
Scale and information-processing thresholds in Holocene social evolution - headalgorithm
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-16035-9
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headalgorithm
Abstract:

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.

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headalgorithm
Basically there appears to be a link between the way in which societies
process information and how large they can become

