Disentangling the evolutionary drivers of social complexity: A comprehensive test of hypotheses

Turchin, Peter; Whitehouse, Harvey; Gavrilets, Sergey; Hoyer, Daniel; François, Pieter; Bennett, James S.; Feeney, Kevin; Peregrine, Peter N.; Feinman, Gary M.; Korotayev, Andrey; Kradin, Nikolay; Levine, Jill; Reddish, Jenny; Cioni, Enrico; Wacziarg, Romain; Mendel-Gleason, Gavin; Benam, Majid

doi:10.1126/sciadv.abn3517

Cited by 28 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 73 publications

(103 reference statements)

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“…In other words, the drivers of systemic events seem to be embedded in the way our current social order is constructed (Centeno et al, 2015) giving rise to a situation of 'permacrisis' (The Collins, 2022). Two opposite hypotheses may be made regarding the importance of systemic crises as an evolutionary driver of social complexity (Turchin et al, 2022). First, the current multilateral international institutional order, mainly designed after World War II to prevent major military conflicts between powerful states, may become outdated and ineffective.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and governing global systemic crises in the 21st century: A complexity perspective

et al. 2023

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Contemporary globalization has fostered human development but growing interconnectivity between societies has increased systemic risks (Goldin & Mariathasan, 2014;Goldin & Vogel, 2010). Systemic risks are risks associated with large-scale failures or changes of a system (Helbing, 2013). Disruptions originating in one country can quickly spread beyond national borders and affect large parts of the human population. Addressing such threats is considered a global public good, i.e., goods with benefits that extend to all countries (Kaul et al., 1999). In the study of risks with large-scale impacts, research has often focused on wars, natural disasters, and existential risks (Ord, 2020). However, crises affecting human societies are also related to economic and social issues, or the cooccurrence of social and ecological phenomena (Folke et al., 2021). In the early 21st century, the world has experienced several systemic events with global repercussions, including jihadist terrorism and the war on terror (2001), the global financial and economic crisis ( 2008), the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), and the current broader impact of the Russian aggression against Ukraine on energy, food, and security (2022).These events have provided an empirical basis to study systemic crises. This article aims at providing a broader understanding of the nature, causes, mechanisms, and impact of global systemic crises and their implications for global policymaking and governance. Such understanding is essential for the provision of global public goods to prevent, react to, and recover from shocks. The article

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding and governing global systemic crises in the 21st century: A complexity perspective

et al. 2023

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“…Productive agriculture was a necessary condition for the next revolution [18]. royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstb Phil.…”

Section: Neolithic Agricultural Revolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first complex states started to emerge abruptly from approximately 7 ka onwards, following periods of conflict and limited population growth (or even decline) [80] ( possibly linked to climate or environmental degradation). Once established, they were propelled by reinforcing feedbacks of innovation, including increasing governance complexity boosting agricultural productivity [18], and specialization (division of labour) improving performance [3]. Thanks to these feedbacks, agricultural states are estimated to have had three times the population density of non-state-occupied agricultural regions [81]-enabling their diffusion.…”

Section: Rise Of Complex Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Spread of the cycles: a feedback perspective on the Anthropocene

Lenton,

Scheffer

2023

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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What propelled the human ‘revolutions' that started the Anthropocene? and what could speed humanity out of trouble? Here, we focus on the role of reinforcing feedback cycles, often comprised of diverse, unrelated elements (e.g. fire, grass, humans), in propelling abrupt and/or irreversible, revolutionary changes. We suggest that differential ‘spread of the cycles' has been critical to the past human revolutions of fire use, agriculture, rise of complex states and industrialization. For each revolution, we review and map out proposed reinforcing feedback cycles, and describe how new systems built on previous ones, propelling us into the Anthropocene. We argue that to escape a bleak Anthropocene will require abruptly shifting from existing unsustainable ‘vicious cycles’, to alternative sustainable ‘virtuous cycles' that can outspread and outpersist them. This will need to be complemented by a revolutionary cultural shift from maximizing growth to maximizing persistence (sustainability). To achieve that we suggest that non-human elements need to be brought back into the feedback cycles underlying human cultures and associated measures of progress. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolution and sustainability: gathering the strands for an Anthropocene synthesis’.

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“…Human societies are larger, denser, and more anonymous than ever before (Murdock & Provost, 1973; Turchin et al, 2022). The scaling up of human groups is visible across any number of metrics: capital cities are more populous, infrastructure is more developed, governments control more territory and larger populations, and societies include more ethnic groups (Turchin et al, 2018).…”

Section: Character Complexity and The Challenge Of Choosing Cooperati...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Generalized morality culturally evolves as an adaptive heuristic in large social networks.

Jackson,

Halberstadt,

Takezawa

et al. 2023

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like “moral” and “immoral”? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent to which they perceive moral character as “localized” (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions) versus “generalized” (varying along a single dimension from morally bad to morally good). This variation might be partly the product of cultural evolutionary adaptations to different kinds of social networks. As networks grow larger, perceptions of generalized morality are increasingly valuable for predicting cooperation during partner selection, especially in novel contexts. Our studies show that social network size correlates with perceptions of generalized morality in United States and international samples (Study 1) and that East African hunter–gatherers with greater exposure outside their local region perceive morality as more generalized compared to those who have remained in their local region (Study 2). We support the adaptive value of generalized morality in large and unfamiliar social networks with an agent-based model (Study 3), and in experiments where we manipulate partner unfamiliarity (Study 4). Our final study shows that perceptions of morality have become more generalized over the last 200 years of English-language history, which suggests that it may be coevolving with rising social complexity and anonymity in the English-speaking world (Study 5). We discuss the implications of this theory for the cultural evolution of political systems, religion, and taxonomical theories of morality.

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Disentangling the evolutionary drivers of social complexity: A comprehensive test of hypotheses

Cited by 28 publications

References 73 publications

Understanding and governing global systemic crises in the 21st century: A complexity perspective

Understanding and governing global systemic crises in the 21st century: A complexity perspective

Spread of the cycles: a feedback perspective on the Anthropocene

Generalized morality culturally evolves as an adaptive heuristic in large social networks.

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