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Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)

dpflan 10y ago
For an analysis of warfare, progression of technology and its influence on warfare, and war's influence on society, I recommend reading A History of Warfare by John Keegan. It does explore war as an extension of politics and can lead to nice thought exercises about how war does influence the creation and destruction of civilization. 1. Wiki About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Warfare
singularity2001 10y ago
Next: Computer Simulations Reveal Computers Will Drive the Demise of Civilisation
- bbctol 10y ago
  Computer Simulations Reveal Best Option for Civilization is to Cede Control to Computer Simulations, Trust Us You Guys
mrow84 10y ago
(2013)
GavinMcG 10y ago
It seems to me that "reveal" must be the wrong word here, basically by definition.
- asolove 10y ago
  Indeed. The model is seeded with only two interesting bits of information: agricultural capacity and military technology. They then compared that model with one that only knew about agriculture. Because the first model was more predictive, they concluded war was the primary cause of civilization. That result seems suspect. Looking at the little maps in the article, I might hesitate a guess that this model has been over-fit to a certain idea of "civilization". It predicts Egypt and Rome and Greece, things people know about. But it doesn't seem to predict the Byzantines, Sogdian and other Central Asian empires, peaks and troughs of Chinese dynasties, etc., which were just as long-lived and influential but are less well-known. I wonder what would happen if they modeled resource availability, language overlap over time, political ideology (large empires tend to become inward-looking), etc. War is certainly an important factor, but not the only one.
teilo 10y ago
Of which we had not the slightest inkling until a computer simulation told us so.
clock_tower 10y ago
Turchin, like I suspected. War and Peace and War is his first book on the subject, which is well worth reading. He's an ethnic Russian in the US, and focuses on US and Russian history; his model explains both countries very well, but he openly admits in the book that it doesn't explain Italy (or Aquitaine), so we know that there are other factors in life. I'm not convinced that "Turchinian cohesion" is really a good thing, though; it seems to be a way to get people who hate each other to toe the line and work together nonetheless, and he kind of praises how all cohesive societies suppress dissenters... Another book to read, for those interested in neo-Toynbean searches for underlying patterns: The Fourth Turning, which deals with generational cycles of values. The authors, writing around 1990, expected a high risk of some sort of crisis -- possibly even a large terrorist attack -- somewhere around 2000, and a general atmosphere of crisis that would last about 20 years afterwards. Either their model's pretty good, or they just got lucky; if they followed their own investment advice, I imagine they came out pretty well.
platz 10y ago
Computer Simulations also suggest reality is simulated in a computer.
jwtadvice 10y ago
Yes: geostrategy is a huge defining factor in the organization of the planet, the movement of people and the evolution of society. It is a primary factor, including resource extraction technologies, agricultural capability, and more. I think rounding that up to "drove the rise of civilizations" is a crude way to put that. For example, the simulation pits "agriculture plus military" against "agriculture". Then they found that including both food security concerns and physical security concerns more closely predicted known outcomes. Had they put "agriculture plus military" against "military" and found that including both was better than just simulating physical security we would have gotten the title "Computer Simulations Suggest Food Drove the Rise of Civilizations". I think the takeaway (besides how not to model and report on models) is that geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it. A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more. Unfortunately the layman instead is fed a steady diet of "good versus evil" narratives, informing him instead about how he should feel about each case to emotionally and financially support his military.
- mc32 10y ago
  Wouldn't the "military" only group be able to terrorize the agriculture only as well as the ag plus military ones? Something akin to the Danes at one point? They could just build it up so that they could go pillaging indefinitely, so long as they don't outright destroy their target civs.
  - rmchugh 10y ago
    I'm not sure the Danes were ever military only, Denmark was also an agricultural society during the viking period. As I understand it, the viking raids were in fact organised around the agricultural calendar, with the two raiding seasons taking place after the harvest and after the sowing. And of course the Vikings were interested in acquiring farming land and often settled and farmed in their places of conquest. A more apt comparison might be pastoralist raiders as mentioned in Turchin's War and Peace and War, whose nomadic lifestyle led naturally to the development of military skills that could be applied in raids on settled communities. Turchin wrote a lot about the Tatars and the Mongols could also be a good example.
