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Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth
Peter Turchin
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“Our oversized brains evolved, in large part, to detect and resist manipulation by those who want to get ahead at our expense.”
“It takes at least 100 human generations for agricultural societies to develop into states,”
“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”
“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”
“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.”
“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”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”
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Book Keywords:
homo-sapiens, logic, rational, theory, mind, emotion