Jukka Aakula’s Reviews > The Great Holocene Transformation: What Complexity Science Tells Us about the Evolution of Complex Societies > Status Update

Big Goods theory is wrong according to the Seshat analysis.

Chapter 7.6 was partly too difficult for me to understand, even if the threshold model of Collective computation and Scale is clear. I skipped part of the text.

90% of the book is accessible with basic knowledge on statistics, cultural evolution, multilevel selection, agent-based models, etc.

Military technologies and agricultural intensity are the evolutionary drivers for complex societies. Other drivers are not very relevant. Also the affect is pretty much unidirectional. E.g. military technology (until 1500) has been external cause.

"Can different human societies, from different parts of the globe and from different historical eras, be meaningfully compared in their complexity? And how many measures do we need for this comparison: one, two, or many?

The answers to these questions are “yes” and “one,” respectively. Furthermore, we now have a quantitative answer to what is meant by the “bulk of variation”—79 percent, captured by PC1."

"The synthetic theory (Chapter 3) postulates that technical advances in the military sphere increase the intensity of interpolity competition, thus selecting for larger-scale, better-organized, and more cohesive societies. The Seshat project has developed a sophisticated approach for quantifying this potential driver of social evolution (Turchin et al. 2021c)."

Dynamic regression is used to analyze dynamism.

Chapter 3 provides the theoretical synthesis for the Great Holocene Transformation. Probably the main non-formal argument of the book is now defined.

War and CMLS and technology.