Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

by Peter Turchin

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 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 the hidden laws of history itself.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Sociology, Politics, Evolution, War

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 17, 2015

Reviews

[Aaron Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ultrasociety is an extension of Turchin's thesis, laid out in his earlier War and Peace and War, that warfare is the primary driver of civilization. Why are humans so good at cooperating together in groups? Because warfare between groups is a powerful selector for traits of cooperation, so over time societies that have been good at getting their members to work together within groups have outcompeted less cohesive ones. Or, as Benjamin Franklin said to encourage his fellows struggling to establish a new group identity: "We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately." This inside the tribe/outside the tribe distinction has fascinating implications for many aspects of modern society, in particular understanding how and why many types of violence have declined over time, so if War and Peace and War often seemed like a response to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel, Ultrasociety can be seen as a response to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Turchin begins by wanting to understand cooperation. How is it that human beings have managed the fantastically complex task of building the International Space Station? He points out that the ability to cooperate has been increasing over time, roughly measured in the increasing number of person-years required to build a number of large structures over time:

- Göbekli Tepe = 300 people-years
- Poverty Point Mound A = 1,000 people-years
- Great Pyramid of Giza = 400,000 people-years
- Roman Colosseum = 100,000 people-years
- Gothic cathedral of Amiens = 15,000 people-years
- ISS = 3 million people-years

The numbers aren't linear, in part because the societies that built those structures did so for different reasons, and also because "Whig history" is an illusion - history does not move in a straight line towards peace and progress. But, even though "man-months" are an infamously inaccurate measure of time cost in the software development world, people-years offer at least one measure of a society's ability to command resources for a specific purpose, and Turchin is correct to point out that by any measure you choose, it's never been easier to coordinate large numbers of people. For that matter, it's never been easier to simply live around large numbers of people, relatively safe from any threats of violence, generating vast amounts of wealth and culture for the enjoyment of your fellow humans.

Most theories that try to explain enduring societal cooperation run into the basic stumbling block of the Prisoner's Dilemma - it's hard to come up with robust, intuitive, plausible explanations for how our ancestors were ever convinced that it was in their long-term interests not to be as selfish as possible, since the consequences of misplaced trust can be so catastrophic and the allure of simply stealing your neighbor's resources so strong. The problem gets worse as groups scale, since the incentives for any individual to reap the benefits without contributing get larger, especially as the task gets more difficult or dangerous. This is the basic divide between biologists who believe in kin selection and those who believe in group selection (Turchin is a group selectionist, presenting his specific theory under the name of "cultural multilevel selection"). E. O. Wilson once summed up the logic thusly: "Within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals." How did we get here, and how do we resolve this tension?

The standard answer is to say that the incentives to behave selfishly change as situations are repeated or iterated, and Turchin sees the "destructive creation" of war (a riff on Joseph Schumpeter's famous description of capitalism as "creative destruction") as the key to breaking humanity out of the small tribes that other primates remain in. Once you get beyond the "two groups of men shaking spears at each other" phase of conflict, war is an extremely complex undertaking, and in order to get good at war, societies must also get good at peace - working together for a common goal. Successful wars over territory and resources makes victorious tribes larger and stronger, so there's a powerful selection effect that encourages rival groups to copy successful strategies, not only of military techniques but also institutional and bureaucratic forms that maximize power while minimizing waste. Those massive monuments from ages past are only part of the story, as seen by the innumerable records detailing the military histories of ancient civilizations. Even today, history is often told in terms of pivotal battles and campaigns, as they are how nations were created or destroyed.

The invention of agriculture is correctly proclaimed as a pivotal moment in human history, but though agriculture is a necessary condition to explain large-scale human cooperation, it's not sufficient on its own. Turchin spends a good deal of time talking about the vast differences in inequality that arose from the agricultural revolution - hunter-gatherers tended to max out their societies at smaller, fairly egalitarian bands whereas ancient agricultural societies developed immensely powerful despotisms. Farmers vs ranchers is a classic divide that remains with us to this day, but the way that a society gathers food has a profound impact on how its social structure operates. Alpha males, in the gorilla sense, limit the ability of tribes to cooperate since they attempt to monopolize the best resources/women, and Turchin has a fascinating, though of course controversial, chapter subtitled "God made men, Sam Colt made them equal" discussing how projectile weapons act as a leveller, allowing societies to contain the damaging effects of rogue alpha males.

Besides agriculture, the two other main ingredients required for the growth of states included ritualized religion and property rights, both of which can also be used to encourage despotism. The transition from temporary Big Man to hereditary chief often required religion to overcome egalitarian norms: "Strangely enough, it is easier to become a god-king than merely a king." However, over time gods changed from Greek-type humanized gods and god-kings to impersonal moralizing gods, which allowed for universal religions not based on the heritage of individual tribes. This allowed for religions to serve as unifying forces when appeals to ethnic heritage weren't enough, as in the usage of the term "Christendom" in the context of the Crusades (and, much later, to transition into the modern secular morality of "Christians without Christ"). Property rights were required once groups made the shift from communal hunts to individual plots of land, but the inability of farmers to simply leave when governments became too despotic was yet another tradeoff. The advantages of agriculture for societies as a whole in warfare are simply too great.

Of course, it's possible to have many wars without farming being involved at all. Turchin touches on warfare in Jared Diamond's favorite environment of New Guinea, where the constant low-level tribal warfare has manifestly failed to generate any large-scale states. Not all wars are actually successful, and in fact a truly comprehensive historical survey might well conclude that the majority are simply wasteful. In New Guinea this is in large part because of its hostile terrain - the defense-friendly jungle hills make it difficult for one group to annihilate or absorb another, and so there wasn't a lot of the kind of cultural variation that drove the growth of large empires in other parts of the world. Genocide isn't a "good thing", but its absence (indicated the immense variety of languages that New Guinea still has) can mean that humanity is stuck in a negative equilibrium of constant small-scale raids and counter-raids, which over a long-enough time scale could end up being more wasteful than the deadlier but rarer large-scale conquests you see in empire-heavy zones like Central Asia.

And that bears on Steven Pinker's thesis in The Better Angels of Our Nature that violence has been on a steady march downwards. Turchin says that the basic Hobbesian state monopoly of violence theory needs some modification, because types of violence like homicide tracked inequality and therefore followed a zigzag path rather than a straight line: high violence in ancestral primate groups, lower in foraging bands, higher again in archaic states, and lower again in modern constitutional democracies. Pinker is a psychologist who tries to ground his theories of social groups in the properties of individual people, but relative peace within societies is an emergent property driven by war between societies, and so Turchin defends multilevel selection as the only logical way to account for this. Pinker's "5 historical forces" that decreased violence - Leviathan, commerce, feminization, cosmopolitanism, and the "escalator of reason" - seem too disparate to offer a truly comprehensive explanation. War, as awful as it is, seems like just the driver of civilization that Turchin was trying to find, selecting for cooperative societies and against distrustful societies.

Ultrasociety didn't have quite the same impact on me that War and Peace and War did. Perhaps that's partially due to the similar subject matter; I already agreed with Turchin so strongly after his previous book that inevitably this one couldn't hit me as hard. Ultrasociety is also significantly briefer, and includes several puzzling asides that are not well-integrated into the main thesis (I don't disagree with him that monogamy makes for a more stable society than polygamy, yet his attempts to explain the tenfold GDP advantage of monogamous Botswana over polygamous Burkina Faso are as out of place as they are unconvincing). However, what's exciting about Ultrasociety is that he's using it as a showcase for SESHAT, his project of coding historical information. The science of human societies is still in its infancy, due to lack of rigorous quantitative methods for examining hypotheses, but Turchin has done fantastic work in trying to give many social science disciplines - history, political science, and sociology among them - the scientific grounding they deserve.

[Grzegorz Chrupała · Rating 2 out of 5]

At the start of this book Turchin makes a big deal of the scientific approach to history - implementing theoretical ideas precisely enough that they can be tested against data. Unfortunately the material in the following chapters doesn't even come close to fulfilling this promise - it is just garden variety storytelling. Some of it is compelling, much of it is extravagantly speculative. The bits when he goes on about the life style of Pleistocene humans are especially egregious. This is not to say that the book is worthless. It is certainly quite readable, and contains plenty of intriguing ideas and little known facts. There is even a decent, if condescending, explanation of the Price equation. I was just expecting something a bit more substantial.

