Reply to Tosh et al.: Quantitative analyses of cultural evolution require engagement with historical and archaeological research

Societal collapse: A literature review

“…This discipline studied societal collapse conceptualizing societies as complex systems, both as only social systems and as socioecological systems. One more prominent example of the former conceptualization in relation to societal collapse is the work of Peter Turchin (e.g., Turchin, 2003 and colleagues (e.g., Turchin & Nefedov, 2009;Currie et al, 2018;Turchin et al, 2018;. His approach is the so-called historical dynamics or cliodynamics, essentially a mathematical modeling of social processes applied to historical events, in a manner echoing the cyclical theories of Toynbee (1946Toynbee ( , 1957 and Sorokin (1937), especially considering how they both presented cultures as systems (von Bertalanffy, 1974) and wrote universal histories (Joll, 1985).…”

“…For example, his work was critiqued for neglecting society's connection to the physical world (Maini, 2020), as well as for methodological issues. One discussion arose around Turchin et al (2018), with Tosh et al (2018) pointing out some analytical challenges in the former article, and Currie et al (2018) clarifying the original article's approach. Another controversy that emerged around methodological issues resulted in a retracted article in Nature.…”

“…Another controversy that emerged around methodological issues resulted in a retracted article in Nature. 1 Such critiques made the authors acknowledge that performing studies with such data magnitudes stresses the need to keep their databases updated to minimize inconsistencies and disagreements in the results (Currie et al, 2018).…”