Cultural evolution is what created the – in many ways – wonderful societies that we live in. It created the potential to free our lives from hunger and early death, and made possible the pursuit of science and art. But cultural evolution also has a dark side, in fact, many ‘dark sides.’ Clearly domestication of… [Read more…]
May 14, 2012
by SEF Editor
I was another participant at the Rules as Genotype workshop held at Indiana University recently. Unlike Peter Turchin, however, I came away with a very different perspective on the usefulness of the metaphor. I am undoubtedly somewhat biased since some of my own research explores the idea of a sacred text as a kind of… [Read more…]
May 12, 2012
by SEF Editor
In his engaging Social Evolution Forum contribution, Networking Past and Present, R.I.M. Dunbar argues that in traditional societies, most people share the same network of friends and relatives because they belong to the same community. In contemporary society, by contrast, our social networks have become fragmented, and we live predominantly with casual acquaintances and strangers.… [Read more…]
May 11, 2012
by SEF Editor
In his excellent target article, “Networking Past and Present”, Dunbar argues that though contemporary personal networks are often geographically dispersed and not densely interconnected, the number of personal relationships individuals can maintain has not changed since our origins in tribal communities. He further suggests that despite the hype surrounding Internet social networking sites (SNS’s), they… [Read more…]
May 10, 2012
by SEF Editor
Dunbar’s article provides a quick trip through major historical transitions in the structure of human social networks. He addresses continuity and change in network structure between traditional small-scale human societies, on the one hand, and modern urbanized societies on the other. He argues that while the total size of co-resident populations (i.e. towns, cities) has… [Read more…]
May 9, 2012
by SEF Editor
In “Networking Past and Present” Dunbar offers a brief, but important overview of the importance of understanding the role of complex network structures in all types of human organizations and societies, from the internal substructure of traditional subsistence societies to the frequency of friending on Facebook. Remarkably, the empirical statistical structures of these seemingly very… [Read more…]
May 8, 2012
by SEF Editor
Our ancestral environment differed greatly from our current environment, for the better (we enjoy better, safer and longer lives than our ancestors) but also for the worse. In his text, Dunbar points out, in particular, that while we used to spend our whole life with the same people, we now live mostly with strangers, people… [Read more…]
May 7, 2012
by SEF Editor
Recent history has witnessed two important dramatic changes that have had a deep bearing on our social lives. One has been the way travel has shrunk the world to create a growing level of economic interdependence: butterflies flapping their wings in Brazil really do have reverberations on the economics and politics of every other continent… [Read more…]
May 6, 2012
by Peter Turchin
Last week I was in St. Louis, where I first participated in the Consilience Conference, then went on a day trip to Cahokia Mounds, and finally gave a talk at Washington University. This has been a very intense and productive trip, and I already see that I will need several blogs to cover various themes… [Read more…]
May 4, 2012
by SEF Editor
What creates political and social changes in a democracy? This is a question being asked a lot lately in the United States, largely because the degree of polarization of American politics is widely perceived to have increased dramatically since the 1960s, with each party becoming less tolerant of ideological diversity in its ranks and both… [Read more…]
April 26, 2012
by Peter Turchin
Thanks to all who left comments on my previous post. This discussion has been very useful and led me to adjust my views. Here’s how I would formulate the issues now: (1) ‘Phenotype’ is determined jointly by (i) genetically stored information, (ii) culturally stored information, and (iii) the environment. It doesn’t make sense to speak… [Read more…]
April 24, 2012
by Peter Turchin
A week ago I was at a workshop Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution (check out the Focus Article by Elinor Ostrom that set the stage for the meeting). One major topic of discussion was what might be the cultural analog of genotype. In biology phenotype is the observable traits and characteristics of an organism,… [Read more…]
April 16, 2012
by Peter Turchin
As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution is a complex book that addresses many roles of religion in human social evolution. One theme that I was particularly interested in was the influence of religious developments on the evolution of human egalitarianism, especially during the Axial Age. The starting point for… [Read more…]
April 15, 2012
by Peter Turchin
I just finished writing a commentary on Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution. Bellah’s ideas are highly stimulating and I want to discuss one central issue of the book, that of evolution of egalitarianism in the next blog. But first a few words about the book itself. Bellah wrote Religion in Human Evolution over the… [Read more…]
April 11, 2012
by SEF Editor
Ostrom’s article presents a cogently argued and lucid approach to investigating the evolution of institutions in complex social-ecological systems. It combines a commitment to testable questions, rigorous data collection, attention to existing data and theories, and synthetic integration and analysis of data. It is sufficiently flexible to allow for novel interpretations and emergence of new… [Read more…]
April 11, 2012
by SEF Editor
To the thoughtful foundational essays written by Wilson & Gowdy and Elinor Ostrom, I suggest three questions. Because it is often helpful to have a concrete application in mind, I’ll phrase this commentary in terms of constitutional dynamics. Constitutions are particularly interesting for our study: they are sets of related rules, each clause formally independent,… [Read more…]
April 7, 2012
by Peter Turchin
I am an avid consumer of science fiction and fantasy novels. The most interesting aspect of such fiction to me is how authors construct social structures within which their heroes operate. Whether this happens in some alternate world where magic is possible, or “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” the authors… [Read more…]
April 6, 2012
by SEF Editor
The Latin root of “rules” (regula) originally just meant a straight stick, and later a stick used for measuring. That sense remains in English (e.g., a wooden ruler), but a later sense was simply that of any consistent pattern (e.g., ruled paper, or “I don’t eat before noon, as a rule”). The most recent sense… [Read more…]
April 6, 2012
by SEF Editor
Professor Ostrom has put her neophyte reader in a difficult situation. Hers is a mature research program of enormous scope and intellectual yield. However, because of that, it is far too complex to be neatly summarized in an introductory section, and if fully summarized, there would be no further space for a positive contribution to… [Read more…]
April 5, 2012
by Peter Turchin
When I first met Sam Bowles (it must have been in the early 2000s) I was already a committed proponent of multilevel selection. My recollection of our interactions at the time was that while he was not a strong critic of the idea, neither was he a strong supporter. I was reminded of our early… [Read more…]
May 17, 2012
by Peter Turchin
7