Турчин Петр - Разрушение кооперации (Russian)

Why do the 99.9% of humanity live in large-scale societies organized as states? During the Holocene (the last 10,000 years), human societies have been transformed utterly: from small groups of nomadic foragers to our current interconnected world of large-scale societies organized as states. Population numbers, agricultural productivity, technological…

We organize ourselves into communities of hundreds of millions of individuals, inhabit every continent, and send people into space. Human beings are nature’s greatest team players. And the truly astounding thing is, we only started our steep climb to the top of the rankings—overtaking wasps, bees, termites and ants—in the last 10,000 years. Genetic…

This article engages with Mark Moffett’s proposed definition of society, which emphasizes shared group identification over social interaction, and argues for a different, problem-driven approach to definition in evolutionary social science. Rather than treating definitions as primary, I situate them within the broader research agenda aimed at explaining the Great Holocene Transformation—the dramatic expansion of human societies in scale and complexity over the past 10,000 years. My central analytical focus is on cooperation: the capacity of individuals to coordinate actions toward collective goals despite incentives to free-ride. Accordingly, society is defined here as a collective of individuals engaged in sustained cooperation, with interest group proposed as a more flexible and analytically useful term. Within this framework, polities represent a key subtype of interest groups, characterized by their role as independent political units whose persistence depends on maintaining cooperative cohesion, particularly among elites. Other commonly cited features of societies—such as group identification, territoriality, and intergenerational continuity—are treated as secondary mechanisms that support cooperation rather than defining properties. Ultimately, I argue that flexible, operational definitions are most valuable at intermediate stages of scientific inquiry, where they facilitate the construction and empirical testing of theoretical models.

How do large-scale human societies maintain functional integration? Over the last 12,000 years, polities grew over six orders of magnitude in population, far exceeding the scale at which the interpersonal mechanisms that promote cooperation in small-scale societies can operate. Here we test the hypothesis that cooperation and functional integration in large-scale societies is promoted by social (and, specifically, institutional) complexity. We model large-scale societies as territorial social networks subject to energetic, cognitive, and competitive constraints. We demonstrate that agricultural intensification generates increasing population density, raising the per capita rate of social interaction beyond what small-scale mechanisms can sustain and requiring institutional rules to substitute for interpersonal knowledge. The model predicts that territory and social complexity scale with polity population with exponents of 5/6 and 1/6. Tests against data describing hundreds of polities spanning the Holocene support these predictions, providing quantitative evidence that social complexity is a central integrative mechanism enabling large-scale human cooperation.

Cultural macroevolution (CME) is a subfield of cultural evolution that studies large-scale changes in the cultural traits of whole groups. A central question in CME is how and why characteristics of polities (such as chiefdoms, states, and empires) evolve over time. Multilevel selection, and especially its application to cultural evolution, provides a very useful theoretical framework for CME because many polity-level characteristics evolve under selection pressures that act in opposite directions at different levels of hierarchical organization. In this chapter I discuss the conceptual framework that multilevel selection provides for studying CME and summarize the main empirical results from my recent book (Turchin 2025). I conclude that major predictions of cultural multilevel selection theory enjoy substantial empirical support.

Climate variability and natural hazards like floods and earthquakes can act as environmental shocks or socioecological stressors leading to instability and suffering throughout human history. Yet, societies experience a wide range of outcomes when facing such challenges: some suffer from social unrest, civil violence or complete collapse; others prove more resilient and maintain key social functions. We currently lack a clear, generally agreed-upon conceptual framework and evidentiary base to explore what causes these divergent outcomes. Here, we discuss efforts to develop such a framework through the Crisis Database (CrisisDB) programme. We illustrate that the impact of environmental stressors is mediated through extant cultural, political and economic structures that evolve over extended timescales (decades to centuries). These structures can generate high resilience to major shocks, facilitate positive adaptation, or, alternatively, undermine collective action and lead to unrest, violence and even societal collapse. By exposing the ways that different societies have reacted to crises over their lifetime, this framework can help identify the factors and complex social–ecological interactions that either bolster or undermine resilience to contemporary climate shocks.