Publications

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.

As our society confronts the impacts of globalization and global systemic risks—such as financial contagion, climate change, and epidemics—what can studies of the past tell us about our present and future? How Worlds Collapse offers case studies of societies that either collapsed or overcame cataclysmic adversity. The authors in this volume find commonalities between past civilizations and our current society, tracing patterns, strategies, and early warning signs that can inform decision-making today. While today’s world presents unique challenges, many mechanisms, dynamics, and fundamental challenges to the foundations of civilization have been consistent throughout history—highlighting essential lessons for the future.

Social diversity, and where archaeologically visible social identity, may have been powerful forcing factors in societal dynamics. Here we look at how these factors may have operated during the period of the emergence of inequality and institutionalized surplus during the Western-Central European Neolithic. Based on the typo-chronological analysis of time-series of ceramic motifs, and their interpretation as social markers, we suggest that social diversity cycles are decoupled from population cycles, at least for the period under investigation. Thus, they may constitute an independent proxy for social mechanisms. Social diversity cycles may have forced population growth to some extent at least during the Early Neolithic and also may have forced and influenced the emergence and the archaeological visibility of inequality and surplus during the Early to Middle Neolithic transition.

To be effective, data-intensive systems require extensive ongoing customisation to reflect changing user requirements, organisational policies, and the structure and interpretation of the data they hold. Manual customisation is expensive, time-consuming, and error-prone. In large complex systems, the value of the data can be such that exhaustive testing is necessary before any new feature can be added to the existing design. In most cases, the precise details of requirements, policies and data will change during the lifetime of the system, forcing a choice between expensive modification and continued operation with an inefficient design. Engineering Agile Big-Data Systems outlines an approach to dealing with these problems in software and data engineering, describing a methodology for aligning these processes throughout product lifecycles. It discusses tools which can be used to achieve these goals, and, in a number of case studies, shows how the tools and methodology have been used to improve a variety of academic and business systems.

Two widely heralded yet contested approaches to economics have emerged in recent years. One follows an older, rather neglected approach which emphasizes evolutionary theory in terms of individuals and institutions. The other emphasizes economies as complex adaptive systems. Important concepts from evolutionary theory include the distinction between proximate and ultimate causation, multilevel selection, cultural change as an evolutionary process, and human psychology as a product of gene–culture coevolution. Relevant concepts from complexity theory include self-organization, fractals, chaos, sensitive dependence, basins of attraction, and path dependence. This book explores these two bodies of theory and their potential impact on economics. Central themes include the challenges that emerge through integration, evolutionary behavioral economics, and the evolution of institutions. Practical applications are provided and avenues for future research highlighted.

This paper describes OWL ontology re-engineering from the wiki-based social science codebook (thesaurus) developed by the Seshat: Global History Databank. The ontology describes human history as a set of over 1500 time series variables and supports variable uncertainty, temporal scoping, annotations and bibliographic references. The ontology was developed to transition from traditional social science data collection and storage techniques to an RDF-based approach. RDF supports automated generation of high usability data entry and validation tools, data quality management, incorporation of facts from the web of data and management of the data curation lifecycle. This ontology re-engineering exercise identified several pitfalls in modelling social science codebooks with semantic web technologies; provided insights into the practical application of OWL to complex, real-world modelling challenges; and has enabled the construction of new, RDF-based tools to support the large-scale Seshat data curation effort. The Seshat ontology is an exemplar of a set of ontology design patterns for modelling uncertainty or temporal bounds in standard RDF. Thus the paper provides guidance for deploying RDF in the social sciences. Within Seshat, OWL-based data quality management will assure the data is suitable for statistical analysis. Publication of Seshat as high-quality, linked open data will enable other researchers to build on it.