[Rossdavidh · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can read a book about ancient Rome, or about ancient Egypt before that, or about tribal states that were around before both of them, or about the prehistoric hunter-gatherer societies that were around long before any of those. All of those are interesting topics. What this book brings you, is the perspective that comes from looking at all of them, and more besides.

Too often we are presented history as if it is a linear march upwards, or a long series of events with no patterns whatsoever. This book avoids both of those mistakes, and looks instead at the most fundamental trend of the last several thousand years: the increasing scale of human societies. How is it that I can rely on the actions of others, in a society of millions or hundreds of millions, who I have never met before and will never meet again? Why is it that people in other times and places could not? Why did human society start out egalitarian, then become increasingly despotic, and then reverse itself again? Peter Turchin believes he has the master theory to explain all of this, but is also willing and able to explain competing theories.

The key to many good books is not just the questions they answer, but also the questions they ask. Before becoming just the latest author to attempt to answer why the Roman Empire fell, for example, Turchin asks the more fundamental question: why did it rise in the first place? Why are empires possible at all? The vast majority of human societies do not create large-scale states like this. Why did Egypt, and Rome, and Han China, and a few other places create societies orders of magnitude larger than the 150 or so people that are the limit of how many we can know well (Dunbar's number)? There are many places (even today) where efforts to create or maintain a nation-state are unsuccessful. Why and how did we get empires? Once we have some idea of the answer to that, we have a better chance of answering the next question, of why they fell.

If you've got a fervent commitment to either conservative or progressive ideology, this might not be an easy read, as Turchin brings up plenty of uncomfortable facts for both world views. However, if you've got an open mind, and an interest in how human society got the way it is, this is an important and highly readable book on a topic of fundamental interest.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Modern western societies, such as the United States in the 21st century, are nowhere near as egalitarian as human societies before agriculture.” “Before 1500, Europe was a backwater of civilization.” “Archaic states” were much more unequal than before agriculture or now. Hawaii was once a hotbed of human sacrifice; you wouldn’t want to go to a Luau and become the main course. “The unhappy victims have not the distant intimation of their fate. Those who are fixed upon to fall, are set upon with clubs wherever they happen to be”. Anyone who raised a knee while their Hawaiian tabu chief was eating was executed. If you looked up to see a chief walk past, you were executed. Polynesians colonized Hawaii around 800 CE. Agriculture once begun, took 3,000 to 5,000 years to create archaic states. The Frankish and Gothic kingdoms however established themselves in only 500 years. Peter says 99% of people would rather be a free farmer than live in an archaic state.

Mesopotamian violence by 1000BCE made those Hawaiian human sacrifices seem like scenes from The Little Mermaid. A Mesopotamian chief’s death might demand 1,000 human sacrifices. Caesar was murdered because unlike Sulla, after becoming dictator he didn’t give up power but held on too long. He was stabbed 23 times. Ordinary tribal alliances sometimes turned into “permanent confederations” from which came the Goths, Alamanni, and the Franks. The most warlike time in history was pre-state farming after the beginning of agriculture. Peter gets the pre-agriculture analysis right saying before states people were largely egalitarian, and with the advent of civilization 10,000 years ago, something went wrong. For Peter, it was conflict and competition that put civilization on a path leading only toward more equality and a better society. War is both destructive and creative says Peter and “there are good reasons to believe that it (war) will eventually destroy itself and create a world without war.” So anti-war activists everywhere can stay in your seats because more war will somehow bring us less war. What?


Agriculture led to people becoming sick more often due to nutrition and pathogens jumping around. Peter believes states arose from groups making alliances for mutual advantage which increased cooperation. Agriculture’s costs were trumped by its obvious military advantages. 2,000 BCE was when animals were first harnessed for military purposes. First came the chariot, then a 1,000 years later, riding horses, then the bitted bridle, then stirrups, then the Polo Logo. Fun fact: An iron arrowhead keeps its edge better than bronze. For 2,000 years the war horse was the top military technology. For example, Napoleon was led to defeat by basically running out of horses in Russia. And while Wilbur was still with Mr. Ed, he never lost a battle. “Inequality corrodes cooperation”. “Watched people are nice people” (Jeremy Bentham and any arrested peeping tom will tell you that). Peter says the evidence is on Pinker’s side (see Better Angels) that violence started highest with hunter-gatherers and since then it’s been declining. Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble’s lives would have apparently been a living hell that would have made the Spanish Inquisition look like an ad for My Little Pony. Peter says we live in “ultrasocieties” of (seeming) cooperation enforced by the threat of state violence (a.k.a. fear and intimidation). Sounds like life in fascism or a prison, or a Huxley novel. Peter says it is “ultrasociety” has made violence decline (no doubt by the press never reporting those stories of violence caused by capitalism or our foreign policy). Peter says, Axial age religions stopped human sacrifice (victims of the Spanish Inquisition or being boiled to death in England and Scotland or even the Wexford Martyrs would have been so relieved to know unofficial sacrifices aren’t called sacrifices anymore).

This was a conservative/centrist read, I only read it because Richard Heinberg wrote so highly of it. I never expected to only find three paragraphs of usable info from it. Europeans, Peter insists, didn’t bring war to this continent, it was already here. By mentioning only the most egregious accounts of indigenous violence and ignoring all peaceful or diplomatic evidence that clearly conflicts with Peter’s thesis, Peter states that recent advances in forensic anthropology simply show how brutal the indigenous were. Anyone who has read David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything (published this month 11/21, and infinitely higher rated) will read Turchin’s book and laugh. Graeber has higher credentials and his book discusses over a hundred indigenous groups whose histories disprove Turchin’s thesis. Peter says that indigenous groups in history “had one of the highest rates of war-inflicted injuries ever” and cannibalism was “widespread.” Not finished, Peter says the Kalahari Bushmen have a homicide rate four times higher than the US, and the Inuit’s homicide rate is ten times higher than the US. On page 30, he says pre-contact America was MUCH more violent than today’s United States. Then to be cute, he says, “where did all the bad guys go?” To Peter’s credit, he does recognize all-white Amish barn raisings as both tribal and cooperative. On page 36, he first goes Blue Lives Matter and then says true society is “cooperation” and we must “restrain” and “punish” those “who want to solve their problems with intimidation and violence.” But then he gives a free pass to both neoliberalism and US foreign policy which continue to be the two greatest forces globally keeping away actual cooperation and a chance for world peace. If anyone disagrees with Peter, he says look at Keeley’s “War Before Civilization” (which is conveniently even more right-wing and cherry-picked than Peter’s book). The blurbs on the back of Peter’s book are by names no one has ever heard of, while the blurbs on Graeber’s book are by the top names in the business.

On page 31, Peter singles out freeways as a “public good” that benefits “all” in spite of their insane car carbon footprint. Water and train transport is, of course, far more energy efficient and thus would really benefit all, while freeways were built to intentionally keep people largely alone burning fuel while to and from their jobs and their food source (benefiting largely growth, capitalism, oil companies and builders of sprawl). On page 37 he blames the present-day state of Afghanistan on Marxism and Islam, even though the rest of us know from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s interview that the US wanted to give Russia its own Vietnam so they threw $$$$ into Pakistani religious madrassas to fund Islamic extremism ALL on the US taxpayer’s dime. Kudos to centrist Peter though for admitting that the US also “invaded” Afghanistan. On page 76, he says cooperation has increased over the past 10,000 years moving from savagery to barbarism to civilization. Peter’s main talking points are the opposite of Daniel Quinn, Rousseau, Derrick Jensen, Kropotkin, and the entire anti-Civ crowd. Peter’s cynical take on Christopher Boehm’s work is foragers couldn’t be egalitarian without also having the threat of a big stick. Peter says that sometimes war is the lesser evil. The most progressive comment in the book which injures Peter’s own thesis is his admission that “a significant minority within the country, consider the US the chief threat to world peace.” Yes. And rogue states by definition don’t cooperate or want world peace.

