects the question we are currently investigating, the role of war in the rise of archaic states. While there is confusion resulting from competing definitions, and a great degree of controversy about evidence and how to interpret it, all parties agree on one thing: warfare was particularly vicious among pre-state farming societies.
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
e05f3e1
|
call this the "bottom-up" theory of the evolution of social complexity, because it treats social complexity as a sort of "superstructure" on the material resource base. In other words, if you stir enough resources into your evolutionary pot, social complexity will inevitably bubble up. The problem with the bottom-up theory is that in several places where we can date the key stages in this process, we see a different sequence of events. The ..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
1515888
|
The first cities and states arose 5,000 years ago. One of these archaic states, the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2650-2150 BCE), the one that built the Great Pyramid of Giza, had a population of between one and two million, which is beginning to approach the social scale of the most complex social insects, ants and termites. The
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
9d09aab
|
For example, the populations of both the Roman Empire and Han China grew to 50-60 million people at the peak. This is the point when we surpassed the social insects. During the past two millennia no other animal anywhere has rivaled human societies in size and complexity. *** In
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
fb7ac4c
|
In other words, the important statistic is the risk of violent death for each person. To illustrate this point, there were 49 homicides in Denmark in 2012 (population: 5.6 million), so the chance of any particular Dane being murdered that year was less than one in 100,000. But in a typical small-scale society, with a population of, say, 1,000, 49 homicides would translate into one chance in 20 of being murdered. As
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
5ca5d83
|
The collapse of order brings in its wake the four horsemen of the apocalypse - famine, war, pestilence, and death. Population declines, and wages increase, while rents decrease. As incomes of commoners recover, the fortunes of the upper classes hit the bottom. Economic distress of the elites and lack of effective government feed the continuing internecine wars. But civil wars thin the ranks of the elites. Some die in factional fighting, oth..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
6df6032
|
Ranged weapons, together with the mastery of fire, literally made us human. They also defined what may be called the "human way of war." The distinguishing characteristic of human combat is the ability to strike from a distance coupled with mobility."
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
96ded17
|
Cultural traits, however, are a more general category than memes, because they also include quantitative (smoothly-varying) characteristics that cannot be easily represented as discrete alternatives: for example, the inclination to trust strangers. (More on that below.)
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
0596916
|
In fact, the most important influence predicting a person's level of generalized trust is the attitude of his parents.84 And that would make generalized trust a culturally transmitted trait. Lorenzo
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
934fb91
|
Humans are uniquely good throwers. No other species even comes close. Monkeys and apes can throw branches, rotten fruit, and excrement (I still remember an encounter with an irate troop of howler monkeys in Costa Rica . . .), but they do not use projectiles as lethal weapons in hunting or combat. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are quite pathetic at throwing.94 Imagine
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
7a4b497
|
Our behavior and decisions are based on a mixture of calculation, emotions, and internalized norms, with calculation often a minor component of the cocktail.
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
d5a1f87
|
the Asian War Complex, appeared in Alaska. It spread rapidly through the continent--east to Greenland and south to California and the American southwest. The central innovation of the package was the recurved bow, backed with sinew. This was a much more powerful weapon than the wooden self bow already known to the Native Americans, and came with body armor often made from slats of wood or bone. Clearly, it wasn't just a hunting tool: it was..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
0acdb69
|
These windows were dedicated to the patron saints of the guilds and often showed the donors at work: furriers displaying a fur robe, money-changers testing their coin, butchers killing oxen. Even the common laborers, who somehow managed to pool their meager resources, donated a window, which was dedicated to Adam, "who first dug the earth by the sweat of his brow."5"
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
c3cac60
|
Malthusian-Ricardian theory predicted that an increasing population would result in a specific progression of effects. Rents would rise first, with grain prices lagging behind rents, the price of industrial goods lagging behind grain prices, and workers' wages bringing up the rear. The evidence showed that this was precisely what happened (until the whole system was dramatically changed in the nineteenth century).
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |
|
d09e23c
|
Again, the uncertainty in the estimate pales into insignificance when we look at the overall trend. Over the 11,000 years separating Gobekli Tepe from the International Space Station, the scale of cooperation, when measured by the labor costs of the most impressive building project, went up by four orders of magnitude--from 300 to 3,000,000. This is a huge--indeed, an astronomic--increase. And, of course, it was paralleled by an equally eno..
|
|
|
Peter Turchin |