Small-scale human societies are a leap in size and complexity from those of our primate ancestors. We propose that the behavioral predispositions which allowed the evolution of small-scale societies were also those that allowed the cultural evolution of large-scale sociality, in the form of multiple transitions to large-scale societies. Although sufficient, the cultural evolutionary processes that acted on these predispositions also needed a unique set of niche parameters, including ecological factors, guiding norms, and technologies of social control and coordination. Identifying the regularities and patterns in these factors will be the empirical challenge for the future. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

After a long and turbulent history, the study of human cultural evolution is finally becoming comparable to the study of genetic evolution, with human history the counterpart of the biological fossil record. One of the most remarkable products of cultural evolution has been an increase in the scale of human societies by many orders of magnitude. Today, the great majority of humans live in complex societies, which can only exist due to extensive cooperation among large numbers of individuals. Ultrasociality, the ability of humans to cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals, presents a puzzle to both evolutionary and social theory. Although much theoretical effort has been devoted to understanding the evolution of cooperation in small-scale groups (hunter-gatherers living in societies of hundreds to a few thousand individuals), the same cannot be said about the next phase of human evolution, the rise of complex societies encompassing tens and hundreds of millions of people. Evolutionary biologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and others have proposed a multitude of theories to explain how complex societies evolved. However, scientific study has suffered from two limitations. First, with a few exceptions, theories have relied on verbal reasoning; formal models tend to focus on the evolution of cooperation in small groups, whereas the transition from small- to large-scale societies has been mostly neglected. Second, there has been no systematic effort to compare theoretical predictions to data. Human ultrasociality has evolved repeatedly around the world and across time, reflecting both common selection pressures and the unique contingencies affecting each case. An enormous amount of archaeological and historical information exists but has not been studied from an evolutionary perspective. Thus, explicit models that will yield specific and quantitative predictions are needed as well as databases of the cultural evolution of human ultrasociality. Furthermore, a research program combining explicit models with empirical testing of predictions is not only an academic endeavor. Understanding conditions that either promote or inhibit human ultrasociality is highly relevant for addressing the challenges of large-scale cooperation and conflict in the modern world. Published in the Strungmann Forum Reports Series.

Political instability in collapsed or collapsing states is one of the greatest sources of human misery. Since the end of the cold war, withinstate conflicts, such as civil wars and separatist rebellions, have caused ten times more deaths than have wars between states. The indirect, non-military consequences of internal conflict — civilian casualties, refugees, wrecked economies, famine and disease — are orders of magnitude worse than the direct, military outcomes. In Fixing Failed States, former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani and development-policy expert Clare Lockhart analyse why states crumble and propose a framework for rebuilding state capability.

Most people assume that the current period of global connectivity is a unique and unprecedented development in human history. Although the breadth and depth of the globalization that began after World War II is indeed unrivaled, in the past humanity has experienced other periods of heightened longdistance connectivity that resulted in massive long-distance movements of goods, people, ideas, genes, cultivars, and pathogens (Chase-Dunn and Hall 1997; Gills and Thompson 2006). One example of a previous “globalization” is the Age of Discovery of the sixteenth century, during which all major population centers of the world, both in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas, were connected by trade and conquest, which resulted in a massive interchange of cultural elements, genes, and pathogens, known as the Columbian Exchange (Crosby 1972). The globalization of the sixteenth century was followed by the Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, which was also truly global in nature. The wave of state collapse rolled over the whole of Eurasia (with the possible exception of South Asia). Populations declined in such far-flung regions as Spain, Russia, and China. But the demographic catastrophe was even greater in the New World – the Native American population may have declined to perhaps ten percent of the pre-Columbian level. So massive was the world’s population collapse that we can detect it in the decline of global emissions of greenhouse gasses (CO2 and CH4), which even then were affected by anthropogenic activities. According to at least one theory, this decline in greenhouse gas concentration may have caused the Little Ice Age of the eighteenth century (Ruddiman 2005).

In this chapter we have several objectives. First, we observe that processes within world-systems are often characterized by cycles or waves: chiefdoms cycle, empires rise and fall, and the modern state system undergoes a "power cycle" or "hegemonic sequence." Furthermore, all world-systems "pulsate," that is, expand rapidly, then more slowly, or even contract (Chase-Dunn & Hall 1997). Because spatial waves of expansion/contraction occur across all types of world-systems, such pulsations cannot be rooted in a specific mode of production or mode of accumulation. Rather, these cycles are themselves evidence that polities and world-systems are dynamical systems with various feedback loops. Second, we want to explore the issue of spatial influences and how they interact with various social factors in world-systemic processes, especially the synchronization of cycles across great distances. Third, we suggest some potential empirical tests of these models, and propose that, whether or not these models work, the exploration of them will deepen our understanding of social evolutionary processes. Fourth, we argue that this is not an exercise in reductionism, nor is it an attempt to remove actors from the system model. Rather, it helps clarify how structures change, how they constrain behaviors, and conversely, how behaviors can act on those evolutionary processes.

