Clio Meets Seshat: Building the Global History Database

1. Clio Meets Seshat:Building the Global History Database Peter Turchin Dublin, June 2014

2. A Science of History? • According to most historians, history is a part of the humanities • Most historians have abandoned the belief in general laws • Yet, when historians construct narratives they also propose explanations for why things happened the way they did • which implies existence of general principles (“laws”)

3. History as viewed by a natural scientist • A mature descriptive discipline that requires high technical expertise • But it is not (yet) a theoretical, explanatory science • History needs • a falsificationist agenda • a mathematical component • systematic databases for testing models

4. Why History Needs Mathematics • A science becomes Science only after it gains mathematical content • formal models • statistical analysis • Why: to translate assumptions into predictions (for empirical testing) • especially in nonlinear dynamics • Explicit mathematical models can correct faulty verbal theory • example: the theory of “imperial overstrech”

5. Imperial Overstrech: the Theory • An empire gobbles up too much territory, incurs heavy logistical burdens that cause it to collapse • Paul Kennedy • Randall Collins

6. Conclusion: theory of imperial overstretch leads to a first-order differential equation that cannot exhibit boom-bust dynamics predicted dynamics

7. Why do Empires Fall? “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings...”

8. Why did the Roman Empire Fall? • The German historian Alexander Demandt counted at least 210 explanations of why Rome fell • Demandt, A. 1984. Der Fall Roms: die Auflösung des Römischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt (Beck, Munich) • The problem with history, as it is traditionally practiced, is that theories multiply but are never rejected

9. … and explanations continue to multiply…

10. Can ancient history tell us anything about today?

11. Why we need to startreject hypotheses • In natural sciences progress occurs when some hypotheses/theories are rejected in favor of others • Phlogiston • Lamarkism

12. The Good Old Scientific Method • Define the question • Propose two or more alternative explanations/theories • Use mathematical models to extract predictions from theories • predictions that disagree about some observable aspect of reality • Put together data to adjudicate between the theories • Repeat as necessary

13. The Puzzle of Ultrasociality Ultrasociality – extensive cooperation among very large numbers of genetically unrelated individuals How did it evolve? International Space Station

14. Approaches: • General theory: cultural multilevel selection (CMLS) of ultrasocial norms and institutions • A specific model: Africa and Eurasia, 1500 BCE – 1500 CE • Empirical tests: building a massive historical database of cultural evolution

15. General Theorydefinitions Ultrasociality: extensive cooperation among very large numbers (e.g. >106) of genetically unrelated individuals Norms: culturally acquired rules of behavior Institutions: systems of norms that govern behavior of individuals in specific contexts Ultrasocial norms and institutions: provide the basis for integration of large-scale societies, but have costs for lower-level units

16. Examples of ultrasocial norms Propensity to trust and help individuals outside one’s ethnic group (“generalized trust”) benefit: provides a basis for cooperation in multiethnic societies cost: vulnerability to free-riding by ethnic groups that restrict cooperation to coethnics Willingness to pay national taxes Obeying laws Refusing bribes and not offering bribes Volunteering for military service in times of war

17. Examples of ultrasocial institutions Government by professional bureaucracies basis for one common definition of the state benefit: governing sufficiently large-scale societies is apparently impossible without bureaucrats, record-keeping, division of tasks cost: expensive to train and maintain bureaucrats; principal-agent problems Universal religions and other integrative ideologies Legitimating power/restraining rulers The state as a ‘bundle’ of ultrasocial institutions

18. Understanding how ultrasocial traits spread is not a simple matter of accounting for their benefits for integration of large-scale societies these institutions have significant costs and historical record indicates that they repeatedly collapsed need an evolutionary mechanism to explain the spread of such traits despite the costs CMLS: cultural multilevel selection “group selection” Boyd, Richerson, D.S. Wilson, Bowles, Turchin

19. Major Evolutionary Transitions: Eukaryotic cell Multicellular organism Eusocial insect colony Complex human society General Processes “particle” cooperation selection on “collectives” suppression of particle selfishness and competition increasing functional integration of collectives collectives become organisms

20. A Social Scale (Agrarian Polities)

21. Alternative Theories Resource base (agriculture) Childe, White, Service, Diamond Social differentiation and class structure Marx, Engels, Patterson Warfare and circumscription - Carneiro Cultural Multilevel Selection Boyd, Richerson, D.S. Wilson, Bowles Economics and trade, problem-solving and information processing, …

23. Simulated Data Real Data Overall model fit R2 ≈ 0.65

24. Spread of ultrasocial traits predicted by the model

25. SESHAT: Global History Databank The huge corpus of knowledge about past societies collectively possessed by academic historians is almost entirely in a form that is inaccessible to scientific analysis, stored in historians’ brains or scattered over heterogeneous notes and publications. The huge potential of this knowledge for testing theories about political and economic development has been largely untapped. Our goal: a historical database that will enable us and others to test theories about the processes responsible for the rise of large-scale societies in human history. The database will bring together, in a systematic form, what is currently known about the sociopolitical organization of human societies, and how it has evolved with time.

26. An example: bureacracy characteristics • Examination system • Merit promotion • Solutions to the principal-agent problem

27. SESHAT: Global History Databank Editorial Board Peter Turchin (UConn): overall coordinator; social complexity Harvey Whitehouse (Oxford): co-editor; ritual and religion Pieter François (Oxford): historical coordinator; ritual variables Thomas Currie (Exeter): resources, agriculture, and population Kevin Feeney (TCD): information technology Consultants J. G. Manning (Yale) Douglas White (UC Irvine) Arkadiusz Marciniak (Poznan) Peter Peregrine (Lawrence and Santa Fe Institute) Enrico Spolaore (Tufts) David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton) Peter Richerson (UC Davis) Postdocs Daniel Hoyer, and 2 postdocs to be hired Research Assistants Rudolf Cesaretti, Edward Turner, and ~10 short-term RAs

29. What will Seshat (eventually) do? Electronic Archives Collective intelligence Feedback databases Seshat Databank Data Consumers High Quality Open Data Community of experts & volunteers “improve the extraction of collective intelligence from electronic archives, research communities and data consumers to improve the quality of published data”

30. SESHAT: Global History Databank Acknowledgments Bernard Winograd Jim Bennett Tricoastal Foundation