Wednesday, October 02, 2013

war, space and the evolution of complex societies...,


pnas | How did human societies evolve from small groups, integrated by face-to-face cooperation, to huge anonymous societies of today, typically organized as states? Why is there so much variation in the ability of different human populations to construct viable states? Existing theories are usually formulated as verbal models and, as a result, do not yield sharply defined, quantitative predictions that could be unambiguously tested with data. Here we develop a cultural evolutionary model that predicts where and when the largest-scale complex societies arose in human history. The central premise of the model, which we test, is that costly institutions that enabled large human groups to function without splitting up evolved as a result of intense competition between societies—primarily warfare. Warfare intensity, in turn, depended on the spread of historically attested military technologies (e.g., chariots and cavalry) and on geographic factors (e.g., rugged landscape). The model was simulated within a realistic landscape of the Afroeurasian landmass and its predictions were tested against a large dataset documenting the spatiotemporal distribution of historical large-scale societies in Afroeurasia between 1,500 BCE and 1,500 CE. The model-predicted pattern of spread of large-scale societies was very similar to the observed one. Overall, the model explained 65% of variance in the data. An alternative model, omitting the effect of diffusing military technologies, explained only 16% of variance. Our results support theories that emphasize the role of institutions in state-building and suggest a possible explanation why a long history of statehood is positively correlated with political stability, institutional quality, and income per capita. Fist tap Dale.

20 comments:

woodensplinter said...

Big Don, Vic said it best to you the other day, take care, and be well.

CNu said...

BD - how is that complex, organized, european system of production working out on the sustainability front?

the needed future-time-orientation to recognize the benefits of organized civilization supported by technology.....White colonization provided the basis for sovereign states in Africa, otherwise it would still be nothing but a bunch of warring tribes.

lol, see John, you just can't make up someone who said the above and then proudly displayed something squeezed out of this piece of human filth http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2013/03/dangerous-scumbag-deconstruction-master.html

CNu said...

BD - how is that complex, organized, european system of production working out on the sustainability front?

Tom said...

Obviously your use of that silly "tribal" picture simply indicates your own lack of understanding of history. Unless "tribe" = "ethnic group" which everybody has.

Long before the colonial period there were a series of unified states in West Africa, much larger than any current European state
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_West_Africa#Empires

Tom said...

Sub-Saharan Africa went through a dark age, ok, but it had no shortage of civilization long before the Arabs and then Europeans attacked.


It's simply good luck which way overwhelmingly powerful outsiders steer their lunatic war machines. If the Mongols had not been turned back by the Arabs, or had just headed west first directly into Europe instead of southwest toward the wealthier Arab civilization, then Europe would probably be a minor and frequently-overlooked part of the third world today. Neil Stephen notwithstanding, there was nothing in Europe that could have remotely held back the nearly-Eurasia-spanning Mongol empire.

Tom said...

*Neil Stephenson, alternate-history writer

BigDonOne said...

Stuff your Wiki by some drooling liberal wishful thinker and consider the Real_Data BD brings to the table. 'Tribes' is everything from the adjacent villages in Congo, each trying to capture the other's chief and eat his heart to absorb his 'Power' (primitive tribal beliefs ongoing for a thousand years, described in below non-fiction), to the rival gangs on adjacent blocks today in Chicago shooting (and flashing signs & sneering at each other on Facebook)....LOL!

Book chronicles rescue of 500 Americans and Belgians held by IQ-60 Congolese Simba rebels in 1964, who, among other atrocities, killed the only resident White physician and his family who had been selflessly treating the locals for years. Akin to the IQ-60 Zimbabweans who took over that country from productive white Rhodesians who had been *exporting* food, then eating the dairy cattle and seed corn and now the whole MFn place is bankrupt and starving....

Speaking of *sustainability*, BD will see who survives the resulting chaos when EBT cards will no longer swipe, Should've picked our own GDFcotton....

Tom said...

ROFL the West African empires are acknowledged by everybody and do not originate with Wikipedia.


