
Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013) - unitedacademics
http://www.ua-magazine.com/computer-simulations-reveal-war-drove-the-rise-of-civilisations/
======
jwtadvice
Yes: geostrategy is a huge defining factor in the organization of the planet,
the movement of people and the evolution of society. It is a primary factor,
including resource extraction technologies, agricultural capability, and more.

I think rounding that up to "drove the rise of civilizations" is a crude way
to put that. For example, the simulation pits "agriculture plus military"
against "agriculture". Then they found that including both food security
concerns and physical security concerns more closely predicted known outcomes.

Had they put "agriculture plus military" against "military" and found that
including both was better than just simulating physical security we would have
gotten the title "Computer Simulations Suggest Food Drove the Rise of
Civilizations".

I think the takeaway (besides how not to model and report on models) is that
geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and
international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it.

A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more
able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure
projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea
to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more.

Unfortunately the layman instead is fed a steady diet of "good versus evil"
narratives, informing him instead about how he should feel about each case to
emotionally and financially support his military.

~~~
mc32
Wouldn't the "military" only group be able to terrorize the agriculture only
as well as the ag plus military ones? Something akin to the Danes at one
point? They could just build it up so that they could go pillaging
indefinitely, so long as they don't outright destroy their target civs.

~~~
rmchugh
I'm not sure the Danes were ever military only, Denmark was also an
agricultural society during the viking period. As I understand it, the viking
raids were in fact organised around the agricultural calendar, with the two
raiding seasons taking place after the harvest and after the sowing. And of
course the Vikings were interested in acquiring farming land and often settled
and farmed in their places of conquest.

A more apt comparison might be pastoralist raiders as mentioned in Turchin's
War and Peace and War, whose nomadic lifestyle led naturally to the
development of military skills that could be applied in raids on settled
communities. Turchin wrote a lot about the Tatars and the Mongols could also
be a good example.

~~~
mc32
I didn't mean for the imperfect example of the Danes to take it off tangent,
it was only to illustrate a people I could think of for whom raiding was
integral but your examples or any other is just as well. I think someone (civ)
could have taken it further and been sociopathic and only relied on military
force for survival. Obviously there are benefits in diversifying, but I think
while not ideal, it's possible and could work, in some circumstances.

~~~
jandrese
You mean like the Mongols? They didn't stop and farm. Their entire society was
built around conquest and pillage.

~~~
jwtadvice
Until they established city centers, trade routes, spread religious freedom to
among their subjects, developed population centers and their agricultural
output, standardized exchange rates and quality bars, created systems of news
and material delivery, and all that other stuff.

Their empire was, of course, extremely short, as it collapsed with the death
of their Great Kahn soon after it established itself and its following leaders
abandoned the previous inroads in the West to focus on the prize of capturing
China (that ultimately failed).

Our history tends to focus on the expansion of their empire rather than its
subsequent administration, I think in part for that reason.

~~~
mc32
True, but I think it tentatively proves it's possible, if not effective, long
term.

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stcredzero
The older I get, the more it strikes me that _civilization_ is inherently
unstable. It may be metastable, in the way that a predator-prey relationship
is stable. A technological civilization like ours is not stable. It's a
_conflagration_. It's subject to a number of exponential processes. Our
economy is based on exponentiation. If progress is based on war, then that's
just another nail in the coffin. This makes for a plausible "Great Filter"
solution to the Fermi Paradox. Civilizations are so unstable, they can only
progress through war, which makes them more likely to destroy themselves.
Perhaps civilizations almost never stay organized at the point where they are
capable of star travel.

~~~
wyager
This is why it's critical to become starfaring _as soon as possible_. Every
year we delay carries tremendous risk.

~~~
kowdermeister
Do you think we can get rid of this once we leave the planet and go multi-
planetary? We will bring our gray matter with us. May a few generations grow
up and they will repeat our mistakes.