Peter says don’t look to primate interaction stories or indigenous people’s stories for countless heart-warming stories of cooperation, instead just look at his hand-picked stories. Peter discusses the “innumerable wholesale (indigenous) massacres in prehistory”. Peter, were they worse than the US lynching of Sam Hose or Jesse Washington? What a great book for the Holidays to fan flames of US hatred against the indigenous; not one story by Peter of an indigenous person who cooperated or showed great diplomacy in history until whitey showed him the way. Groan. The opposite thesis of the Graeber book. When Peter writes “production of public goods is what distinguishes a true society from a mere collection of individuals” he knows full well, but doesn’t say, that Cahokia or Poverty Point was all that back in pre-Agriculture North America. Peter’s comments about Christianity shows he doesn’t understand how Constantinian Christianity (war can now be morally justified) and Prophetic Christianity (Vatican II + Sermon of the Mount) are the opposite of each other (read Cornel West).

“Military competition between societies became a force for greater equality, less violence and ultimately a better life for all. How could that be possible?” That’s possible Peter if you ignore what the US is doing (and England did before that) as king of the military heap to undermine equality, cooperation and world peace.

Peter mentions the UN’s successes in El Salvador and Guatemala (page 4) without mentioning the obvious role of the US in intentionally injuring those countries over decades. Nor will Peter mention how the International Court of Justice clearly voted for Nicaragua against the United States in 1986 for blatant war crimes (like mining a harbor). This book has two points to “teach”: First, Hobbes was right, people before civilization were nasty and brutish. Second, the United States (the biggest violator of International Law), and Capitalism will both somehow teach the world to cooperate which will then lead to world peace. Groan.

Pearls of Peter conjecture: “If we had a time machine and could travel back into the past, we would see the scale of human cooperation dwindle, until all we found were small bands of hunter-gatherers” (sure, if you erase thousands of years of indigenous diplomacy and cooperation which would render laughable your thesis). Read instead of this book The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber; the Graeber book tells so many recent stories from the anthropological world and both prove and disprove Turchin’s thesis that it is then easy to see Turchin’s cherry-picking for what it is.

[Simon Lavoie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Human evolution from the Pleistocene (2 million years - 10 000 BCE) onward can best be described, according to Turchin, as a zigzag.

The dominance typical of ape groups was inverted into a dominance free, egalitarian polity in hunter-gatherer groups, which was in turn, quite later, inverted into some bloody archaic states held by sacrificial god-kings, archaic states that gave way to modern states regulated by egalitarian, tolerant - even benevolent standards in laws, institutions and values.

From the start to the end point of the process, small groups of few dozens of individuals facing a 30% death expectancy at the hand of a belligerent group, become ultra societies of more than millions individuals whose comparable expectancy falls to 0,7% (fail states not taken into account).

Peter Turchin view this historical zigzag (and puzzle) through the lens of Cultural Evolution - a trend in biological theory bolstered by such authoritative figures as Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Jerome Feldman (see chapter 4 for a good overview).

Pinker's Better angels of our nature is a setback against which Turchin asserts the superiority of his account : a hodgepodge of reasons (Pinker) given in a inductive way, against a coherent, testable and unified, deductive theory (Turchin).

Cooperation is roughly defined as a drop in intra-social competition, and a rise in intra-social coordination towards shared goals.

Evolution is taken as a modification in a variant's frequency. Where a variant (be it genetic or cultural) rises in frequency at the expense of another, we find evolution.

Being a mathematician, Turchin shows how calculus of the Price equation sort (p.87) can account for how cooperation rises the likeliness of a cultural group outcompeting other groups deprived of cooperators (a view that Darwin himself have championed in The Descent of Man) .

Fortunately, the most part of the book is devoted to historical facts, from recent to distant, shown to support this overall hypothesis : war between groups act as a Destructive creation. Favoring larger, cooperative groups to beat others, war is one key to how we became more social in large group, to how legitimation of group leadership mutated (first by giving war leaders a prolonged authority in time of peace by alleging to the unrest of foreign threat, second by pulling kings away from the horror of wars).

Projected weapons, from rocks, spears, compound bows to horse propelled archers and gun powder, made us equal at different historical turning points, and changed our cultural ways.

Of key interest is the debunking of the Dawking-inspired philosophy, preached by CEO and the 1%-ers, offered by Turchin. Time and again in the historical record, open appraisal of egoism and greed led to higher mutual distrust and social debasement (chapter 3). Of key interest also are the critics aimed at the Rousseau-an view of the noble savage. Violent war through raid, ambushes and the like appear, though archeological records, to have been common currency among natives before European contacts.

Ultrasociety is a most-read that offers a view on cooperation and evolutionary transitions that is quit distinct from that of Michael Tomasello (see A Natural History of Human Thinking), Benoît Dubreuil (Human Evolution and the Origins of Hierarchies) Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion), Joshua Greene (Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them). For the latter stress how building common grounds, enforcing group's rules and conventions, and collaborating seems to take hold on psycho-biological, automatic, non-conscious means. In a way close to Joseph Henrich (The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter), Turchin takes side for the causal power of learning and sharing values per se.

One rewarding aspect of Ultrasociety is to give the Axial age view of religion (formulated first by Karl Jasper) a firmer empirical ground than that of structural analysis (Marcel Gauchet's Le désenchantement du monde).

Ultrasociety is part of an ambitious research program (Cliodynamics) aimed at (1) turning historical knowledge into a scientific work, forging and testing hypothesis, and at (2) giving policy makers a better angle to prevent violent escalation.

The Destructive creation force of war appears to be an elegant and coherent account of the zigzag asserted throughout the book, with a wide-breadth, stimulating historical testimony. It is most read and a good advise for the future.

[Denis Vasilev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Война как двигатель прогресса в в��де создания огромных обществ, способных создавать такие сложные вещи как МКС. Умение кооперироваться отделяет побеждающие сообщества от проигрывающих. Бонусом как уже обычно у Турчина огромное количество любопытных исторических фактов

[Steve Greenleaf · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth, Peter Turchin has another book that translates his sophisticated models of historical dynamics into a prose exposition that non-specialists can enjoy. As in his previous work, War and Peace and War, he has succeeded in his task by mixing accounts of historical (and pre-historical) incidents and epochs with lessons about the science of evolution. Having admired his accomplishment in War and Peace and War, I held high expectations for this book. He has met and exceeded those expectations by addressing a set of topics of even greater and wider import than those of his first (popular) book. He does this by following the course of most academics whom I admire: they transgress departmental boundaries to explore new connections and arrive at new insights. In his case, he moved from an academic specialization in population dynamics to helping found the new science of Cliodynamics, the study of history using large data sets to create mathematical models of historical dynamics. Although already a fan (and thanks to the internet for allowing groupies like me to follow along with new thoughts and trends between books), I almost shouted “Amen!” aloud when I read:

The situation [of competing theories] is made worse by the division of social science into “tribes” of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and economists. Each discipline tends to emphasize its own set of theories while disagreeing with others (and even among its own adherents). Social scientists are the blind men touching different parts of an elephant and drawing different conclusions about it. -- Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth, Location 567.

The thesis of Ultrasociety is simple: over the course of human evolution, we humans have become the most cooperative species on the planet, outpacing our nearest rivals, the more numerous and highly cooperative ants. As Turchin points out, several factors account for this distinction, including two factors that take humans beyond the biological. First, in addition to biological evolution, which is slow and random, humans developed culture, the transmission of information via representation. The transmission of information by culture from generation to generation allows changes in human behavior to occur much more rapidly than any change in the human genome would allow. As a practical matter, the lives of humans, especially in the last 10,000 years (since the advent of agriculture) have changed by orders of magnitude far beyond anything that biological evolution by itself could have allowed.

Turchin identifies a second crucial spur to changes in human ways of life, and it may come as a shock to readers. It’s war. Especially in the last 10,000 years, war is—for all its horrors—the most potent source of cultural evolution. War compels change and change occurs through cooperation within groups. As humans developed societies beyond those of hunter-gatherers, as they developed civilization (a society based on cities), war became more organized and pronounced, and increasing competition for survival ensued. The seeming paradox is at the heart of Turchin’s analysis.

By the way, Turchin notes that the idea of the "noble savage" leading a bucolic, pastoral life is a fantasy; in fact, hunter-gatherers have shockingly high rates of violent death from warfare and other forms of homicide. Note that Turchin is not a war-monger. He concedes the horror of war and that it entails destruction—often vast destruction. He is not, as some--especially during the period before the First World War--who think war a fine tonic for whatever ails society. Not at all. However, he recognizes war as a competitive environment that spurs intra-group cooperation.