If you have any Goth or Celt in you then it's laughable to point the Tribal finger here.

woodensplinter said...

Should've picked our own GDFcotton....


You must have had your coffee by now, as this is the first true thing you've written all day.



Instead of perfecting the "arts" of sadistically robbing, raping, pillaging, and looting others, your forbears would have been much better served picking their own cotton. As things presently stand, in the wake of serial military defeats and collapsing economies, you palefaced Klingons have no claim to fame aside from being universally despised and not universally feared anymore.

CNu said...

lol, guess you didn't read his lips Tom. BigDon wrote "Real_Data" - clearly signalling to you that senior white folks talking now, and that you need to play at your level and stay in your lane. I wonder what Frantz Fanon would have to say about the debt of gratitude Africans owe to their high-IQ sovereign torturers? http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2013/08/murdering-wretched-of-earth.html

BigDonOne said...

Golly, from CNu's WikiMap you'd think the early Africans had transits, levels, chains and knew how to survey. Remember, none of those folks even had a written language to record their own history, if indeed they had had the FTOrientation to even think of doing that. Nor the necessary communications to coordinate affairs of anything like a large sovereignty. The map is a total fabrication of some dreamer(s) based on isolated partial very sketchy info, and what passes for "boundaries" changed radically every week depending Who had recently conquered Whom in the continuous tribal fighting. And a lot of those slaves came from the tribal winnerz selling the tribal LOOZerz to the slave boat operators currently in port.....and there was an absolute S_Load of slavery ongoing between Africa and South/Central American continent and islands before any white folks were even in America, read all about it in the definitive work below (more Real Data)...

CNu said...

Wait a minute:


1. Tom linked the wikimap - not moi (I have no objection to it, but don't need it to support my simple point about sustainability)
2. If the map is fictitious because there's no recorded history, that means all of what you've noted is a crock of speculative whooey


Bottomline BD, are you arguing for a genetic basis to the historically observable pattern of white parasitic militarism and naked killer-ape behavior giving rise to unsustainable social orders that inevitably collapse into dark ages? That's a pattern which appears to have repeated itself at least a few times during the total recorded historical period - for which there are credible records.

Vic78 said...

I'm going to help you out a little. Tell us what the mind is. After that, explain intelligence and how it's measured. Then you can explain how white minds are better than non white minds. I am not some low self esteem cat that wants to prove that I'm just as good as you are. Fuck that. I would like for you to stop embarrassing yourself at the big kids' table.

Nakajima Kikka said...

So Turkin, et al. are basically saying that the key to the good life (living in a society that's politically stable, has strong institutions, and provides a high standard of living) is war. Perpetual war between nations, societies, ethnic groups and races is just the ticket for the happy life. War is all you need.


Have I got it about right?

CNu said...

Did he neglect to mention the Victorian style beauracracy and educational system required to feed and sustain the same lionized hereabouts just the other day? http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2013/10/school-is-prison.html You know, the one for which Alfred Binet invented his much misused and now maligned system for measuring curricular competencies? http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2007/11/iv-is-establishment-reviving-eugenics.html

John Kurman said...

Short stroke pud pulling aside (harrumph and giving BD the hairy eyeball), did anyone actually read the paper? The model seems to me question-begging in that reliance on the steppe ecologies (and by assumption, domestication of the horse) for transmission is their foregone conclusion. If this is not just a really cool computerized version of Risk, how does that actually tie in with the behavior of the -stan populations? Or for that matter, societies located around the Patagonian steppe ecosystem or the High Plains? (which, whoopsie, didn't have horses).

CNu said...