Both thinkers of the past and modern philosophers have argued a lot about can history be as much a science as physics or biology. History, of course, started as a descriptive science, and source studies - no less difficult and technical subject than, say, materials science. But physics and other natural sciences have made the transition from descriptive to theoretical, "explanatory" science. In the nineteenth century, on the wave of impressive successes natural sciences, many thought that the turn of history would soon come. a lion Tolstoy, for example, devoted the second part of the epilogue "War and Peace." But that did not happen. Incidentally, other public/humanitarian disciplines - economics, sociology, anthropology, linguistics - succeeded overcome the barrier, but history does not.

Are there general patterns in history? It is clear that the ancient China is not medieval France; between the Han empire and the kingdom Capetians there is a huge number of differences. However, the existence of differences does not exclude the possibility of commonalities. For example, Mars and Saturn too differ from each other - in color, size, presence of rings, distance from sun, etc. But they also have common features - the trajectories of the movement of both planets around the sun are described by the same regularity. Therefore we have the right to ask whether there are common features characterizing the dynamics, for example, agrarian states (such as the Han empire and the French kingdom)? Or each historical state is unique and inimitable in all its aspect

One of the hallmarks of a mature discipline is its ability to make predictions that can be used to test scientific theories. Scientific predictions do not necessarily have to be concerned with future events; they can be made about what occurred in the past. I illustrate such retrospective prediction with a case study of conversion to Christianity in the Roman Empire. The bulk of the paper deals with the logic and methodology of setting up a scientific prediction in macrosociology. The specific case study I develop is the possible state collapse in Saudi Arabia. The theoretical setting is provided by the demographic-structural theory of state collapse. The starting point is a previously developed model for political cycles in agrarian societies with nomadic elites, loosely based on the ideas of Ibn Khaldun. I modify the model to fit the characteristics of the modern Saudi Arabian state and estimate its parameters using data from published sources. The model predicts that the sovereign debt of Saudi Arabia will reach unmanageable proportions some 5-20 years in the future; the fiscal collapse will be followed by a state collapse in short order. The timing of the collapse is affected by exogenous events (primarily, fluctuations in world oil prices) and by parameter uncertainty (certain parameters of the model can be estimated only very approximately). The generalized prediction of eventual Saudi collapse together with subsidiary relationships specifying how variations in exogenous factors and parameters affect the future trajectory is the "Ibn Khaldun scenario." A major theoretical alternative is provided by a set of ideas and specific recommendations suggesting how Saudi Arabia can avoid crisis by reforming its economy and liberalizing its political system (the "IMF scenario"). The main purpose of the proposed test, therefore, is to determine which of the two theoretical scenarios will best describe the trajectory of the Saudi state over the next two decades.

Many historical processes are dynamic (a dynamic process is one that changes with time). Populations increase and decline, economies expand and contract, while states grow and collapse. How can we study mechanisms that bring about temporal change and explain the observed trajectories? A very common approach, which has proved its worth in innumerable applications (particularly, but not exclusively, in the natural sciences), consists of taking a holistic phenomenon and mentally splitting it up into separate parts that are assumed to interact with each other. This is the dynamical systems approach, because the whole phenomenon is represented as a system consisting of several interacting elements (or subsystems). In the dynamical system's approach, we must describe mathematically how different subsystems interact with each other. This mathematical description is the model of the system, and we can use a variety of methods to study the dynamics predicted by the model, as well as attempt to test the model by comparing its predictions with the observed dynamics.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan a traveler from another solar system has crash-landed on one of the moons of Jupiter and is using his last bit of fuel to beam forces onto the Earth in order to send a message home. His efforts induce the Central Asian steppe nomads to behave in a way that causes successive Chinese states to build the Great Wall in the form of a script that appears from space as a rescue plea. This trope of distant forces affecting human history is an ironic tool in the hand of the fiction-smith who pokes fun at us for our hapless intentions. World-historians have hypothesized other powerful mechanisms by which macro-social processes may have been shaped by exogenous forces.