Competition between groups and cooperation within groups, whether hunter-gatherer tribes or highly developed and coordinated nation-states are traits that evolutionary theory explain. The controversial (but increasingly accepted) theory of cultural multilevel selection is a key concept for understanding the dynamics involved in these competitions that require so much cooperation. To explain this, Turchin provides a brief history of evolutionary biology and the controversy about whether groups can evolve and undergo a process of natural selection. As recently as the 1970s, with the publication of Richard Dawkins's book, The Selfish Gene (and more recently in some of Steven Pinker’s work), mainstream biology believed that evolution occurred only on the level of individual genomes and not among groups. Turchin points out that there was an early, naïve theory of group selection that did not hold up to scrutiny. However, in work conducted by David Sloan Wilson and colleagues, the theory of multilevel selection became more sophisticated. This theory now provides a persuasive—albeit not universally accepted—theory of how groups compete and evolve.

Part of what makes Turchin's work fascinating is that he translates the highly theoretical and mathematically modeled work of evolutionary biology (his native field) into commonplace examples taken from anthropology and history. For instance, he draws upon his academic home at the University of Connecticut, which has a phenomenally successful women's college basketball program (and a successful men's program as well) to frame the problem of cooperation and competition within a group. He uses examples of sports teams as a microcosm of the problem of cooperation and competition. As a member of numerous sports teams and now as a boys varsity basketball coach, this issue has long intrigued me. How does one promote competition within the team to draw out the best individual performances and determine playing time, while requiring those same individuals to coalesce and cooperate unselfishly at the highest level to defeat an opponent? To the extent the team succeeds in cooperating against an opponent, the team will likely win. Maximum success depends on individuals putting aside their selfish interests (glory, pay) for the benefit of the team. Moreover, what applies to something as inconsequential as sports (at least at bill level of high school sports), applies to the level of intergroup competition in something as deadly serious as war. (Of course, this leads one to speculate on the relationship between war and sports, but that's a subject for another time). Turchin explains the dynamics involved and provides some revealing information about how relationships and status among members of a team affect team performance. Studies have shown that wide disparities in pay between professional players correlates with poorer team performance. Those teams with the greatest equality of pay tend to be the most successful. Although Turchin does not mention this directly, one has to wonder how this applies to society as a whole. With an increasing awareness of a growing inequality in American society since the 1970s, one can't help but notice the increasing social and political polarization that occurred during the same period. We have become an increasingly less cooperative polity and society as inequality has grown. Turchin also notes the triumph of individualist philosophies espoused by Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek (which is a selective reading of his total work by some proponents), and others who emphasize a highly individualistic and laisse-fair ideology. Turchin quotes the "greed is good" speech by the fictional character Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street as an exemplar of the ascendant selfish ideology that began running amok in the 1980s. Turchin makes clear that an undue emphasis on individual accomplishment and selfishness hurts the society as a whole.

Turchin can claim to be the founding father of Cliodynamics, a discipline that works to discern patterns in history and prehistory based on the quantification of data through mathematical modeling. Attempts of this sort in the past have been failures. Through the lens of the philosopher R. G. Collingwood (of whom I've been reading a great deal lately), this endeavor doesn’t qualify as history properly understood. For Collingwood, History is the history of thought and not the history of behavior. But Turchin's work and the work of others in Cliodynamics demonstrates the weakness of Collingwood's position. When Collingwood emphasizes history as the history of thought, including the thoughts behind human actions and choices, he limits history to examining the tip of the iceberg. Just as humans are the result of eons of evolution layered one upon another to arrive at our current state, with most of the functions of our bodies running involuntarily and without our conscious knowledge or decision, so with many of the actions of society. Many actions seen together, aggregated over large groups, display behaviors that are not the result of a conscious decision. Often they are the aggregate of individual decisions that reveal a larger pattern. We deal with this every day when considering market "decisions." (But note our personification of markets often leads to poor analysis. The “market” is not a conscious individual; it’s an abstraction of many individual actions aggregated for the convenience of analysis). Turchin analyzes data from the past to better understand the past. (Note: the only source of knowledge is the past!) To me, Cliodynamics is a welcome addition to the field of history. Although I retain my prejudice for history as the history of thought, with an emphasis on political and intellectual decisions, we simply cannot ignore the fact that human beings are both a part of Nature and apart from Nature. To understand the totality of the human past—the highest intellectual endeavor—we need to take advantage of all the tools available. Looking at history through different lenses provided by of social and natural sciences is a resource that we are foolish to ignore.

Indeed, in this book, Turchin suggests that perhaps we humans can move another step forward on our evolutionary journey and make war obsolete. The massive improvements in warfare and killing efficiency epitomized by atomic weapons make this more than a utopian dream. It's a practical necessity. The next logical—even necessary—step in cultural evolution must be increased cooperation, or we run the risk of regression to a less cooperative, must more barbaric (in the worst sense of the term) reality. Turchin uses the international space station as an example of the level of cooperation that nations are capable of attaining. He suggests that perhaps economic competition can replace war as a means of spurring cultural innovation without suffering the horrors of war. Paul Krugman, another social scientist inspired by Isaac Asimov’s vision of “psychohistory” outlined in his Foundation books, suggests we need an attack of aliens to foster an economic growth and cooperation, which is much in keeping with Turchin’s direction of thought. I believe that with the imminence of global climate change, we—as a species working through nation-states—will either ratchet-up our levels of peaceful cooperation to combat (by abatement and adaptation) what will become an increasingly alien environment—or we will suffer an increasingly deadly level of social and political conflict.

One mark of a successful book is that it leaves you wanting more. You hear yourself saying, “telling me more about this and that.” So it is with this book. The number of issues that it raises, the number of possible areas of explorations it suggests, are too numerous to list completely. But to name just one area of where I’d like to know more: Turchin describes the idea of “cultural evolution” as a scientific theory “based on mathematical models [that] are empirically testable.” Id., Location 330. Moreover, there is a tradition within sociology of social evolution and development theory, as well as theories of history (addressed by Turchin in War and Peace and War). However, I’m wondering about connections with theories of cultural evolution (or change) based on language and other symbolic systems, such as the work of Owen Barfield, Walter Ong, Jean Gebser, William Irwin Thompson and Ralph Abraham, and Clare Graves and Don Beck (an eclectic list, I admit). None of these thinkers, I believe, would necessarily disagree with the biologically based theory of cultural evolution espoused by Turchin, but it would be interesting to determine where they mesh and where they conflict.

So, I’ll stop here. With an outstanding book, the temptation is to go on and on about it. I’ll not. Go read it yourself.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

Peter Turchin leads a recent academic movement to quantify and mathematize human history. That is, instead of analyzing history thematically, or engaging in broad analysis of happenings and trends, he aims to use processed data to prove hypothesized truths about our collective past. Turchin calls this new science cliodynamics (after the Muse of history), and I thought this effort was largely successful in his Ages of Discord, in which the focus was cycles of stability and instability. I think the effort much less successful in Ultrasociety, which tries to explain all of human history as inevitable cultural evolution towards cooperation, but still, it’s an interesting, if bumpy, ride.

Turchin begins by telling us, accurately enough, that humans are unique in their ability to cooperate at scale. When Turchin says “cooperate,” he means individuals choosing to act in concert with others in pursuit of at least a modestly complex common goal, such as hunting. He says that cooperating only in small groups with known others is the norm among all primates, and that was once also the limit of all human cooperation. Turchin’s bad habit of blurring inconvenient facts shows up early here, however—he ignores that cooperation among non-human primates is actually sharply different than that among primitive humans, so the smooth evolutionary line he is trying to draw from our most distant ancestors to us is not accurate. For example, Turchin does not say, but it is true, that non-human primates cannot even cooperate in small mechanical tasks, such as two chimpanzees carrying a log (they lack “shared intentionality”), and the very earliest humans apparently could.

Anyway, for humans, Turchin contrasts limited cooperation among hunter-gatherers with what is true in the twenty-first century, where some societies are now extreme cooperators, meaning they coordinate voluntarily across millions of people and many years to produce costly public goods (those to which equal access for everyone is the default; air is a public good, for example). Turchin’s aim, therefore, seeing where we began and where we are now, is to explain how this happened “through the new science of Cultural Evolution,” which is a subset of his larger field of cliodynamics.

