Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific
Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific
复制标题
DOI：
10.1038/nature09461
复制
发表时间：
2010-10-14
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Mace, Ruth
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Currie, Thomas E.;Greenhill, Simon J.;Mace, Ruth
关于人类政治进化是否经历了一系列复杂性的递增，或者是否发生了更大的、非连续的递增，人们存在分歧。社会在多大程度上降低了复杂性也不清楚。这些争论在很大程度上是在缺乏严格的量化测试的情况下继续进行的。我们使用系统发生学方法评估了南岛语社会中六种相互竞争的政治进化模式。在这里，我们展示了在最合适的模型中，政治复杂性以一系列小步骤的方式起伏。紧随其后的是另一个模型，在该模型中，增长是连续的，但下降可以是连续的，也可以是更大的下降。结果表明，在这些社会的进化史上，政治复杂性没有发生过大规模的、非连续的跳跃。这表明，尽管人类历史上有许多偶然的路径，但文化进化中有一些规律可以用计算系统发生学方法来检测。
There is disagreement about whether human political evolution has proceeded through a sequence of incremental increases in complexity, or whether larger, non-sequential increases have occurred. The extent to which societies have decreased in complexity is also unclear. These debates have continued largely in the absence of rigorous, quantitative tests. We evaluated six competing models of political evolution in Austronesian-speaking societies using phylogenetic methods. Here we show that in the best-fitting model political complexity rises and falls in a sequence of small steps. This is closely followed by another model in which increases are sequential but decreases can be either sequential or in bigger drops. The results indicate that large, non-sequential jumps in political complexity have not occurred during the evolutionary history of these societies. This suggests that, despite the numerous contingent pathways of human history, there are regularities in cultural evolution that can be detected using computational phylogenetic methods.