An Evolutionary Agent-Based Model of Pre-State Warfare Patterns: Cross-Cultural Tests (original) (raw)
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Adaptive Agents, Natural Resources, and Civil War
This article adds agency to greed-based explanations of civil war by creating an artificial landscape populated with agents (government, rebel, and peasant) and natural resource deposits (alluvial and kimberlite diamonds). We model the incidence of civil war as contingent upon: (i) the government and rebel allocation of revenue -investment in extractive and military capacity, short-term robbery, or spending on social welfare; (ii) peasant support for the government or rebels; and (iii) the nature of the physical landscape -the type, size, and location of resource deposits. Using this exploratory model, we begin to explain contradictory findings from quantitative research on natural resources and civil war, find the relationship between export agriculture and civil war to be determined largely by government strategy, and highlight the importance of measurement, distinguishing between conflict onset, the number of independent conflict episodes, and disparate measures of conflict duration.
Chapter 1 - Evolution of Warfare
International Handbook on Collective Violence
The evolution and history of warfare has been investigated by philosophers, historians, practitioners, social scientists and life scientists. Common questions in this endeavour are: How far back into human evolution and history do we find evidence of warfare? How frequent was warfare in any given historical period? How lethal was warfare? In short, scholarship on the evolution and history of warfare has focused on questions of origins, frequency, and intensity. Despite the fact that scientific interest in these questions is perhaps broader and more methodologically sophisticated than ever, consensus on these questions remains elusive for at least two reasons. First, the archaeological record of warfare is incomplete. Second, we do not agree on what warfare is or how to unambiguously distinguish it from other forms of violence. Beyond an agreement that warfare is something more than violence between two individuals, there is little consensus on the proper scope of our main unit of analysis. Given these hurdles, it would seem that an investigation into the evolutionary origins of human warfare is destined merely to perpetuate academic stalemates, in which old arguments are continuously repackaged with each new discovery of a mass grave or ‘peaceful’ society. Although this is a rather pessimistic view, I establish it at the forefront of this chapter since my argument will be that these hurdles (e.g. knowledge of ancestral phenomena and consensus on definitions) are not insurmountable. Entire disciplines thrive on their ability to successfully infer and model the unobserved past based on imperfect historical, geological and archaeological evidence. And the question of definitions must be placed in its proper scope – as a methodological, rather than ontological, consideration.
Population Dynamics and Internal Warfare: a Reconsideration
The hypothesis that population pressure causes increased warfare has been recently criticized on the empirical grounds. Both studies focusing on specific historical societies and analyses of cross-cultural data fail to find positive correlation between population density and incidence of warfare. In this paper we argue that such negative results do not falsify the population-warfare hypothesis. Population and warfare are dynamical variables, and if their interaction causes sustained oscillations, then we do not in general expect to find strong correlation between the two variables measured at the same time (that is, unlagged). We explore mathematically what the dynamical patterns of interaction between population and warfare (focusing on internal warfare) might be in both stateless and state societies. Next, we test the model predictions in several empirical case studies: early modern England, Han and Tang China, and the Roman Empire. Our empirical results support the population-warfare theory: we find that there is a tendency for population numbers and internal warfare intensity to oscillate with the same period but shifted in phase (with warfare peaks following population peaks). Furthermore, the rates of change of the two variables behave precisely as predicted by the theory: population rate of change is negatively affected by warfare intensity, while warfare rate of change is positively affected by population density.
The evolution of war: Theory and controversy
International Theory, 2016
The use of evolutionary theory for explaining human warfare is an expanding area of inquiry, but it remains obstructed by two important hurdles. One is that there is ambiguity about how to build an evolutionary theory of human warfare. The second is that there is ambiguity about how to interpret existing evidence relating to the evolution of warfare. This paper addresses these problems, first by outlining an evolutionary theory of human warfare, and second by investigating the veracity of four common claims made against the use of evolutionary theory for explaining warfare. These claims are: (1) ancestral warfare was not frequent or intense enough to have selected for psychological adaptations in humans for warfare; (2) the existence of peaceful societies falsifies the claim that humans possess adaptations for fighting; (3) if psychological adaptations for warfare exist, then war is an inevitable and universal component of the human condition; (4) modern warfare and international politics is so qualitatively different from ancestral politics that any adaptations for the latter are inoperative or irrelevant today. By outlining an evolutionary theory of war and clarifying key misunderstandings regarding this approach, international relations scholars are better positioned to understand, engage, and contribute to emerging scholarship on human warfare across the social and evolutionary sciences.
EMERGENT WARFARE IN OUR EVOLUTIONARY PAST
Why do we fight? Have we always been fighting one another? This book examines the origins and development of human forms of organized violence from an anthropological and archaeological perspective. Kim and Kissel argue that human warfare is qualitatively different from forms of lethal, intergroup violence seen elsewhere in the natural world, and that its emergence is intimately connected to how humans evolved and to the emergence of human nature itself.
Pattern and process in cultural evolution, 2009
ECOLOCIST PETER Turchin and anthropologist Andrey Korotayev (2006) propose that population size and incidence of internal warfare or sociopolitical instability exhibit a deterministic relationship in prestate societies. Important to their thesis is that both population size and incidence of instability are, and must be treated as, dynamic variables: population growth eventually causes an increase in instability, with a lag, whereas increased instability, also with a lag, eventually leads to decreases in population size.
Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution, 2012
Collective violence is an evolved part of human biology, but war also evolves as part of culture. The evolution of agriculture subjected human societies to circumscription, making it harder for groups that lost conflicts to move away. Over the long run, such groups were absorbed into larger, more complex societies, which formed governments that pacified the group internally and as a side-effect increased its prosperity. In the short run, some wars broke down these larger, safer, richer societies, and in particular cases-such as much of Eurasia between about 200 and 1400 CE-the two effects of war settled into an unstable equilibrium. But the main function of war in cultural evolution across the past 15,000 years-and particularly across the past 500 years-has been to integrate societies, increasing material wellbeing. Even though wars became more and more destructive, internal pacification lowered the overall rate of violent death from 10-20 percent in nonagricultural societies to just 1-2 percent in the twentieth-century industrialized world. By the mid-twentieth century war had become so destructive that rather than unifying the entire planet, another great conflict could destroy it. However, there are numerous signs that institutions are evolving even faster than the means of destruction, and that the twentyfirst century will see the emergence of entirely new forms of conflict resolution
UC Riverside Cliodynamics Title The Evolution of War Permalink Publication Date The Evolution of War
2012
Collective violence is an evolved part of human biology, but war also evolves as part of culture. The evolution of agriculture subjected human societies to circumscription, making it harder for groups that lost conflicts to move away. Over the long run, such groups were absorbed into larger, more complex societies, which formed governments that pacified the group internally and as a side-effect increased its prosperity. In the short run, some wars broke down these larger, safer, richer societies, and in particular cases-such as much of Eurasia between about 200 and 1400 CE-the two effects of war settled into an unstable equilibrium. But the main function of war in cultural evolution across the past 15,000 years-and particularly across the past 500 years-has been to integrate societies, increasing material wellbeing. Even though wars became more and more destructive, internal pacification lowered the overall rate of violent death from 10-20 percent in nonagricultural societies to just 1-2 percent in the twentieth-century industrialized world. By the mid-twentieth century war had become so destructive that rather than unifying the entire planet, another great conflict could destroy it. However, there are numerous signs that institutions are evolving even faster than the means of destruction, and that the twentyfirst century will see the emergence of entirely new forms of conflict resolution