Turchin never offers a pithy definition of cultural evolution, but he means that cultures evolve through natural selection, that is, competition that drives one society to extinction and enhances the survivor. In an initial sleight of hand, in one glancing reference, Turchin dismisses as the cause of increased cooperation biological evolutionary changes such as those proposed by Gregory Clark and Nicholas Wade. Considering that possibility would detract from his thesis of cultural evolution, but he is too honest to reject the reality of biological changes entirely, so he ignores them instead. He traces back the modern version of cultural evolution to E. O. Wilson in the 1970s, and views his own contribution as adding data and mathematical synthesis, which gives “us the tools to analyze societies as coherent, integrated wholes,” strengthening what otherwise might be perceived as mere anecdotes.

In these introductory sections, Turchin previews the rest of the book by informing us that the driver of cultural evolution, more than anything else, is war, which paradoxically, after much tears and blood, creates “large, peaceful, and wealthy ultrasocieties.” (“Eusociality” is the instinctive large-scale behavior of honeybees and certain ants; “ultrasociality” is, we are told, the term for similar cooperative behavior by choice, only found in humans—thus the title of the book.) In short, therefore, this book is an explanation of why war is necessary for peace. I think Turchin is probably right in that, but I think he’s wrong that humans qua humans have reached some unique level of beneficial cooperation in the modern world, and in fact it’s pretty obvious we’ve either passed over into diminishing returns from cooperation, or discovered the hard-coded limits of cooperation. But more on that later.

To prove his claims, Turchin offers selected history from the past ten thousand years. He points out the extreme violence that characterizes all tribal hunter-gatherers (which all humans were ten thousand years ago, with some variations in societal complexity), from American Indians to pre-pharaonic Egyptians. No cooperation existed between tribes, rather a state of war. Turchin wants to offer an explanation of what changed and what made the cooperation of today possible. This is another way of asking how human societies became more complex than tribes, a question that has exercised very many great minds. The short answer given by Turchin’s version of cultural evolution is that the need to not be wiped out led, in zigzag pattern, sometimes up, sometimes down, to greater cooperation and societal size. This is basically Francis Fukuyama’s idea, and not new with him either, but Turchin puts an original gloss on it.

He sets the stage by complaining that cooperation has been declining in America, no doubt trying to offer a compelling hook to the casual reader. He does identify correctly that America is now a far lower cooperation society than it was in 1955. But he does himself no favors with his tendentious and wholly inaccurate capsule history of the last sixty years, in which he ascribes this problem to one cause—the ideology of Ayn Rand, filtered through and popularized by Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and politicized by Ronald Reagan, who channeled Gordon Gekko (occasionally spelled by Turchin “Gecko,” not lending confidence to the reader). This led to Enron, which was Very Bad. The ludicrous silliness of this trite and superficial analysis cannot be overstated—it completely ignores the several real drivers of this decline, and grossly overstates the influence, and unitary philosophy, of dead European refugees. Economically the global free market, in what is now in retrospect obviously a mistake, was indeed allowed to overwhelm America. But that’s among the minor reasons that social trust and cooperation has disappeared; the rot of the elites and the dominance of leftist narratives are far more important, as I have discussed more than once elsewhere. Ayn Rand and Mises have no relevance to anything in 2021 America.

From here, though, Turchin improves (even if there’s lots of bouncing around, and a distinct odor of cherry-picking, easy to do with archaic history). He discusses when it is rational to cooperate, most of all to produce public goods, and when it is rational to free-ride. (Answer: always the latter, absent some larger framework that changes incentives; contra Richard Dawkins, there is no biologically-evolved altruism toward strangers, and the “selfish gene” is a myth.) Team sports teach us about cooperation (although reader confidence drops again when Turchin refers to the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball team as “famous” and its wins resulting in the campus “celebrat[ing] for days on end”—the former is not true, and I doubt the latter). For a team, maximizing individual performance (and therefore benefit to that player) will almost always lead to not maximizing team performance. According to Turchin, data across multiple sports shows that teams which have higher inequality of performance among team members perform worse, on average, than teams with less inequality of performance. Egalitarian cooperation, that is, on average maximizes returns to the group.

Then Turchin turns back to “the study of how and why the frequencies of cultural traits change with time.” He talks about social trust (which he seems to treat as a subset of social cooperation, though I’d invert that), citing Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, which studied a mid-twentieth-century Italian village with very low trust (although Turchin is wrong that Banfield identified this as a trait passed down over the generations; he actually said the opposite). “Evolution,” Turchin hastens to add, doesn’t mean progress; it just means some change in an otherwise stable cultural system. From these small-scale societal anecdotes Turchin generalizes a theory of “Multilevel Selection.” He offers some basic (but confusing) math, the “Price equation” (a way to measure the generational effects of covariability), to show that given intense competition between groups, more variation within groups leads to worse outcomes, but more variation across groups leads to better outcomes—for the winning group, that is. “Variation” here includes degrees of cooperation; thus, if a group has more free riders than another group has cooperators, the second group will, on average, out-compete the first (because, as for basketball teams, egalitarian cooperation is better). It will grow more crops, it will get bigger, it will win more battles—as long as the cooperators don’t lose out to free-riders within their own group. To avoid this, they must suppress internal competition, and not allow free-riding within the group.

Having set the evolutionary scene through a mathematical lens, Turchin purports to apply it directly to human history. In this telling, projectile weapons were more important to human evolution, biological and cultural, than fire; they allowed felling large animals and eating the marrow, moving from scavenging corpses to making corpses (and helping to increase brain capacity). Humans were still hunter-gatherers, and fitting with Turchin’s theory, hunter-gatherer societies appear to have been universally (and are today) notably egalitarian, with a “reverse dominance hierarchy” where the group strongly discourages attempted domination by any one person. Why, though, when other primates have normal dominance hierarchies? Turchin says it was because projectile weapons allow those who set themselves up to be alpha males to be easily killed by the others—unlike among other primates, whose lack of such weapons invariably means an alpha male-headed hierarchy. This meant that evolution selected men (who of course still led, as they have led every group in human history, with zero exceptions) not so much for strength, but for social intelligence, the ability, among others, to build coalitions through cooperation. And in this process, when groups competed with each other, in war, those with more cooperators tended to win out, because of Multilevel Selection.

Cultural evolution isn’t inevitably the result of intense inter-group competition, however. Turchin details the constant warfare of the New Guinea highlands, which continued into the modern era. No cultural evolution resulted at all; some war is just counter-productive, leading to endless death with zero change. For the most part, such wars are either wars within societies or inconclusive wars, as both of which Turchin counts New Guinea wars. He also goes on a pages-long digression, an attack on Victor Davis Hanson’s claim that the “Western way of war” is a “decisive clash with close-range weapons.” Turchin says this is a “delusion,” and all that matters, or has ever mattered, in warfare is long-range weapons, in the West and elsewhere.

But, paradoxically, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies evolved, zig-zagging, not to larger egalitarian societies, but to the most extremely non-egalitarian societies in human history. Turchin uses the example of Hawaii, where a version of god-kingship evolved, in which lower caste people were often killed for looking incorrectly at the king, or sacrificed in religious rituals. Most or all archaic societies developed in a similar strongly inegalitarian direction, including the earliest human civilizations in Mesopotamia. Turchin ascribes this to the development of agriculture—not at the inception of agriculture, though. He claims that small-scale agriculture, with societies still egalitarian yet capable of cooperation, prevailed for thousands of years before larger archaic states came into being. He ascribes this stasis to people resisting inegalitarianism; his perspective is basically that of James C. Scott (whom he does not cite), that the agriculturalist is much worse off than the hunter-gatherer. Still, societies gradually moved toward being more agricultural and less egalitarian, even against the interests of most individuals in the society. Why did societies so develop? War—bigger societies win against smaller ones, and a bigger society only works if you culturally evolve to cooperate, to produce crops, among other things. Societies that don’t cooperate get exterminated, using the Price equation. And you can have top-down cooperation; Turchin is not using “egalitarian” as a synonym for “cooperative,” although he frequently blurs the difference in a confusing way.

Turchin offers an unconvincing explanation for why it took thousands of years for this cultural evolution to happen, alleging that anyone trying to grab power was assassinated until “new cultural methods for legitimating” the power of chiefs evolved. He uses the example of the Germanic tribes and Arminius, who was assassinated despite his success against the Romans, and concludes “there must have been thousands of upstarts in human history who failed to make the leap to a permanent kingship.” Then he ascribes success to “avoiding arrogance and cultivating modesty [and] demonstrat[ing] to the people that the hierarchical social order is preferable to the alternative.” Turchin rejects alternative explanations of the masses voluntarily giving up egalitarianism, such as the need for irrigation, economic benefit, or the masses being hoodwinked.