stcredzero 10y ago
The older I get, the more it strikes me that civilization is inherently unstable. It may be metastable, in the way that a predator-prey relationship is stable. A technological civilization like ours is not stable. It's a conflagration. It's subject to a number of exponential processes. Our economy is based on exponentiation. If progress is based on war, then that's just another nail in the coffin. This makes for a plausible "Great Filter" solution to the Fermi Paradox. Civilizations are so unstable, they can only progress through war, which makes them more likely to destroy themselves. Perhaps civilizations almost never stay organized at the point where they are capable of star travel.
- wyager 10y ago
  This is why it's critical to become starfaring as soon as possible. Every year we delay carries tremendous risk.
  - ionwake 10y ago
    Maybe the rise of the automatons will keep humanity in check.
  - kowdermeister 10y ago
    Do you think we can get rid of this once we leave the planet and go multi-planetary? We will bring our gray matter with us. May a few generations grow up and they will repeat our mistakes. Possibly the only solution is to get way smarter by gene editing and preserve as much data as we can from our age.
    - clock_tower 10y ago
      Over time, populations adapt to their circumstances. In a society in which Malthusian pressures operate, and the thrifty and peaceful out-reproduce the violent and improvident, society will become more thrifty and peaceful over time -- and will eventually become prosperous and organized enough to escape the Malthusian trap. (The opposite pressures can also operate, but you need external sources of chaos for selection in favor of chaos to occur. Order is normally self-establishing, self-reinforcing, and stronger than chaos over time.) A Farewell to Alms discusses this in great detail; England began the Industrial Revolution (i.e. broke out of the Malthusian trap) in the late 18th century, but if not for them, the Continent would have done it in the 19th; if not the Continent, then Japan in the late 19th or China sometime in the 20th.
ComteDeLaFere 10y ago
“It seems warfare created intense pressure that drove these societies.” This seems backwards. Wouldn't the intense pressure of societies bumping up against each other drive warfare, and not the other way around?
- MarkPNeyer 10y ago
  The pressure analogy seems reasonable to me. It suggests that this goes both ways: Two societies pushing against each other lead to pressure. This pressure results in military conflict. Whoever wins the military conflict can exert increased pressure. The necessity of winning wars put pressure on the society to develop better ways of winning wars. These better ways put more pressure on external societies, etc. China was the most wealthy, educated civilization in the world in the 1400's. They stagnated basically becuase there was little to no fighting. Meanwhile Europe was busy finding newer more elaborate ways to slaughter each other, and to avoid being slaughtered.
  - ComteDeLaFere 10y ago
    -> They stagnated basically because there was little to no fighting. A fair assessment, but now I realize that another way to say this is - They stagnated because there was little to drive innovation. Stated this way, it at least makes us consider that there might be an alternative to constant warfare as a driver of progress. Maybe recognition of this is some kind of societal turning point as well?
    - redwards510 10y ago
      > alternative to constant warfare How about the existential threat of climate change? Either way though, the driver is survival.
    - hx87 10y ago
      Modern capitalism, combined with the expectation that things should improve over time (which wasn't very prevalent until recently) can be one hell of a driver.
mynegation 10y ago
A little bit of offtopic that might be interesting to HN crowd: Peter Turchin is a son of late Valentin Turchin [1] who has quite a following in Russian Computer Science community. Probably due to our history, there is a large amount of interest among Russians about rise and fall of civilizations. Lev Gumilyov's [2] work is something else that comes to mind, although much less mathematical. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Turchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Turchin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov
virgil_disgr4ce 10y ago
Proud that my brother and I playing about 3,000 games of Civ I contributed, I assume, to this study
- pugworthy 10y ago
  Came for the Civ comment, was not disappointed.
wwggggoi 10y ago
maybe. but, imagine where we'd be now had science driven the rise of civilization. imagine if all the money squandered on war were invested in science.
squozzer 10y ago
