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Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth, by Peter Turchin
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Follow Peter Turchin on an epic journey through time. From stone-age assassins to the orbiting cathedrals of the space age, from bloodthirsty god-kings to India’s first vegetarian emperor, discover the secret history of our species—and the evolutionary logic that governed it all.
- Sales Rank: #110071 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-11-17
- Released on: 2015-11-17
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"In Ultrasociety, we see a brilliantly original scientist at the top of his game. Turchin's delightfully readable book defends a bold thesis--that the institutions that have made today's extraordinary degree of human cooperation possible were forged by ten millennia of inter-societal military conflict. No future accounts of society's origins will dare to ignore his carefully crafted arguments in support of this claim."--Robert H. Frank, Cornell University, author of The Darwin Economy.
"Ultrasociety is a winner. It gives us an incisive look at Cultural Evolution and the implications for group selection. Turchin argues clearly and well for a deeper understanding of how culture trumps other social forces, and thus he can explain our era far better." --Gregory Benford, author of Timescape.
"Peter Turchin will go down in history as a great scientific historian. In Ultrasociety he makes the thesis of Edward O. Wilson's The Social Conquest of Earth come alive with empirical detail." --David Sloan Wilson, author of Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others.
"An exciting account of how the growing theory of cultural evolution can be applied to understanding patterns in the sweep of human history and prehistory" --Peter J. Richerson, coauthor of Culture and Coevolutionary Process.
"Peter Turchin's Ultrasociety delivers multi-level satisfaction, as deep-down enjoyable as seeing justice served on a bully. The book is a riveting safari through the origins of human social behavior and a revolutionary new way of reframing the study of culture as a scientific discipline. Turchin and his colleagues are on the cusp of changing the humanities forever, and none too soon. Ultrasociety is a must-read for any member of an intellectually curious species." --Baba Brinkman, author of The Rap Guide to Evolution.
From the Back Cover
Cooperation is powerful.
There aren't many highly cooperative species--but they nearly cover the planet. Ants alone account for a quarter of all animal matter. Yet the human capacity to work together leaves every other species standing.
We organize ourselves into communities of hundreds of millions of individuals, inhabit every continent, and send people into space. Human beings are nature's greatest team players. And the truly astounding thing is, we only started our steep climb to the top of the rankings--overtaking wasps, bees, termites and ants--in the last 10,000 years. Genetic evolution can't explain this anomaly. Something else is going on. How did we become the ultrasocial animal?
In his latest book, the evolutionary scientist Peter Turchin (War and Peace and War) solves the puzzle using some astonishing results in the new science of Cultural Evolution. The story of humanity, from the first scattered bands of Homo sapiens right through to the greatest empires in history, turns out to be driven by a remorseless logic. Our apparently miraculous powers of cooperation were forged in the fires of war. Only conflict, escalating in scale and severity, can explain the extraordinary shifts in human society--and society is the greatest military technology of all.
Seen through the eyes of Cultural Evolution, human history reveals a strange, paradoxical pattern. Early humans were much more egalitarian than other primates, ruthlessly eliminating any upstart who wanted to become alpha male. But if human nature favors equality, how did the blood-soaked god kings of antiquity ever manage to claim their thrones? And how, over the course of thousands of years, did they vanish from the earth, swept away by a reborn spirit of human equality? Why is the story of human justice a chronicle of millennia-long reversals? Once again, the science points to just one explanation: war created the terrible majesty of kingship, and war obliterated it.
Is endless war, then, our fate? Or might society one day evolve beyond it? There's only one way to answer that question. Follow Turchin on an epic journey through time, and discover something that generations of historians thought impossible: the hidden laws of history itself.
About the Author
Peter Turchin is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut, Research Associate in the School of Anthropology, University of Oxford, and Vice-President of the Evolution Institute. He is one of the world's leading authorities on quantitative history and cultural evolution. He lives in Connecticut.
Most helpful customer reviews
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointed
By Morris39
Regret that I could not rate this book higher b/c I like and admire Turchin’s approach to history (mathematical modeling) which aims at objectivity and balance. This work seems to be not quite balanced or nuanced as his earlier War, Peace and War. The thesis seems to be almost entirely premised on the idea that social inequality, a current hot topic, destroys cooperation. That explains too much without providing sufficient evidence. Exploitation (almost) always infers inequality but inequality which is everywhere does not automatically infer exploitation. That bears exploration in depth which is missing. First the good stuff. Turchin writes in clear, lucid prose unlike the turgid obfuscating prose of his colleagues. And he does not spend a lot of time boring readers with endless criticisms of other authors, but see below. The book traces human violence and warfare with interesting historical examples. He claims that the hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian compared to animals (apes) or later human societies but provides no evidence, which is not surprising. I certainly cannot claim otherwise but sketchy evidence from studies of primitive people in the 20th century suggest that male dominance operated on the only available resources i.e. access to choice females and food. Archeological burial evidence of societies prior to large scale farming suggests that material goods (weapons mainly) were highly prized and signaled inequality. More thorough discussion would be useful. Turchin errs in a point by point criticism of Pinker’s explanation for declining violence (The Better Angels of Our Nature) .Pinker (wisely) explicitly places little importance on the explanations but rather offers some possible reasons. Turchin tellingly criticises Pinker’s “muddle of reasons” for the decline of violence, but it is exactly that the independent (muddled) contributions are more plausible than the single reason (inequality) offered by Turchin. That is something he, as a person trained in mathematics should know instinctively. Turchin misses an opportunity to clearly explain the only equation (Price) in the book, probably because he is so accustomed to maths. By rephrasing the wording and comparing the dot product would make the equation more intuitive to readers not familiar. Prof. Turchin says he is working on a continuing book. I hope he spends more time and offers a more complete analysis next time. Rereading what I wrote, it sounds too negative but I am too lazy to start again. In sum I recommend the book as interesting; I am not in a position to offer alternate theories.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Powerful new perspective on how culture evolves
By Hindmost
This is an accessible overview of a powerful new way of understanding History - all of it, for every culture. The models Turchin describes are explanatory, not just descriptive, and are testable, not just anecdotal.
