Last weekend my wife and I were in Barcelona. It was our fist visit to the lovely capital of Catalonia, and it certainly lived up to its reputation as one of the Grand Cities of Europe. Source: Wikimedia But a visit to Barcelona also makes one think about the European Union, especiall

In September I went to an international conference in Vienna, Austria, The Haves and the Have Nots: Exploring the Global History of Wealth and Income Inequality, about which I wrote in a previous post. One thing I learned at the conference is that, apparently, economists don’t really

  In the current issue of Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution the anthropologist Sarah Mathew reviews War, Peace, and Human Nature, edited by Douglas Fry. Fry is one of the large group of anthropologists and other social scientists who have be

On several occasions, when I presented the results of our model and data analysis that support the idea that the primary engine of the evolution of large-scale states is warfare, people objected by saying that there are lots of places on earth where warfare is very intense, but no sta

Over the last two years I’ve written a number of blogs exploring the role of warfare in cultural group selection (you can see these blogs collected under the heading Ways of War in Popular Blogs and Series). Today I’d like to return to the question, What makes war productive as an eng

In the first installment I argued against extreme positions about the prevalence of warfare in the Pleistocene. One problem underlying the controversy over warfare in the early human history is that different people use different definitions of war. So let me be clear and say what def

I periodically get asked, what do I think about the controversy over Steven Pinker’s Better Angels? Truth is, I did not find anything particularly new in the book. For those of us interested in the role of war in social evolution most of the empirical material he goes over is quite fa

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. By publishing free-to-public data on historical societies, Seshat will soon become the world’s largest profess

Thank you, Joe and all people who left comments. It has been an extremely thought-provoking discussion, so I thought it’s worth a separate blog to address the issues that most resonated with me. Let me start by repeating that the title, “War! What is It Good For?” was not mine, but Ia

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.  I read through the comment thread and noted how the framing of the title and text contributed to the breakdown in dialogue