Turchin has made the point elsewhere that agriculture is important because food production is a fundamental constraint on population growth. But it's warfare that provided the impetus for scaling societies past the tribal level.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  But tribes fight better than civilizations (less concern for social status, less internal dissention; read War Before Civilization for an interesting discussion of this) -- so over-civilization is self-correcting in a way. Turchin sees his ideas as an elaboration on ibn Khaldun...
LordHumungous 10y ago
Interestingly, from a cursory glance at those images, it looks like the biggest gap between the model and the data is in Iran and central Asia. The model predicts a low incidence of civilization there, which makes sense due to the region's low agricultural potential, but in reality large civilizations have thrived in those areas. I wonder what factor explains this divergence? Trade along the Silk Road?
- joshuaheard 10y ago
  Long term climate change? Those areas were probably fertile when the ancient civilizations thrived there.
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    It was local climate change and poor resource management -- two problems which fed on each other. Desertification isn't new to the 20th century... Iran was originally wooded, but the forests were marginal -- not very fertile, easy to lose, mostly valuable for keeping topsoil in place. These were cut at rates faster than they could regenerate, and the country desertified. The ancient Persians were superb engineers (their air-conditioning and water-transport methods, in particular, get a lot of attention in sustainability circles today), but poor foresters. Of course, regenerative forestry was only invented in the 19th century. Persia isn't the only part of the world where marginal forests were over-harvested and lost; the forests that survived were those in very tree-friendly regions, or in uninhabited regions, or both. In Persia, the temperate-rainforest zone north of the Elburz Mountains (on the south shore of the Caspian Sea) was forested much longer, although these days it's more urbanized than anything else. The problem in Iraq -- Mesopotania -- was a different one: the Babylonians put in irrigation canals, but, over time, irrigation canals render the soil salty and toxic to plants. This takes thousands of years; but by the time the Mongols arrived, parts of Iraq were already a salt marsh, and after Hugalu Khan destroyed the irrigation systems, no one could get much value from rebuilding them. The climate is still mild and pleasant; the soil, much less so.
hyperion2010 10y ago
And then there is Caral, a civilization that seems to have evolved without any violence. Here is an excellent video about the discovery [1]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0jSXv9Jyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0jSXv9Jyk
- clock_tower 10y ago
  Norte Chico society was unusual in a lot of ways, including disinterest in violence (which was helped along by having no neighbors). I'd recommend 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus for an in-depth look.
myf01d 10y ago
Things liberals won't like to hear.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  Turchin's pretty embarrassing for everyone, except ibn Khaldun of course. Even Hitler wouldn't want to hear it, since race is a rounding error in Turchin's model... (Think of the War Nerd on Eritrea; as he tells it, that's a classic Turchinian story.)
- lawless123 10y ago
  why would anyone like to hear it? your comment implies conservatives love war.
DrNuke 10y ago
Sid Meier knows it better ehehe
rossdavidh 10y ago
For those interested in Peter Turchin's work, he just released a new book called "Ages of Discord". It's got a lot of mathematical notation, but if you're not put off by that it's a good read. http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/ http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/
grandalf 10y ago
War is the application of violence to achieve a political outcome. It's important to differentiate between this type of war and simple conquest and commandeering of resources (human, natural, etc.) In both cases, as the scale increases, the sophistication required to support the effort increases... One needs better social structures, better technology, supply chain management, etc. So these "civilized" aspects are in fact prerequisites for victory in war, though war may offer an incentive to focus on improving those systems and their coordination at the expense of other aspects of society. So just as eating food strengthens a person enough that he/she may grow, survive, and thus desire to eat larger meals in the future, eating is not the cause of hunger. What we must also realize (for history and for the present day) is that war utterly wipes out culture and the history of humans, and replaces it with some politicized narrative imagined by the victors. We know little about indigenous Americans, and the future will know little about the Afghanistan and Iraq of the early 21st century and earlier. There will be volumes of information, but it will be written by scholars beholden to the occupying hegemon.
digi_owl 10y ago
