This isn’t rocket science. Review of five books, including Ultrasociety by Jonathan Marks

Intro:

“Peter Turchin’s Ultra Society lurches back to the microevolution analogy. Here the driving force in human cultural history is intergroup competition, meaning war. Thus, history will be reducible to military tactics, technology to weaponry, and culture to its EurAsian cutting edge. Turchin’s argument is that a proper naturalistic, biological, evolutionary view shows that the modern, cooperative world is the unintended consequence of the history of war, the most obvious form of competition between groups. How so? ‘By eliminating poorly coordinated, uncooperative, and dysfunctional states it creates more cooperative, more peaceful, and more affluent ones.'”