For me, the most powerful concepts in this book is the interaction between cooperation and competition, within groups and between groups. Unlike other social theories which attempt to use evolution, this theory can explain why altruism and cooperation have increased as civilization has advanced. This is not a side effect, or an accident - it is the consequence of competition between groups, and the essence of civilization. This theory is much more useful, and consistent with experience than 'selfish genes' or the 'greed is good' theories which have dominated political discourse for the past half-century.
The book can seem a little disjointed at times, as the author tries to keep the many threads tied together. It is a wonderful overview, and a fairly quick read - definitely makes you think
12 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Important, ambitious, fun, insightful, empowering... just read it!
By Dan Mullins
Read this masterwork! Fellow lovers of big history, cultural evolution, whit & science--this book was written for us! Full disclosure: I work with this book's author, Peter Turchin. When I learned that he was writing a new book, I asked him for pre-publication copy and he kindly sent one along, no strings attached. Now, I can smugly say, 'I read Ultrasociety before it was cool' :) Here is my honest review, warts and all.
'Ultrasociety' tackles a huge range of topics. It doesn't seek to tell us what happened in world history, but why historical happenings (e.g., the fall of the Roman Empire) make sense given what we know about how and why humans cooperate and compete in groups. In other words, 'Ultrasociety' tells us not only how history went down, but why these things happened in the first place. It explains just as much as it tells. When I turned the last page, I felt empowered. I had acquired a number of tools for understanding world history in general, not the kind of historical trivia that I might use at dinner parties to show my friends how smart I am ('You think your rent is sky high, let me tell you what poor families in imperial Rome's insulae had to put up with!') For example, instead of detailing the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (as so many scholars have done), 'Ultrasociety' takes a scientific approach to create a general theory of empires, answering questions like 'Why did humans create empires in the first place?' and 'How do empires around the world and throughout history stick together and why do they crumble so dramatically?' If you want a detailed account of a particular time or place, look elsewhere. This book hurdles through human history with an olympic pace.
'Ultrasociety' tackles big questions with big history using a common language and everyday examples. As a result, this book is both authoritative and accessible/fun, a difficult balancing act. Sometimes Peter doesn't get the balance quite right. He sometimes lacks nuance as he gallops on a mounted archer through his historical accounts. In chapters 9 and 10, for example, he uncritically adopts the central premise of Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict. Recent research by Atkinson, Latham, and Watts (2014) tells us that the jury is still out about whether the observed increases in individual prosocial behavior brought about by powerful/moralizing/punishing gods produce actual cooperative advantages at the societal level. Thus, Peter is vulnerable to same criticism that he makes of Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined in chapter 10 when he says, 'Pinker does mention the changes changes in our cultural environment, but his emphasis is on how this environment molds the psychology of individuals'. Perhaps in favor of Peter's Axial-thesis is that Atkinson et al point to comparative evidence that the gods of Abrahamic religions--with their universalizing ideology, proselytization, and codified moral norms with a one-god exclusivity clause--appear to confer cooperative advantages, but we don't have good comparative data on non-Abrahamic religions/gods or societies that have not been hugely affected by Abrahamic religions/gods. Peter needs more historical data to refine his theory and argument here. Undoubtedly, historians will find other areas in need of refinement as well. Luckily, Peter is leading the charge in the collection of just the sort of historical data necessary to test and refine our theories of history and cultural evolution.
Like any proper scientist, being 'right' isn't Peter's goal. He wants to expand our knowledge by marshalling more data to test key predictions. As he points out in the final chapter, 'Vulnerability to being rejected is of course a virtue, as far as scientific theories are concerned.' He should be applauded for putting his ideas and predictions into plain language, allowing them to be scrutinized, criticized, and refined by others. Ultimately, Peter seeks to transform what we know about human societies into a science. If we can developed a science of cultural evolution, he argues, then we can learn how to cure our social ills. Count me among those persuaded.
Important, ambitious, fun, insightful, empowering... just read it!
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