No shit Sherlock. Just looking at recent history will show that outright war, or the imminent threat of same, has driven perhaps the biggest technological push in known history.
softwarelimits 10y ago
what are the best open source tools for social simulations?
- anonymouslee 10y ago
  I'm part of an NSF funded research coordination network focused on supporting good practices for computational modeling (www.comses.net). We've been curating a comprehensive list of computational modeling platforms at https://www.openabm.org/modeling-platforms https://www.openabm.org/modeling-platforms but for the most part the popular modeling platforms are NetLogo (https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/), Repast (https://repast.github.io/ https://repast.github.io/), and Mason (https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/ https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/). Rob Allan wrote a survey of agent based modelling toolkits available at http://www.grids.ac.uk/Complex/ABMS/ http://www.grids.ac.uk/Complex/ABMS/ (in 2011 though so some things are out-of-date). It's important to strive towards models that are as simple as possible so you don't end up "simulating the world" and so you can better understand and analyze the processes that led to the interesting results. It's also important that you document and open your source code to review because as we all know, it's trivial to hardcode your assumptions into a program to tell you what you want to see.
outworlder 10y ago
I used to run a computer simulation that proved the same thing. It's called Dwarf Fortress world generation.
TheGRS 10y ago
Everyone should listen to Dan Carlin's amazing Hardcore History series on Genghis Khan: http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-43-wrath-of-the-khans-i/ http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-43-wrath-o... He makes a case for not just Kahn and his descendants being a huge factor in history, but for every ruler who has gone in and shaken up the foundations of civilization through conquest. Khan, Alexander and Napoleon are prime examples given (and I'm avoiding another key example but you'll know who it is if you listen to the podcast). He speculates that at various times in history, civilization stalled out, but these rulers came in and got things moving again simply by clearing entire parts away and making room for new ideas and new forms of government. Its a fascinating theory and I think this data corroborates that.
- ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  You can point to examples of predator migrations causing rises in the populations of prey species for nearly the same reasons.
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
The Old Testament of the Bible is a lot taken up with the rise of kings over judges, with prophets then warning people that the only reason to have kings is conquest, and that this is Hubris That Will Arouse The Ire of $DEITY. Whether it's really on a timeline or adapted, it's kind of an interesting idea that much of that old book is about that. It's especially interesting when you consider the idea that in order to survive, a system like that has to become ephemeral; that Judaism survived the destruction of various temples because it became much more of an idea than a place or thing. But we remember the conquerors because the stories are better :)
ommunist 10y ago
Sorry, computer, I am not going to war, even if it will rise another civilization.
DanielBMarkham 10y ago
Random internet comment: in my mind there are three cooperative/adversarial games that drove all of human civilization: trading/commerce, clanning/war, and prey/predator. Each of these requires vastly different strategies in different circumstances. Each scales out in a way that becomes more nuanced and complex the bigger the system. Each one, and various ones in combinations drive out other complex, emergent behavior like religion or language. Intelligence, at least on this planet, seems to thrive in a state of stress and moderate, creative chaos. There are a lot of idealists in the world who want to build something totally peaceful where all needs are taken care of and there's very little risk. If I'm correct, this would effectively kill the species over the long run.
Tomrn 10y ago
Was anyone else half expecting this to be a dwarf fortress story?
erikpukinskis 10y ago
This seems almost tautological to me. Civilization is violence. Civilization is cultural agreement, agreement generally requires control, control is violence. How else are you going to centralize a way of life besides killing everyone who doesn't agree to it?
dschiptsov 10y ago
Competition in general. War is just one form of it. So-called Cold War and Arm-racing is the most recent examples. Continuous competition for everything, not just survival and reproduction, is what makes evolution (biological or social) possible.
negamax 10y ago
Always knew this intuitively. When two tribes, cities, countries goto war; they push each side to get better or perish. Winner never takes all as any society created with war in center will have power struggle built in. Process repeats.