Still, in these early years of the new agricultural mega-societies, those men at the top who were successful in war somehow managed to achieve the right aura to become god-kings, the top of the heap. These god-kings behaved in terrible ways, unrestrained by any moral code, including as a rule “massive human sacrifice.” Cultural evolution nonetheless proceeded; competition among these new larger societies led some to survive and some not; “by eliminating poorly coordinated, uncooperative, and dysfunctional states, [this process] create[d] more cooperative, more peaceful, and more affluent ones.”

So in a sense the societies of god-kings “worked.” [Review completes as first comment.]

[Andrés Astudillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why do we not read more books like this one?
I thought it was great to discovery Evolutionary Psychology. But when it comes to -group fitness-, through the evolutionary lens, we've got Cultural Evolution. That's it. Cultural Evolution is studying how societies evolve through time and most importantly, trying to explain "why".

Asking "why" is simple, but trying to answer human civilization is quite an achievement that no man can do alone. That's the main theme of the book, cooperation is one of the bases for human survival, not being selfish. Ultrasociety is the word to define a human feat, cooperation involving a million people, let me use some examples:
- The LHC: a project that involved people from the whole world, and indirectly, even more.
- The Hubble Space Telescope: a project that involved people from the whole world, and indirectly, even more.
- The James Webb Deep Field: a project that involved people from the whole world, and indirectly, even more.
- The International Space Station ISS: a project that involved people from the whole world, and indirectly, even more.

All of them are exclusive human feats, such as religion. The author sort of created a field called cliodynamics, which is the study of human societies through time. Cultural Evolution is a complete guide, which is being studied by scientists. Really, reallay amazing. The book does not explain -coalitionary proactive aggressions- which may be explained by evolutionary psychologists and primatologists; the point of view is wider than that. For example the book explains in scales how societies evolved and religions too, such as Judaism to nowadays Catholic Church, and Zoroastrism to today's Islam. Worth the reading, and Peter Turchin must be a recommended author on society dynamics.

[Andrzej · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book: information-packed, informative, with fresh look on the evolution of societies. Highly recommended

[Laurent Franckx · Rating 2 out of 5]

The ambition of this book is vast: using an (extremely) long-term historical perspective to explain nothing less than how humans are able to cooperate in complex societies. As such, it can be placed alongside other 'recent' books such as Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germ and Steel", Steven Pinker's "The better angels of our nature" and Paul Seabright's "The company of strangers" (for some reason, Seabright is not discussed in the book, which is a pity).
The beginning of the books is very promising. The book remains very informative and even fun until the end, and contains truckloads full of new (that is, to me) information.
However, in the end, it did not live up to my expectations. The reader gets lost in a myriad of (admittedly often original and challenging) theories, anecdotes and data, and it is really difficult to keep track of the general thread of the argument. As has already been pointed out by other reviewers, a lot of what Turchin writes is (clever) speculation rather than well established knowledge, and one feels that other clever speculative theories could be developed that would also be compatible with the sparse data that are available.
My main issue with the book is however the discussion about individual versus group selection. Turchin dismisses Dawkin's explanation of cooperative behaviour at the phenotypic level as the result over 'selfish' behaviour at the genotypic level. Turchin argues that one cannot explain large scale societies without relying to 'group selection'. Well, I am not a biologist, but, as an interested layman with some solid knowledge of game theory, I find the arguments against group selection more convincing - see for instance https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress..... Even if it is not possible to include the maths of the arguments in a book written for a general audience, Turchin should have invested much, much more time and effort explaining the controversy. Maybe he could have convinced me if he had done so.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I see this as an intermediary book in which the author is travelling from the basic ideas set out in Secular Cycles to some, as yet unknown, destination. In this volume, he examines a paradox of human development. On the one hand, human progress can be marked by competition between individuals and groups, whilst on the other, competition is best enhanced when individuals and groups co-operate with each other to achieve a common purpose. Which is it?

Of course, the answer is both. However, this isn't an interesting answer. The interesting answer is how do we map the times when it is best to compete and those when it is best to co-operate? That is the underlying theme of the book. I don't quite think that the author has reached a final conclusion to this question. Perhaps there isn't one? It is interesting, though, to look at periods in which competition has been intense and periods in which co-operation has been paramount. What I like about this approach is that it has an empirical basis.

The author has an approach that develops an hypothesis and then goes out to sieve the available evidence to see if that is true. We are treated to some interesting conclusions. For example, the author develops a model to explain why it is that the scale of collective operations, as developed through the state, has increased over time. We no longer live in villages that are largely cut off from the modern world. Our current society is one characterised by global interdependencies that are largely based upon trust. What intrigues me is whether or not this is reversible? Could the size of society get smaller rather than larger?

This is not an easy read. Many of the concepts developed are fairly abstract, even if they are empirically evidenced. The polemic style of writing is not one that appeals to me and it does not make this an easy read. What I did find interesting is that this is a self-published book. It hasn't been edited very well and, at times, comes over as rather home-made. This is a volume for the aficionados rather than a more general readership.

[Juny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me ha gustado mucho. Se presenta un análisis fascinante que argumenta cómo las ardientes llamas de la guerra, extendidas a lo largo de diez milenios, han sido las forjadoras del hierro de nuestra cooperación actual. Este libro, una joya de sabiduría desenterrada, ha añadido una nueva dimensión a mi comprensión de la evolución (tanto biológica como cultural) de la humanidad.

Turchin no se limita a la superficie. En esta obra se sumerge en la evolución cultural, esa fuerza que también moldea y da forma a nuestras sociedades, un proceso continuo tan antiguo como la humanidad misma. Turchin nos lleva en un viaje a través del tiempo, desde las primeras aldeas neolíticas hasta las metrópolis modernas, rastreando la sombra siempre presente de la guerra y su inesperado papel en la consolidación de nuestra capacidad de cooperación. El autor también arroja luz sobre la teoría de la selección cultural multinivel. Aquellas sociedades que lograron superar sus diferencias y trabajar juntas resultaron ser las que sobrevivieron y prosperaron, dejando su legado en las generaciones futuras.

Ultrasociety es una obra que desafía nuestras nociones preconcebidas y nos lleva a pensar en cómo hemos llegado a ser lo que somos como sociedad y como cultura. El viaje de Turchin a través del pasado puede no ser siempre fácil de seguir, pero la recompensa, una nueva comprensión de nuestra historia compartida, resulta satisfactoria.

[Kate Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ideas here were generally interesting, but I wonder if war is quite as central to human development as the author says it is. Wouldn't we cooperate with other members of our tribe--in growing food perhaps, in caring for orphans and the sick, in making handcrafted items like pots and baskets--without the necessity of war?
I hadn't realized that early human groups would put down upstarts and were thus more egalitarian; I thought it was a gradual progression of complexity and hierarchy. It was also interesting to read the author's critiques of Pinker, Dawkins, Diamond and others, and his thoughts on how religion made possible complex societies. (Sharing the same beliefs led people to trust each other.)
Still, though, the text was somewhat dry and at times convoluted, not as well-written as the above-mentioned authors. But then Turchin is not a native speaker of English, so I guess it's not fair to hold him to the same standard.

[Scott Somerville · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not perfect, but still impressive!

Peter Turchin makes some huge claims in this book—which, if true, should have a huge impact on many current controversies. He does two things: one, he proposes a causal mechanism for the evolution of ever-larger societies, and two, he works to prove this mechanism by assembling a massive database of human history and archaeology. The second effort may or may not succeed, and if it succeeds, it may or may not uphold his initial claim. But it’s a noble effort either way, and a book worth reading in any case!

[Marc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impressive book. I love long term history, as practised by William McNeill and Jared Diamond. Only, Turchin is better, because he bases his analyses on actual science and mathematics, allowing for testable hypotheses. Turchin is a biologist, by the way, not a historian.

There is quite a lot in this book, but the main talking point is that cooperation, as a cultural trait, finds it origin in competition between groups, which for most of human history has taken the form of war. Quite an interesting idea. He calls it destructive creation, a pun on creative destruction.

