Blog Archive

The brilliant atomic physicist Enrico Fermi was notorious for unnerving PhD candidates during their oral examinations by asking ‘How many piano tuners are there in the city of Chicago?’ The point of the question, besides the psychological effect, was to…

A guest post by Harvey Whitehouse and Pieter Francois This is an interesting moment in the development of history as an academic discipline. We stand on the brink of a sea change, not necessarily in the way historical evidence is gathered and documented, but…

A Guest Post by David Hines At the start of 2017, America looks to be in for a stretch of serious political turmoil. Accordingly, it makes sense to look at previous such period to see what lessons can be learned.…

I spent several instructive days with Branko Milanovic at the Santa Fe Institute, but we did not discuss this interesting issue (see The Iron Logic of Gordon Gekko ). It is worthwhile discussing it in this forum.…

Dear Peter, I am on my way to Moscow and just read the first three chapters of your book. Let me now give you my first reaction because I am afraid I might go back to the rest of the book only in a week or so (i.e., after Moscow, since my program in Moscow…

Thanks Peter for bringing this issue to your blog readers. Here are a couple of important points which you and/or your readers should address when evaluating Richard Wrangham’s hypothesis that the control of fire and subsequent consumption of cooked tubers…

The following reflection on the problems of psychology, anthropology, and a science of human beings has been stimulated by recent responses to a couple of recent articles in Nature ( Looking for the Roots of Terrorism and Psychologists Seek Roots of Terror…

Evolution is a process that proceeds incrementally, one step at a time. One thing leads to another. This is true for all kinds of evolution. Living things evolve through natural selection, with small changes between generations leading to larger changes…

Seshat: The Global History Databank is a game-changing database construction project that may reveal there is actually one thing war is good for: historical statistics.…

Peter Turchin recently posted an article on the Forum about the role of war in cultural evolution that stimulated a lively, yet largely discordant, conversation.…

Imagine a world without poverty. What would it look like? Is it even possible? How do we get there? When people working at foundations, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies dive into this topic, they typically do so with the assumption that…

As I wrote in the first part, one factor underlying the success of the 2001 Egyptian Revolution was strong intraelite conflict. The second factor that lead to an unexpectedly fast success of the protestors was the formation of a wide opposition alliance,…

Our young Egyptian friends (a sort of “leftist liberal revolutionaries”) consider the post-July 3 events in their country [the ousting of president Morsi by the military] as “counterrevolution”.…

Bernard Winograd has written an intriguing post , summarizing the findings one must grapple with when thinking about how attitudes can change within a single generation.…

At the risk of oversimplification, consider a few key findings of researchers into human beliefs and their evolutionary foundations. • Human belief systems are rooted in biologically evolved senses of morality.…

In his book, The Social Conquest of Earth , E.O. Wilson repeated three questions originally posed by Paul Gauguin: Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going?…

Hello Peter, I've read the blog post and think it's an interesting and well-presented idea. But before the evolutionary-ecologist/criminologist/historian in me could accept this as plausible, I'd want to account for three sets of causal forces.…

I’ve always made argument with my colleagues and students that there are indeed cyclical patterns in US History. I also believe that part of that phenomenon is related to the reality that younger generations lose touch with the implications of violence and…