Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution
Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution
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DOI：
10.1038/s41467-020-16035-9
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发表时间：
2020-05
影响因子：
16.6
通讯作者：
Jaeweon Shin;M. Price;D. Wolpert;Hajime Shimao;Brendan D. Tracey;Timothy A. Kohler
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Jaeweon Shin;M. Price;D. Wolpert;Hajime Shimao;Brendan D. Tracey;Timothy A. Kohler
在整个全新世，随着人口和领土的增长，社会发展了额外的管理层和更多信息丰富的工具来管理和记录交易和事件。然而，尽管这种增长似乎不可避免，但事实并非如此。在这里，我们使用Seshat数据库来研究数千年来来自多个大陆的数百种政策的发展。我们发现，社会政治发展首先由政治规模的增长主导，然后是信息处理和经济系统的改进，然后是规模的进一步增加。因此，我们为社会定义了一个规模阈值，超过这个阈值，信息处理的增长就变得至关重要，而信息阈值一旦超过，就会促进规模的进一步增长。在信息阈值以下，政治在社会政治特征上出现分歧，但在信息阈值之后又重新趋同。我们提出了一种基于规模和信息处理的阶段性增长来解释新旧世界政治之间进化差异的方法。我们还提出了一种机制来帮助解释没有明显外部原因的社会崩溃。
Throughout the Holocene, societies developed additional layers of administration and more information-rich instruments for managing and recording transactions and events as they grew in population and territory. Yet, while such increases seem inevitable, they are not. Here we use the Seshat database to investigate the development of hundreds of polities, from multiple continents, over thousands of years. We find that sociopolitical development is dominated first by growth in polity scale, then by improvements in information processing and economic systems, and then by further increases in scale. We thus define a Scale Threshold for societies, beyond which growth in information processing becomes paramount, and an Information Threshold, which once crossed facilitates additional growth in scale. Polities diverge in socio-political features below the Information Threshold, but reconverge beyond it. We suggest an explanation for the evolutionary divergence between Old and New World polities based on phased growth in scale and information processing. We also suggest a mechanism to help explain social collapses with no evident external causes.