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 gauge how well the candidate co

As the readers of this blog know, a big chunk of my research focuses on why complex societies go through cycles of alternating internally peaceful, or integrative, phases and turbulent, or disintegrative periods. In all past state-level societies, for which we have decent data, we fin

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

The last installment in this series (first one here) adopts a more critical stance towards the article by McConnell et al., Lead pollution recorded in Greenland ice indicates European emissions tracked plagues, wars, and imperial expansion during antiquity. As I said in the second pos

A conversation about how Cultural Evolution helps us understand the rise of complex societies in human history A week ago I gave an Evolution Institute webinar about how our “ultrasocieties”—huge cooperative groups numbering in hundreds of millions of people and more—evolved over the

Over the previous weekend the Seshat project ran a workshop on Cretan history and archaeology. We met in Villa Ariadne that the first excavator of Knossos, Sir Arthur Evans, built for himself right next to the Knossos Palace. Several times during the workshop the discussion among the

I recently finished reading Why Did Europe Conquer the World? by Philip T. Hoffman. Hoffman proposes a new explanation for the perennial question, Why Europe? Why did that cultural and technological backwater, Western Europe, suddenly embarked on the path to global domination. By 1914

I’ve just finished David Kang’s East Asia before the West. It’s a very interesting argument, but I cannot whole-heartedly recommend the book. Columbia University Press could have done a much better job of editing. The text is very repetitive, with some ideas repeated over and over aga

In the aftermath of the Brussels terror attack many will call for a military solution to the Islamic State problem. Yet the new science of Cliodynamics predicts that the long-term result of the military victory over ISIS will be the opposite of what is intended. A decade ago I made a

Writing in Scientific American, John Horgan states, “10,000-Year-Old Massacre Does NOT Bolster Claim that War Is Innate. A new report on a massacre of hunter-gatherers in Africa is consistent with the claim that war, far from being an inborn trait that evolved millions of years ago, i