An other interesting idea is that inequality corrodes society, as opposed to the greed is good idea originating in the eighties, or even earlier (Ayn Rand, whom I have never read and probably never will). More inequality leads to lesser trust and lesser cooperation. This explains the long term development towards greater equality in the world. Turchin mentions the Roman army that actually went on strike a couple of times, because they didn't want to fight for the 1%. Obviously this is a very long term development, currently inequality is increasing, thanks to neoliberalism.

A slightly less appealing idea is that religion has been an important factor in creating trust in big societies. The idea is that a shared religion causes people to trust each other, even if they are total strangers. It breeds cooperation in multi ethnic societies. In the long run it becomes costly to be atheistic or adhere to another belief, because people won't do business with you.

The book is full of similar insights. What distinguishes it from established history is that it is much more empirical. Traditional historians don't even understand high school math or stats, let alone computer modeling of theories, so I don't expect them to be very open to Turchin's approach. Bad luck for them.

[srdjan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating read on one of my favorite topics, cooperation. Ultra Society hints at an emerging science that looks to bring analytical rigor to historical analysis, but the book takes pains to avoid explaining the rigor in order to avoid losing potential mass appeal. Written in a relatively breezy fashion despite being dense with ideas and theories, Ultra Society feels like it contains the material for 3-4 books, though none of which are contained start to finish. Like the cover art, I was left with a feeling that many loose threads were not brought to conclusion. However, I was also left with the impression that the theories are still in their infancy and the analysis is just beginning, so I'm grateful to the author for taking the time to bring these nascent ideas to the public.

I expect his methods will yield more robust theories than Jared Diamond or other popular writers, who always left me unsatisfied in identifying principals and underlying drivers. I think Peter Turchin is 2-3 books and some more analysis away from a breakthrough book that stand the test of time. An exciting, thought provoking read whose insights are occasionally dismal but ultimately hopeful.

Please keep researching and writing!

[Abhishek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Expands on an interesting hypothesis on how it was humans, and not other animals, that took over the planet. Found the mental model of cultural evolution particularly compelling - why it is that all over the planet we have adopted pants instead of the veshti(hint: prestige signaling). At least more persuasive than Jared Diamond. If Turchin’s thesis is right, that war has led to larger and larger societies in part because the bigger army always wins, it doesn’t seem like the modern nation state is going away any time soon. The state is more stronger now than any other time in history, making it hard for secessionist movements to succeed. From the surface, it seems to be playing out exactly like that if one were to take Eelam, Kashmir, Balochistan or Tibet as examples.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

A disappointing effort.

The first two-thirds of this book were excellent but then Turchin slips into a weird cultural Marxist/cultural materialism, intellectual idealist narrative and the argument becomes suspicious. What the author calls cultural evolution reads suspiciously like critical theory out of the Frankfurt School of post world war I Germany.

For those steeped in critical theory you may enjoy this book for others you will understand the faults of this narrative, going into it here is not useful.

Still, the first two-thirds of the book is excellent and worth a read. His earlier books are better but suggestive of this one.

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are interesting ideas in Ultrasociety, of which I wrote notes and will continue to ponder. It's also clear that Peter is an ernest and enthusiastic scientist, but... I would have really preferred to read a 20-50 page version of this book that hits the key points.

I find this to be a common problem with non-fiction, where the key ideas are expressed in the first 10%, and then the remainder is example after example, which interests me not at all.

[Shyamal · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hard read mostly because of the great number of examples drawn from history which can sometimes make one lose sight of the actual point being made. One hopes that his seshat database will provide more obvious and interactive ways of navigating through the trends that he claims / notes. Many of his counterexamples to other authors are especially provocative and interesting - I quite liked the one that bashes Ayn Rand for supporting polygyny as a reward for individual success with data!

[Štefan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally the book I have been waiting for years to read. Explains how we got from hunter groups to empires with data and theory instead of sciency dreamy stereotypes, but remains interesting all the way.

[avaa · Rating 3 out of 5]

به نظرم بهترین ترجمه ای که میشه کرد « فوق جامعه» است.
حقیقتا لذت بخش ترین بخشش برام این بود که از منابع مختلف با دیدگاه های متضاد استفاده کرده.
فقط قبل از خوندنش بهتره یکم درباره نظریه بازی ها، نظریه تکامل فرهنگی در مقابل تحول زیستی و روانشناسی اعتماد بدونید.

[Samuel Thomsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a brief pop science book, Ultrasociety goes very deep, and it's rich in historical and theoretical insight. Like Guns, Germs, and Steel, it's a good introduction to the history of civilization, and will have plenty for even an expert to chew on. But like most popularizations, Ultrasociety tends to overstate the success and generality of its theories, and to gloss over any aspects of history that fall outside its scope.

To his credit, Turchin dismantles a number of popular misconceptions about cultural evolution. For example, he challenges the (already absurd) idea that complex civilization is the accidental result of selfish genes that dispose us to kindness toward relatives. Rather, he points out that group selection on culture is a more plausible explanation and better supported by the evidence. He also disputes the idea that religion is a memetic virus that does little more than cause violence. The evidence again shows the opposite--more religious cultures tend to show less internal violence and better cooperation and prosperity. He has many insights like this scattered throughout, and they make the book well worth reading.

Nevertheless, Ultrasociety falls short of its stated aim, to explain the evolution of enormously complex and large societies like our own. It focuses on the time period between 5,000 BC and 1500 AD, and only occassionally discusses cultural evolution following the advent of gunpowder and the printing press. In fact he admits the gap and promises a more thorough analysis of modern civilization in his next book. But the blind spot here is huge. Between 0 AD and 1500 AD, you saw the collapse of the Roman Empire and arguably no significant decrease of violence in Europe. So his main thesis, that cultural selection tends to create larger and more cooperative civilizations through war, is left without convincing support for the last 2000 years of history. First, because the trend toward larger civilizations is not uniform. Second, because the last 500 years involves powerful forces aside from war. In fact, Turchin admits the shift from violent to nonviolent means of conquest over the last century, but seems to see it as a victory for his view. True, this would seem to be a positive development, but he does little to show how his theory can account for it.

The problem is that the scope of his explanation is too vast. Nobody can ever explain in complete detail why and how human civilization evolved. When tackling any question so large, oversimplification is inevitable. Sure, war was essential to the evolution of modern society. He makes an excellent case that you cannot explain the development of large empires and nation-states without war. He is correct that agricultural advances, urbanization, and far-flung trade networks can all happen in the absence of a state, and that a state's main purpose, at least until modern times, has always been the waging of war. But the fact that war has proven essential does not imply that it is sufficient. He discusses the importance of religion, too, but seems to assume that unless it helps a nation wage war it serves no function. He makes the same sort of assumption about every element of culture he discusses: horses, wheels, farming, and even cooperation itself. The ultimate utility of all these innovations is in waging war, he claims. But it does not follow that just because the primary function of states is warfare, that the primary function of all the rest of culture is warfare. Life is more complex than that. There have always been plenty of selective forces aside from war.

Finally, Turchin falls into the trap of projecting recent "progress" indefinitely into the future. In an early chapter, he is quick to criticize the progressive view of human history, correctly pointing out that evolution need not lead to improvement. Bafflingly, the rest of his book seems to assume the opposite. States will continue to get larger, encompassing the entire world. Cooperation will become more and more prevalent, he claims. He seconds Pinker's prediction that violence will continue to decrease indefinitely into the future.

But modern civilization is very far from sustainable. None of our advances can be counted on to last, not while 90% of our energy comes from nonrenewable resources, not while inequalities continue to rise, and especially not when every major civilization before ours has eventually declined and collapsed due the same kinds of unsustainability.

I'm sure Turchin would admit all of this. But like Jared Diamond and other popularizers, he knows what people want to hear. So he is careful to provide happy ending, one that leaves all our progressive illusions intact, and enthrones science as our savior. Near the end of the book he writes, "What we need to do now is develop the science of cooperation to the point where we can use it to improve people’s lives." (After all these decades it's still not at that point?) And elsewhere: "This, then, is the great hope for humanity: that war can finally fade away, displaced by more obviously constructive contests." (Good luck.)