For an analysis of warfare, progression of technology and its influence on warfare, and war's influence on society, I recommend reading A History of Warfare by John Keegan. It does explore war as an extension of politics and can lead to nice thought exercises about how war does influence the creation and destruction of civilization. 1. Wiki About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Warfare

singularity2001 10y ago

Next: Computer Simulations Reveal Computers Will Drive the Demise of Civilisation

bbctol 10y ago
Computer Simulations Reveal Best Option for Civilization is to Cede Control to Computer Simulations, Trust Us You Guys

mrow84 10y ago

(2013)

GavinMcG 10y ago

It seems to me that "reveal" must be the wrong word here, basically by definition.

asolove 10y ago
Indeed. The model is seeded with only two interesting bits of information: agricultural capacity and military technology. They then compared that model with one that only knew about agriculture. Because the first model was more predictive, they concluded war was the primary cause of civilization. That result seems suspect. Looking at the little maps in the article, I might hesitate a guess that this model has been over-fit to a certain idea of "civilization". It predicts Egypt and Rome and Greece, things people know about. But it doesn't seem to predict the Byzantines, Sogdian and other Central Asian empires, peaks and troughs of Chinese dynasties, etc., which were just as long-lived and influential but are less well-known. I wonder what would happen if they modeled resource availability, language overlap over time, political ideology (large empires tend to become inward-looking), etc. War is certainly an important factor, but not the only one.

teilo 10y ago

Of which we had not the slightest inkling until a computer simulation told us so.

clock_tower 10y ago

Turchin, like I suspected. War and Peace and War is his first book on the subject, which is well worth reading. He's an ethnic Russian in the US, and focuses on US and Russian history; his model explains both countries very well, but he openly admits in the book that it doesn't explain Italy (or Aquitaine), so we know that there are other factors in life. I'm not convinced that "Turchinian cohesion" is really a good thing, though; it seems to be a way to get people who hate each other to toe the line and work together nonetheless, and he kind of praises how all cohesive societies suppress dissenters... Another book to read, for those interested in neo-Toynbean searches for underlying patterns: The Fourth Turning, which deals with generational cycles of values. The authors, writing around 1990, expected a high risk of some sort of crisis -- possibly even a large terrorist attack -- somewhere around 2000, and a general atmosphere of crisis that would last about 20 years afterwards. Either their model's pretty good, or they just got lucky; if they followed their own investment advice, I imagine they came out pretty well.

platz 10y ago

Computer Simulations also suggest reality is simulated in a computer.

jwtadvice 10y ago

Yes: geostrategy is a huge defining factor in the organization of the planet, the movement of people and the evolution of society. It is a primary factor, including resource extraction technologies, agricultural capability, and more. I think rounding that up to "drove the rise of civilizations" is a crude way to put that. For example, the simulation pits "agriculture plus military" against "agriculture". Then they found that including both food security concerns and physical security concerns more closely predicted known outcomes. Had they put "agriculture plus military" against "military" and found that including both was better than just simulating physical security we would have gotten the title "Computer Simulations Suggest Food Drove the Rise of Civilizations". I think the takeaway (besides how not to model and report on models) is that geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it. A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more. Unfortunately the layman instead is fed a steady diet of "good versus evil" narratives, informing him instead about how he should feel about each case to emotionally and financially support his military.

mc32 10y ago
Wouldn't the "military" only group be able to terrorize the agriculture only as well as the ag plus military ones? Something akin to the Danes at one point? They could just build it up so that they could go pillaging indefinitely, so long as they don't outright destroy their target civs.
- rmchugh 10y ago
  I'm not sure the Danes were ever military only, Denmark was also an agricultural society during the viking period. As I understand it, the viking raids were in fact organised around the agricultural calendar, with the two raiding seasons taking place after the harvest and after the sowing. And of course the Vikings were interested in acquiring farming land and often settled and farmed in their places of conquest. A more apt comparison might be pastoralist raiders as mentioned in Turchin's War and Peace and War, whose nomadic lifestyle led naturally to the development of military skills that could be applied in raids on settled communities. Turchin wrote a lot about the Tatars and the Mongols could also be a good example.

