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Promoting discussion and collaboration in social and cultural evolution
Browsing All posts tagged under »empires«
Science on Screen: DUNE
Frank Herbert’s DUNE is probably the most popular science fiction novel ever (over 12 million of copies sold). It has everything – a complex and dynamic main hero, great villains, neat ecology (planetology!), philosophical and religious insights, and (what is particularly fascinating to me) a well-structured social world. I have written before on this topic […]
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 […]
The Z-Curve of Human Egalitarianism
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 […]
March 28, 2013 by Peter Turchin
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