[Keith Akers · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a marvelous exploration of history from a new perspective. What is distinctively human about humans is their ability to cooperate. This cooperation has manifestly greatly increased during the past 10,000 years. Instead of hunting and gathering, we are now working together on such projects as the Great Pyramids and the International Space Station. "Ultrasociety" is similar in scope to Steven Pinker's book "The Better Angels of Our Nature"; but instead of asking (as Pinker does) why violence has declined, Turchin asks a different and parallel question --- why has cooperation increased?

In the end, these two questions turn out to be related. Groups with greater internal cooperation tend to out-compete groups that do not cooperate as well. Paradoxically, it is war leads to greater cooperation within the group, and ultimately to a decline in violence. I found this book both helpful and convincing. My one criticism is that there's no index.

Peter Turchin is one of the pioneers of "cliodynamics," as he calls the application of quantitative methods to history. This book does not have a lot of data, though he does cite a lot of books or studies that have such assessments. For that, you should check out Turchin's book "Secular Cycles" (co-authored with Sergey Nefedov). On a scale of 1 to 10 for how academic this book is, with "1" representing "light summer reading," and "10" representing "totally academic," "Secular Cycles" is a "10." "Ultrasociety," by contrast, is more like a "7".

It only has one excursion into mathematical formulas, which comes in the process of explaining the "Price equation." Turchin is patient in explaining the basic concept behind this equation, and if, like me, you've never heard of the "Price equation," then this book is for you. But while there's not a lot of quantitative analysis, there are plenty of new concepts.

"Ultrasociety" is a refreshing contrast to Steven Pinker's "The Better Angels of Our Nature." Pinker wants to know why violence has declined (though it is only in the last chapter that he actually tries to answer the question). Turchin, starting from a different perspective, disagrees somewhat with Pinker on the broad scope of this decline. Violence, he thinks, actually got worse for the 5,000 years between the beginnings of agriculture (10,000 years ago) until the development of large-scale states. Turchin also has a very different (and more coherent) explanation of why violence has declined, and dissects Pinker's hodge-podge explanations for why this happened.

Ultimately, Turchin and Pinker are asking roughly the same questions but starting from rather different perspectives. Pinker starts with the decline of violence, while Turchin starts with the rise in cooperation. What's really intriguing here is that for Turchin, violence and cooperation are linked. Violence drives the rise in cooperation, thus sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

[Myles · Rating 3 out of 5]

While a focus on war to explain the increases in cooperation in ever growing societies sounds counterintuitive, Peter Turchin makes eminently good sense.

His argument is that competition between groups rather than within groups has led to epic changes over eons rather than centuries. It has playing a gigantic role in what makes some societies thrive, and played an outsized role in why some states fail.

It increases the net growth in cooperation which he equates to progress. It gives us the power to build projects as complex as Gothic cathedrals or, even more impressive, such gargantuan projects like the International Space Station.

He coins the phrase ‘Destructive Creation’ along the lines of ‘Creative Destruction’ to illustrate how catastrophic violence ultimately helped evolve bigger and better societies.

He doesn’t advise continuing the use of catastrophic violence to straighten things out moving forward, because it is ideas, commerce, and the quality of governance which drive innovation today.

But competition between groups will persist even as information washes over all societies in an increasingly democratic fashion.

This is an optimistic take on things. Is it, as Turchin contends, a scientifically sound approach?

In my age one is inevitably led to ask ones-self if the MAGA revolution in the US (and other places as well) has a happy ending? So much of the social destruction in its path has led to awful outcomes such that it is fair to conclude, in my opinion, that MAGA has made America much worse off in the short term.

Despotic regimes through time, in this approach, have inevitably folded on themselves and metamorphosed into butterflies. Not always, but frequently.

If I have one complaint, it’s that in my opinion the book doesn’t prove the link between military adventures and better methods of cooperation. It’s still a theory, a persuasive theory, but a theory nonetheless.

Perhaps the author’s promise of a gigantic database will eventually yield the data to back up the claim.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Turchin's Ultrasociety moves between the Left and the Right, ideologically, but appears to be coming down on the side of government and cooperation (what may be read as code for socialism). This seems to be made explicit in this quote:

"The 30 years in America since about 1985 were a giant social experiment. What would happen if ideologies extolling extreme individualism and elevating self-interest as the sole basis on which to organize society were to gain the upper hand? The results are in: a decline of social cooperation at all levels of American society, resulting in a decreased ability to get the job done." Location 904.

The author appears to have forgotten the devastation that brought the New Deal and Keynesian Command Economy to a crashing halt in the late-60s through the mid-70s. Cooperation is fine as long as government and bureaucracies are kept out of it because they turn it into an all-you-can-eat buffet for themselves and their friends. As of now, the world needs no more of this government and bureaucratic corruption, though Turchin seems less convinced.

A well researched and written book, Ultrasociety seems to have missed the globalization boat now that we are living in the age of Brexit and Mr. Trump. Of course, globalization is not over but it is transforming into something other and one of these transformations is in the form of economic nationalism. This new economy has become necessary because too many of the electorate in OECD countries have been left behind by the exporting of jobs abroad and the importation of cheap foreign labor -- not simply illegals but techies and scientists who will work for less than American graduates. This is the only explanation since only 24% of graduates with a STEM degree are working in their field in the US.

Well the author appears all in favor of this, the locals, in the OECD states, have had enough...hence Populism.

If readers are in favor of globalization, in its old form, this is a book for you. However, if you believe globalization must begin locally (retraining and employing qualified locals first) then this book will not help enhance your calm.

Rating: 3 out of 5 Stars for plain old narcissistic hubris.

[Julio Astudillo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why do we not read more books like this one?
I thought it was great to discovery Evolutionary Psychology. But when it comes to -group fitness-, through the evolutionary lens, we've got Cultural Evolution. That's it. Cultural Evolution is studying how societies evolve through time and most importantly, trying to explain "why".

Asking "why" is simple, but trying to answer human civilization is quite an achievement that no man can do alone. That's the main theme of the book, cooperation is one of the bases for human survival, not being selfish. Ultrasociety is the word to define a human feat, cooperation involving a million people, let me use some examples:
- The LHC: a project that involved people from the whole world, and indirectly, even more.
- The Hubble Space Telescope: a project that involved people from the whole world, and indirectly, even more.
- The James Webb Deep Field: a project that involved people from the whole world, and indirectly, even more.
- The International Space Station ISS: a project that involved people from the whole world, and indirectly, even more.

All of them are exclusive human feats, such as religion. The author sort of created a field called cliodynamics, which is the study of human societies through time. Cultural Evolution is a complete guide, which is being studied by scientists. Really, reallay amazing. The book does not explain -coalitionary proactive aggressions- which may be explained by evolutionary psychologists and primatologists; the point of view is wider than that. For example the book explains in scales how societies evolved and religions too, such as Judaism to nowadays Catholic Church, and Zoroastrism to today's Islam. Worth the reading, and Peter Turchin must be a recommended author on society dynamics.

[Özgür Takmaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to understand something, first learn how to measure it.

Morality gives no advantage in group but immense advantage intergroup. Darwin

Essential characteristic of cooperation that it requires some kind of sacrifice.

Great civilizations are not murdered, they die by suicide.

Costless cooperation = coordination problem (marine navigation rules)

Costly cooperation: public vs private and vica versa = Multilevel selection

Competition within group destroys cooperation, but between groups creates it.

Organisms with short generation times are able to adapt chaotic environment genetically.

Learning useful things from others is culture.

It's the one you don't see coming that knocks you out.

Passive scavenging > Competitive Scavenging > Hunting

Spiritual awakening of the axial age.

Bridle and saddle took thousands of years to perfect.

Amateurs talk tactics but professionals study logistics in war.

Violence within society: Sacrifice, persecutions, torture, slavery.

Prestige based cultural transmission.

Seshat: Global history database

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good hypothesis for the trajectories of history. The book provides a brief defense of multilevel selection then proceeds to explain how inter-cultural warfare selects for cultures that allow more and more people to cooperate. This is opposed to intra-cultural violence which the author sees as counterproductive. This evolutionary process of inter-cultural competition is, in the authors eyes, the driving force behind the massive increase in cooperation we see over the last 40,000 years.

While i do have a few gripes about this book, it is a big step forward in our understanding of the forces that have led humanity to the point it currently finds itself. Most grand explanations of history tend to rely on exogenous forces or acts of God. This hypothesis seems to be more self contained and to have strong explanatory power.