stcredzero 10y ago

The older I get, the more it strikes me that civilization is inherently unstable. It may be metastable, in the way that a predator-prey relationship is stable. A technological civilization like ours is not stable. It's a conflagration. It's subject to a number of exponential processes. Our economy is based on exponentiation. If progress is based on war, then that's just another nail in the coffin. This makes for a plausible "Great Filter" solution to the Fermi Paradox. Civilizations are so unstable, they can only progress through war, which makes them more likely to destroy themselves. Perhaps civilizations almost never stay organized at the point where they are capable of star travel.

wyager 10y ago
This is why it's critical to become starfaring as soon as possible. Every year we delay carries tremendous risk.
- ionwake 10y ago
  Maybe the rise of the automatons will keep humanity in check.
- kowdermeister 10y ago
  Do you think we can get rid of this once we leave the planet and go multi-planetary? We will bring our gray matter with us. May a few generations grow up and they will repeat our mistakes. Possibly the only solution is to get way smarter by gene editing and preserve as much data as we can from our age.
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    Over time, populations adapt to their circumstances. In a society in which Malthusian pressures operate, and the thrifty and peaceful out-reproduce the violent and improvident, society will become more thrifty and peaceful over time -- and will eventually become prosperous and organized enough to escape the Malthusian trap. (The opposite pressures can also operate, but you need external sources of chaos for selection in favor of chaos to occur. Order is normally self-establishing, self-reinforcing, and stronger than chaos over time.) A Farewell to Alms discusses this in great detail; England began the Industrial Revolution (i.e. broke out of the Malthusian trap) in the late 18th century, but if not for them, the Continent would have done it in the 19th; if not the Continent, then Japan in the late 19th or China sometime in the 20th.

ComteDeLaFere 10y ago

“It seems warfare created intense pressure that drove these societies.” This seems backwards. Wouldn't the intense pressure of societies bumping up against each other drive warfare, and not the other way around?

MarkPNeyer 10y ago
The pressure analogy seems reasonable to me. It suggests that this goes both ways: Two societies pushing against each other lead to pressure. This pressure results in military conflict. Whoever wins the military conflict can exert increased pressure. The necessity of winning wars put pressure on the society to develop better ways of winning wars. These better ways put more pressure on external societies, etc. China was the most wealthy, educated civilization in the world in the 1400's. They stagnated basically becuase there was little to no fighting. Meanwhile Europe was busy finding newer more elaborate ways to slaughter each other, and to avoid being slaughtered.
- ComteDeLaFere 10y ago
  -> They stagnated basically because there was little to no fighting. A fair assessment, but now I realize that another way to say this is - They stagnated because there was little to drive innovation. Stated this way, it at least makes us consider that there might be an alternative to constant warfare as a driver of progress. Maybe recognition of this is some kind of societal turning point as well?
  - redwards510 10y ago
    > alternative to constant warfare How about the existential threat of climate change? Either way though, the driver is survival.
  - hx87 10y ago
    Modern capitalism, combined with the expectation that things should improve over time (which wasn't very prevalent until recently) can be one hell of a driver.

mynegation 10y ago

A little bit of offtopic that might be interesting to HN crowd: Peter Turchin is a son of late Valentin Turchin [1] who has quite a following in Russian Computer Science community. Probably due to our history, there is a large amount of interest among Russians about rise and fall of civilizations. Lev Gumilyov's [2] work is something else that comes to mind, although much less mathematical. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Turchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Turchin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov

virgil_disgr4ce 10y ago

Proud that my brother and I playing about 3,000 games of Civ I contributed, I assume, to this study

pugworthy 10y ago
Came for the Civ comment, was not disappointed.

wwggggoi 10y ago

maybe. but, imagine where we'd be now had science driven the rise of civilization. imagine if all the money squandered on war were invested in science.

squozzer 10y ago

Turchin has made the point elsewhere that agriculture is important because food production is a fundamental constraint on population growth. But it's warfare that provided the impetus for scaling societies past the tribal level.

clock_tower 10y ago
But tribes fight better than civilizations (less concern for social status, less internal dissention; read War Before Civilization for an interesting discussion of this) -- so over-civilization is self-correcting in a way. Turchin sees his ideas as an elaboration on ibn Khaldun...

