Coronavirus and Our Age of Discord
April 05, 2020
16 Comments
As readers of this blog know well, I don’t claim to be a prophet and I think that prophecy is, in any case, overrated. But I make predictions. A scientific prediction, unlike a prophecy, is not about a future, but about a theory — it’s a way to find out how good is o
Continue Reading →
Italy Turns the Corner
April 01, 2020
Last week my analysis of the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy yielded a very depressing result: despite all the measures taken by the government, there was no sign that they were making a difference. The epidemic was still growing exponentially with dire implications for the overall number
Continue Reading →
How Effective Are Public Health Measures in Stopping Covid-19?
March 23, 2020
As many of my readers know, I have accepted the position of research group leader at the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) in Vienna (and I continue as University of Connecticut professor, so right now I am in Connecticut). A week ago the Austrian government asked CSH to conduct research t
Continue Reading →
The Transcendental Revolution
February 09, 2020
My reading of the month is Unearthly Powers by an Oxford historian Alan Strathern. It’s a very interesting and thought-provoking book. Highly recommended. There is much that I like in the book. Strathern avoids the ideological extremes that preoccupy today’s humanities, such as an ave
Continue Reading →
Phylogenetics of Religion
December 28, 2019
Question: What was the word for “two” used by people living in the Pontic-Caspian steppes (modern Ukraine and Southern Russia) 5,000 years ago? Answer: *dwóH₁ This is how historical linguists reconstruct “two” in the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language (see Indo-European vocabulary on
Continue Reading →
Beresta Books Publishes Seshat History of the Axial Age
December 19, 2019
As long-time readers of this blog know, I am not only a scientist, but also a scientific publisher. I founded and indie imprint Beresta Books in 2015 to publish academic and popular non-fiction books that do not fit comfortably within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The main, but
Continue Reading →
What Came First: Big Gods or Big Societies? Round Two
November 22, 2019
In my previous post, Historians and Historical Databases, I discussed how the Seshat Databank would be impossible without a close collaboration with historians and other humanities scholars. Today I want to give a specific example of how this collaboration works. For those who have no
Continue Reading →
Historians and Historical Databases
November 13, 2019
In recent days there was much discussion by historians on Twitter of the proper and improper uses of historical knowledge in testing social science theories. It was initially prompted by the publication of a Science article last week on historical Church exposure and global psychologi
Continue Reading →
A History of the Near Future: What history tells us about our Age of Discord
November 06, 2019
Last week I visited Centre for Complex Systems Studies (CCSS) in Utrecht, where I gave a talk about my research results and plans for the Ages of Discord project. Several people on Twitter asked to see the slides, and so I am posting them on this blog. First, here’s an abstract
Continue Reading →Connect with me
Featured Book
Follow Peter Turchin on an epic journey through time. From stone-age assassins to the orbiting cathedrals of the space age, from bloodthirsty god-kings to India’s first vegetarian emperor, discover the secret history of our species—and the evolutionary logic that governed it all.
Buy it on Amazon.com 
© 2015-2020 Peter Turchin. All rights reserved.