Ultrasociety Quotes

“We also know, of course, that human beings are not perfectly rational calculators. Our behavior and decisions are based on a mixture of calculation, emotions, and internalized norms, with calculation often a minor component of the cocktail.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“We know that, over the past 10,000 years, larger polities consistently outcompeted smaller ones, with the result that 99.8 percent of people today live in countries with populations of one million or more.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“It takes at least 100 human generations for agricultural societies to develop into states,”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Our oversized brains evolved, in large part, to detect and resist manipulation by those who want to get ahead at our expense.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“But while Ashoka is unusual in his exceptional degree of care for the wellbeing of his subjects, he is not unique. In fact, he represents a new trend: all across Eurasia, rulers were getting interested in what today we would probably call social justice. In”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“The altruistic gene doesn’t help just any randomly chosen individual. In a sense, it helps copies of itself in a different individual. Generally speaking, full siblings share 50 percent of their genes, so if I can help more than two of my sisters, even at the expense of sacrificing myself, then, on average, such behavior will be favored by natural selection. Hence the famous quip by the evolutionary biologist J. B. S. Haldane. When asked whether he would give his life to save a drowning brother, he replied: “No, but I would to save two brothers or eight cousins.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“...what makes war creative is not how many people are killed. What matters is the effect on cultural evolution. War is an evolutionary force of creation only when it results in some cultural traits outcompeting others.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Such perfection endures. For more than two millennia after horse-riding was invented, the warhorse remained the most important military technology bar none. A plentiful supply of horses was critical even in the 19th century, well after firearms had replaced the bows and arrows. Have you ever wondered why Napoleon, who won all of his battles until 1812, lost one battle after another in 1813 and 1814, leading to defeat and abdication? The surprising answer is: horses.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Ashoka not only exhorted others to cultivate Dhamma, he practiced what he preached. He abolished human and animal sacrifice. He “made provision for two types of medical treatment: medical treatment for humans and medical treatment for animals.” Wherever medical herbs suitable for humans or animals are not available, I have had them imported and grown. Wherever medical roots or fruits are not available I have had them imported and grown. Along roads I have had wells dug and trees planted for the benefit of humans and animals. This concern for animals is particularly touching. He was the first ruler ever to publish a list of protected species: “parrots, mainas, aruna, ruddy geese, wild ducks, nandimukhas, gelatas, bats, queen ants, terrapins, boneless fish .”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“moral of this mathematical digression is that, on flat plains, with warriors using projectile weapons, any numerical superiority that an army can achieve over its enemy is magnified out of all proportion. In other words, Lanchester’s Square Law yields an enormous return to social scale. If the opposing forces use a mix of ranged and shock weapons, numerical superiority will still be amplified, although not as much as with purely projectile weapons. So there is an intense selection pressure for cultural groups living in flat terrain to scale up, and a very high price to pay by those that fail to do so (recall where the first states emerged). In the mountains the selection pressure for larger societies is reduced considerably. Wars”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Humans are uniquely good throwers. No other species even comes close. Monkeys and apes can throw branches, rotten fruit, and excrement (I still remember an encounter with an irate troop of howler monkeys in Costa Rica . . .), but they do not use projectiles as lethal weapons in hunting or combat. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are quite pathetic at throwing.94 Imagine”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“In other words, the important statistic is the risk of violent death for each person. To illustrate this point, there were 49 homicides in Denmark in 2012 (population: 5.6 million), so the chance of any particular Dane being murdered that year was less than one in 100,000. But in a typical small-scale society, with a population of, say, 1,000, 49 homicides would translate into one chance in 20 of being murdered. As”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“The first cities and states arose 5,000 years ago. One of these archaic states, the Old Kingdom of Egypt (2650–2150 BCE), the one that built the Great Pyramid of Giza, had a population of between one and two million, which is beginning to approach the social scale of the most complex social insects, ants and termites. The”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Again, the uncertainty in the estimate pales into insignificance when we look at the overall trend. Over the 11,000 years separating Göbekli Tepe from the International Space Station, the scale of cooperation, when measured by the labor costs of the most impressive building project, went up by four orders of magnitude—from 300 to 3,000,000. This is a huge—indeed, an astronomic—increase. And, of course, it was paralleled by an equally enormous increase in the scale of human societies. ·•·”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Roach, N. T., et al. (2013). “Elastic energy storage in the shoulder and the evolution of high-speed throwing in Homo.” Nature 498: 483-487.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Evidence is overwhelming that, after switching to agriculture, human stature decreased, a very reliable indicator of a decline in overall wellbeing. People fell sick more often because of higher population density and because pathogens jumped from domesticated animals to humans. The quality of nutrition declined, as is abundantly documented in ancient bones and teeth.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“We may become the first species to spread beyond the limits of the Earth and colonize other planets.