LordHumungous 10y ago

Interestingly, from a cursory glance at those images, it looks like the biggest gap between the model and the data is in Iran and central Asia. The model predicts a low incidence of civilization there, which makes sense due to the region's low agricultural potential, but in reality large civilizations have thrived in those areas. I wonder what factor explains this divergence? Trade along the Silk Road?

joshuaheard 10y ago
Long term climate change? Those areas were probably fertile when the ancient civilizations thrived there.
- clock_tower 10y ago
  It was local climate change and poor resource management -- two problems which fed on each other. Desertification isn't new to the 20th century... Iran was originally wooded, but the forests were marginal -- not very fertile, easy to lose, mostly valuable for keeping topsoil in place. These were cut at rates faster than they could regenerate, and the country desertified. The ancient Persians were superb engineers (their air-conditioning and water-transport methods, in particular, get a lot of attention in sustainability circles today), but poor foresters. Of course, regenerative forestry was only invented in the 19th century. Persia isn't the only part of the world where marginal forests were over-harvested and lost; the forests that survived were those in very tree-friendly regions, or in uninhabited regions, or both. In Persia, the temperate-rainforest zone north of the Elburz Mountains (on the south shore of the Caspian Sea) was forested much longer, although these days it's more urbanized than anything else. The problem in Iraq -- Mesopotania -- was a different one: the Babylonians put in irrigation canals, but, over time, irrigation canals render the soil salty and toxic to plants. This takes thousands of years; but by the time the Mongols arrived, parts of Iraq were already a salt marsh, and after Hugalu Khan destroyed the irrigation systems, no one could get much value from rebuilding them. The climate is still mild and pleasant; the soil, much less so.

hyperion2010 10y ago

And then there is Caral, a civilization that seems to have evolved without any violence. Here is an excellent video about the discovery [1]. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0jSXv9Jyk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0jSXv9Jyk

clock_tower 10y ago
Norte Chico society was unusual in a lot of ways, including disinterest in violence (which was helped along by having no neighbors). I'd recommend 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus for an in-depth look.

myf01d 10y ago

Things liberals won't like to hear.

clock_tower 10y ago
Turchin's pretty embarrassing for everyone, except ibn Khaldun of course. Even Hitler wouldn't want to hear it, since race is a rounding error in Turchin's model... (Think of the War Nerd on Eritrea; as he tells it, that's a classic Turchinian story.)
lawless123 10y ago
why would anyone like to hear it? your comment implies conservatives love war.

DrNuke 10y ago

Sid Meier knows it better ehehe

rossdavidh 10y ago

For those interested in Peter Turchin's work, he just released a new book called "Ages of Discord". It's got a lot of mathematical notation, but if you're not put off by that it's a good read. http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/ http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/

grandalf 10y ago

War is the application of violence to achieve a political outcome. It's important to differentiate between this type of war and simple conquest and commandeering of resources (human, natural, etc.) In both cases, as the scale increases, the sophistication required to support the effort increases... One needs better social structures, better technology, supply chain management, etc. So these "civilized" aspects are in fact prerequisites for victory in war, though war may offer an incentive to focus on improving those systems and their coordination at the expense of other aspects of society. So just as eating food strengthens a person enough that he/she may grow, survive, and thus desire to eat larger meals in the future, eating is not the cause of hunger. What we must also realize (for history and for the present day) is that war utterly wipes out culture and the history of humans, and replaces it with some politicized narrative imagined by the victors. We know little about indigenous Americans, and the future will know little about the Afghanistan and Iraq of the early 21st century and earlier. There will be volumes of information, but it will be written by scholars beholden to the occupying hegemon.

