Do “Big Societies” Need “Big Gods”?
March 21, 2019
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The scale at which humans cooperate expanded greatly over the last 10,000 years—from hundreds of people to hundreds of millions. One popular theory that explains this dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of human societies is known as the Big Gods hypothesis. The basic idea,
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A Feminist Perspective on Human Social Evolution
February 16, 2019
Levels of inequality have changed dramatically during the course of human evolution: from the social hierarchies of our great ape ancestors to egalitarian small-scale societies of hunter-gatherers, and then to large-scale hierarchical societies with great inequities in the distributio
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An Anarchist View of Human Social Evolution
February 10, 2019
David Graeber and David Wengrow recently wrote a long piece in the New Humanist, Are we city dwellers or hunter-gatherers? New research suggests that the familiar story of early human society is wrong – and the consequences are profound. What follows is my critical review of it. The s
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An Unparalleled Parallel
January 24, 2019
The conflict between the Democratically-controlled House and President Trump has entered a new phase, when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi barred Donald Trump from giving the State of the Union speech in the House of Representatives. Trump backed down and postponed the address, but surely
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A Critique of Ancient DNA research in New York Times
January 19, 2019
Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote a long piece in New York Times which is quite critical of the ancient DNA lab at Harvard led by David Reich. It has generated a lot of discussion and comments, themselves ranging from mildly to very critical – by Razib Khan, Steve Sailor, Greg Cochran, and oth
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How Peaceful Was Life in the Past?
January 08, 2019
What was the quality of life for people living in historical and prehistoric societies? One particularly important dimension of quality of life is freedom from violent death. How high was the probability of being murdered by another person? Modern statistics that express violent death
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Another Clever Proxy for Quantitative History
December 16, 2018
When I became interested in what eventually became Cliodynamics, initially I thought that I would just play with some mathematical models of historical processes, because I had read many times before that there is very little quantitative data in history. In fact, the opposite is true
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The Yellow Vest Rebellion
December 08, 2018
“To defeat populism, America needs its own Macron–a charismatic leader who can make centrism cool” wrote Max Boot in June 2017, one month after Emmanuel Macron was elected president in France. I always felt that calling Macron a “centrist” is a remarkable misrepresentation of hi
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The 50-year Cycle of Political Violence Strikes Again
December 03, 2018
Over the past weekend France has been rocked by “the worst urban riot in 50 years” (see reporting by Reuters, DW). Indeed the previous comparable outbreak of political violence in France was in May 1968, almost precisely 50 years ago. (As a reminder, I define “political violence” as i
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