I read the paper - but didn't assess it that deeply in chorological terms. In all candor John, my superficial and selfish read of the this approach to complex society was stimulated more by my interest in living memory history in the U.S., the role of WW-II and the U.S. military on ethnic integration in the U.S., and, the role of the Soldiers Rebellion at the end of Vietnam in provoking a violent and sustained counterinsurgency against black males in America. http://subrealism.blogspot.com/2010/10/is-this-happening-in-afghanistan-if-not.html


I believe we're at the end of that counterinsurgency and that the symbolic role of the first black narrator-in-chief signifies that fact. The question begged to me is whether or not - given the current resurgence of the confederate states element in congress that wants to defund government - whether the multi-ethnic Federation can/will persist through contraction and take us in the direction of the warsocialist utopia depicted in updated Star Trek movies, or, whether we fall back to Big Don's wet dream along the lines of the Turner Diaries?

John Kurman said...

Hadn't been thinking in those lines. I'm kind of stuck in hundred years ago (or hundred years hence) mode, at the moment thinking about the Long 19th Century turning into the Even Longer 20th. But your noted counterinsurgency, presented in literary form, is not unlike RUR, no? And throw in a poor-poor-pitiful-me white twilight narrative, would go a long way to explaining the almost frantic conversion over to the much more compliant robotic drones. But, uh, with respect to the direction, take your cue from biology - the diverse ecology is always the outrageously baddest-ass motherfucker. We know again and again how the real Turner Diaries end: the bunker, the creamy tort cake, the black pill, the luger, the relieved cigarette smoking.

CNu said...

But your noted counterinsurgency, presented in literary form, is not
unlike RUR, no? And throw in a poor-poor-pitiful-me white twilight
narrative, would go a long way to explaining the almost frantic
conversion over to the much more compliant robotic drones.


lol, zigging from your densely-packed zag - that would also have to encompass the now 40 year old experiment with the CSA all-volunteer demography - field tested from 1973 to 2013? Are you implying that that experiment has yielded anything less than entirely satisfactory results? Clearly there haven't been any successes on the ground, no winning of hearts and minds, and no transmission of our "exceptional" dopamine hegemony. http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/us-and-iranian-realities But a conversion to all robot, all-the-time drone war is proving even less satisfactory in the cultural transmission department, yielding nothing so much as increasing oppositionality and hardened adversaries?

See, I rather uncritically accepted the paper's premise that the military is hands-down the most potent vessel and vehicle for eusociality and cultural transmission of a particular brand of the same, again without consideration of the particulars. It certainly worked with Japan, Germany, South Korea, and then, it kind of epic failed in southeast asia and apparently hasn't been working any too well anywhere else since. The military has been carefully studying Islam for the longest period of time, starting with email/listserve behavior and early-on came to the jarring realization that Islam is more cohesive than the military from a communications and control perspective.

Evidently U.S. military training and eusociality worked swimmingly with the thirsty Tuskeegee airmen generation, but was woefully insufficient to overcome black nationalism and entrenched oppositionality a mere 30 years later.

Of course you'll get no argument from me about diverse ecology, and I think dominant elements of the power elite are well aware of that fact and have conducted much of their long-range social engineering accordingly. What troubles me about what I can see is that the totality of this engineering hasn't yet resulted in even one iota of real power/control being shared across racial/ethnic lines within the U.S. - unless of course there are some black women covertly running things from within the intimate spaces of the big house. (which may in fact account for the historic and unusual survival and comparative flourishment of black folk (compared to Indians) in America in any event)

John Kurman said...

Being a big fan of dynamic solutions allows me to use the "Use it till it stop working" philosophy, which, though pragmatic, really isn't much of a plan. Were we to reinstate the draft today, I don't think it would be (ah ha! ha! oh no! no!) very popular. But - providing no hanky-panky - does have the cache of being more democratic than the current volunteer system. I can only hope that those who choose to serve are properly rewarded and advanced. That would seem only fair. On the other hand, an endless stream of bodies to feed the maw of a permanent war machine... I'd say Vietnam fucked our heads up more it should, driving into zero tolerance risk aversion. Drones don't help at all as, yes, of course, they make us all look cowardly. But, and no question about it, we will become a mobile operated drone nation, as to how that will pan out will make for interesting times. But as for the rest, I don't have any good answers to your observations.

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