digi_owl 10y ago

No shit Sherlock. Just looking at recent history will show that outright war, or the imminent threat of same, has driven perhaps the biggest technological push in known history.

softwarelimits 10y ago

what are the best open source tools for social simulations?

anonymouslee 10y ago
I'm part of an NSF funded research coordination network focused on supporting good practices for computational modeling (www.comses.net). We've been curating a comprehensive list of computational modeling platforms at https://www.openabm.org/modeling-platforms https://www.openabm.org/modeling-platforms but for the most part the popular modeling platforms are NetLogo (https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/ https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/), Repast (https://repast.github.io/ https://repast.github.io/), and Mason (https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/ https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/). Rob Allan wrote a survey of agent based modelling toolkits available at http://www.grids.ac.uk/Complex/ABMS/ http://www.grids.ac.uk/Complex/ABMS/ (in 2011 though so some things are out-of-date). It's important to strive towards models that are as simple as possible so you don't end up "simulating the world" and so you can better understand and analyze the processes that led to the interesting results. It's also important that you document and open your source code to review because as we all know, it's trivial to hardcode your assumptions into a program to tell you what you want to see.

outworlder 10y ago

I used to run a computer simulation that proved the same thing. It's called Dwarf Fortress world generation.

TheGRS 10y ago

Everyone should listen to Dan Carlin's amazing Hardcore History series on Genghis Khan: http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-43-wrath-of-the-khans-i/ http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-43-wrath-o... He makes a case for not just Kahn and his descendants being a huge factor in history, but for every ruler who has gone in and shaken up the foundations of civilization through conquest. Khan, Alexander and Napoleon are prime examples given (and I'm avoiding another key example but you'll know who it is if you listen to the podcast). He speculates that at various times in history, civilization stalled out, but these rulers came in and got things moving again simply by clearing entire parts away and making room for new ideas and new forms of government. Its a fascinating theory and I think this data corroborates that.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago
You can point to examples of predator migrations causing rises in the populations of prey species for nearly the same reasons.

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

The Old Testament of the Bible is a lot taken up with the rise of kings over judges, with prophets then warning people that the only reason to have kings is conquest, and that this is Hubris That Will Arouse The Ire of $DEITY. Whether it's really on a timeline or adapted, it's kind of an interesting idea that much of that old book is about that. It's especially interesting when you consider the idea that in order to survive, a system like that has to become ephemeral; that Judaism survived the destruction of various temples because it became much more of an idea than a place or thing. But we remember the conquerors because the stories are better :)

ommunist 10y ago

Sorry, computer, I am not going to war, even if it will rise another civilization.

DanielBMarkham 10y ago

Random internet comment: in my mind there are three cooperative/adversarial games that drove all of human civilization: trading/commerce, clanning/war, and prey/predator. Each of these requires vastly different strategies in different circumstances. Each scales out in a way that becomes more nuanced and complex the bigger the system. Each one, and various ones in combinations drive out other complex, emergent behavior like religion or language. Intelligence, at least on this planet, seems to thrive in a state of stress and moderate, creative chaos. There are a lot of idealists in the world who want to build something totally peaceful where all needs are taken care of and there's very little risk. If I'm correct, this would effectively kill the species over the long run.

Tomrn 10y ago

Was anyone else half expecting this to be a dwarf fortress story?

erikpukinskis 10y ago

This seems almost tautological to me. Civilization is violence. Civilization is cultural agreement, agreement generally requires control, control is violence. How else are you going to centralize a way of life besides killing everyone who doesn't agree to it?

dschiptsov 10y ago

Competition in general. War is just one form of it. So-called Cold War and Arm-racing is the most recent examples. Continuous competition for everything, not just survival and reproduction, is what makes evolution (biological or social) possible.

negamax 10y ago

Always knew this intuitively. When two tribes, cities, countries goto war; they push each side to get better or perish. Winner never takes all as any society created with war in center will have power struggle built in. Process repeats.