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Gradually, human societies started extricating themselves from the worst forms of oppression. Human sacrifice and deified rulers went out of fashion. Slavery was outlawed, and privileges were taken away from nobles. Human societies regained much of the lost ground. We are still not as egalitarian as hunter-gatherers --there are the poor and the billionaires-- but we are much better off than we were during the days of god-kings.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“...science is not only about building carefully-constructed theories that explain general phenomena. It is also, and primarily, about distinguishing good explanations from bad ones. This is where traditional history has been deficient. Historians have created, and continue to create, new explanations, but they are not in the business of testing them with data.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Strangely enough, it is easier to become a god-king than merely a king. To become god-king the successful upstart needs several things. Obviously, he must be at the top of the military chain of command. But he also needs to become the ritual leader, so that he controls the religious hierarchy—large-scale ritual cults that evolved to cement tribal alliances. Finally, the king-in-the-making needs a fanatically loyal retinue that will follow his orders without question and compel others to do the same. The king needs loyal warriors to protect him from assassination, and to put to death any commoner who shows insufficient respect and obedience. Basically, the king and his retinue are a coalition of upstarts, with the king as the alpha male and his followers as lesser upstarts, but who also do quite well out of the deal.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Around 2,500 years ago, we see qualitatively new forms of social organization—the larger and more durable Axial mega-empires that employed new forms of legitimation of political power. The new sources of this legitimacy were the Axial religions, or more broadly ideologies, such as Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Confucianism (and later Christianity and Islam). During this time, gods evolved from capricious projections of human desire (who as often as not squabbled among themselves) into transcendental moralizers concerned above all with prosocial behavior by all, including the rulers. The”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“This is not to deny that there have been plenty of wicked kings in the past 2,500 years. Most likely they were in the majority. Nevertheless, the new trend was that rulers were at least supposed to be good. And many did try to govern in ways that benefited the common people, not just the ruling class. This remarkable turnaround happened virtually simultaneously in the Mediterranean, the Near East, India, and China. Why? The answer, simply put, is religion. Well, religion plus lots of war. This combination of factors isn’t usually considered very congenial to human flourishing.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Why was cultural group selection the key to the transition from forager to farmer? Because you cannot switch to farming when everybody else in your community is foraging. The whole group needs to shift together. It requires a new set of cultural norms and institutions shared by all. The most important such institution would have been property rights over the food that you have grown.157 The”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“call this the “bottom-up” theory of the evolution of social complexity, because it treats social complexity as a sort of “superstructure” on the material resource base. In other words, if you stir enough resources into your evolutionary pot, social complexity will inevitably bubble up. The problem with the bottom-up theory is that in several places where we can date the key stages in this process, we see a different sequence of events. The two sites with early monumental architecture that we discussed in Chapter 1, Göbekli Tepe and Poverty Point, arose before agriculture. So here we have an inverted sequence of events. First, a fairly large-scale society arises, with quite sophisticated ritual activities and buildings requiring the mobilization of large numbers of workers. Only later comes agriculture. Has the standard theory reversed cause and effect? Second, hunter-gatherer societies share food.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Let’s step back from this debate and consider how it affects the question we are currently investigating, the role of war in the rise of archaic states. While there is confusion resulting from competing definitions, and a great degree of controversy about evidence and how to interpret it, all parties agree on one thing: warfare was particularly vicious among pre-state farming societies.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“This is how upstarts succeed—by avoiding arrogance and cultivating modesty. But even more important, they need to demonstrate to the people that the hierarchical social order is preferable to the alternative. In the Roman case, it was the fatigue of persistent internal wars that led to the re-establishment of monarchy. Monarchies”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“For tens if not hundreds of thousands of years before agriculture, human societies had very effective social norms and institutions for controlling bullies. Why would they suddenly (in a few thousand years) replace them with institutions that gave the upstarts legitimacy?”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“Two very clear indicators are the appearance of lavishly furnished burials and large, elaborate private residences. Skeletons can tell us that one segment of population ate much higher-quality foods and enjoyed better health than the rest. Based on such indicators, we know that large differentials between the rich and powerful few and the rest arose within a few thousand years of agriculture in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Mexico, and the Andes. Somehow a segment of society succeeded in manipulating itself into a position of superiority in these regions; this is a fact accepted by all archaeologists.”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“find it difficult to believe that economic or information-processing advantages were the primary drivers of the transition to large-scale societies. Archaic-style states of which we have direct knowledge, such as Hawaii, did not have complex economies or specialized decision-making procedures (to deal with what kinds of problems?). The chiefs were involved with war and ritual; the economy worked well enough when left to the commoners. In any case, it’s hard to imagine that”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth

“In other words, theorists like van der Leeuw envision that a switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture creates a virtuous circle between problem-solving capacity and societal size, gradually leading to an increase of the scale of cooperation. I”
― Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth