Subscribe:
RSS feed
Promoting discussion and collaboration in social and cultural evolution
Browsing All Posts published on »January, 2013«
The Glue that Binds
There are certain things I miss about my first scientific love, ecology. Mostly it is being able to travel to neat places, like the Yellowstone or the Kruger National Park in South Africa, to commune with neat animals there. Bison in the Yellowstone National Park (photo by the author) But on the whole I don’t […]
Unproductive War II
January 26, 2013 by Peter Turchin
In the previous post I argued that although it looks like the period between 1 and 1500 AD was one of stagnation, and even regress (European ‘Dark Ages’, etc.), under the surface there was a lot of technological and social progress. In China, again, agricultural techniques continued to evolve. And while the geographic extent of […]
Unproductive War?
January 23, 2013 by Peter Turchin
My previous blog discussed the startling idea that war, despite all the blood, death, and suffering it has inflicted on countless humans over the ages, is actually good for something. As the historian and archaeologist Ian Morris argues, war “drove the creation of increasingly effective governments, which pushed down rates of violent death,” ultimately resulting […]
A Productive Way of War
January 17, 2013 by Peter Turchin
A few years ago, as I was writing an article about what it would take to transform history into science, I wanted to get a sample of what influential historians think about this idea. So I went through ten years of issues of Perspectives on History, a monthly bulletin of the American Historical Association. Every […]
Those Wet, Grasping Fingers
January 9, 2013 by Peter Turchin
This morning a colleague sent to the department, with a snide comment, an article that just came out in Biology Letters, Wet-induced finger wrinkles improve handling of wet objects. At first glance it looked like a joke or a hoax, but I opened the text anyway. On the second glance, after reading the first paragraph […]
Social Evolution Forum: 2012 in Review
January 5, 2013 by Peter Turchin
WordPress.com sent me a nice annual report providing all kinds of statistics for the year 2012, so I am sharing these numbers here. It turns out that there were 101 new posts in 2012, of which 54 were my blogs, and the rest mainly posts in Special Features (Focus Articles and Commentaries) and a few […]
Game of Predictions
January 2, 2013 by Peter Turchin
The year of 2012 has been a good one for Social Evolution and Cliodynamics. We had a wonderful meeting in Frankfurt that celebrated the new stature of Cultural Evolution. The Social Evolution Forum has been developing very nicely (in the next blog I will provide more information). And the science of Cliodynamics has been adding […]
January 31, 2013 by Peter Turchin
20