Possibly the only solution is to get way smarter by gene editing and preserve
as much data as we can from our age.

~~~
clock_tower
Over time, populations adapt to their circumstances. In a society in which
Malthusian pressures operate, and the thrifty and peaceful out-reproduce the
violent and improvident, society will become more thrifty and peaceful over
time -- and will eventually become prosperous and organized enough to escape
the Malthusian trap. (The opposite pressures can also operate, but you need
external sources of chaos for selection in favor of chaos to occur. Order is
normally self-establishing, self-reinforcing, and stronger than chaos over
time.)

 _A Farewell to Alms_ discusses this in great detail; England began the
Industrial Revolution (i.e. broke out of the Malthusian trap) in the late 18th
century, but if not for them, the Continent would have done it in the 19th; if
not the Continent, then Japan in the late 19th or China sometime in the 20th.

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clock_tower
Turchin, like I suspected. _War and Peace and War_ is his first book on the
subject, which is well worth reading. He's an ethnic Russian in the US, and
focuses on US and Russian history; his model explains both countries very
well, but he openly admits in the book that it doesn't explain Italy (or
Aquitaine), so we know that there are other factors in life.

I'm not convinced that "Turchinian cohesion" is really a good thing, though;
it seems to be a way to get people who hate each other to toe the line and
work together nonetheless, and he kind of praises how all cohesive societies
suppress dissenters...

Another book to read, for those interested in neo-Toynbean searches for
underlying patterns: _The Fourth Turning_ , which deals with generational
cycles of values. The authors, writing around 1990, expected a high risk of
some sort of crisis -- possibly even a large terrorist attack -- somewhere
around 2000, and a general atmosphere of crisis that would last about 20 years
afterwards. Either their model's pretty good, or they just got lucky; if they
followed their own investment advice, I imagine they came out pretty well.

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hyperion2010
And then there is Caral, a civilization that seems to have evolved without any
violence. Here is an excellent video about the discovery [1].

0\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral)
1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0jSXv9Jyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0jSXv9Jyk)

~~~
clock_tower
Norte Chico society was unusual in a lot of ways, including disinterest in
violence (which was helped along by having no neighbors). I'd recommend _1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus_ for an in-depth look.

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mynegation
A little bit of offtopic that might be interesting to HN crowd: Peter Turchin
is a son of late Valentin Turchin [1] who has quite a following in Russian
Computer Science community.

Probably due to our history, there is a large amount of interest among
Russians about rise and fall of civilizations. Lev Gumilyov's [2] work is
something else that comes to mind, although much less mathematical.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Turchin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Turchin)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov)

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ArkyBeagle
The Old Testament of the Bible is a lot taken up with the rise of kings over
judges, with prophets then warning people that the only reason to have kings
is conquest, and that this is Hubris That Will Arouse The Ire of $DEITY.

Whether it's really on a timeline or adapted, it's kind of an interesting idea
that much of that old book is about that. It's especially interesting when you
consider the idea that in order to survive, a system like that has to become
ephemeral; that Judaism survived the destruction of various temples because it
became much more of an idea than a place or thing.

But we remember the conquerors because the stories are better :)

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grandalf
War is the application of violence to achieve a political outcome.

It's important to differentiate between this type of war and simple conquest
and commandeering of resources (human, natural, etc.)

In both cases, as the scale increases, the sophistication required to support
the effort increases... One needs better social structures, better technology,
supply chain management, etc.

So these "civilized" aspects are in fact prerequisites for victory in war,
though war may offer an incentive to focus on improving those systems and
their coordination at the expense of other aspects of society.

So just as eating food strengthens a person enough that he/she may grow,
survive, and thus desire to eat larger meals in the future, eating is not the
_cause_ of hunger.

What we must also realize (for history and for the present day) is that war
utterly wipes out culture and the history of humans, and replaces it with some
politicized narrative imagined by the victors. We know little about indigenous
Americans, and the future will know little about the Afghanistan and Iraq of
the early 21st century and earlier. There will be volumes of information, but
it will be written by scholars beholden to the occupying hegemon.

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LordHumungous
Interestingly, from a cursory glance at those images, it looks like the
biggest gap between the model and the data is in Iran and central Asia. The
model predicts a low incidence of civilization there, which makes sense due to
the region's low agricultural potential, but in reality large civilizations
have thrived in those areas. I wonder what factor explains this divergence?
Trade along the Silk Road?

~~~
joshuaheard
Long term climate change? Those areas were probably fertile when the ancient
civilizations thrived there.

~~~
clock_tower
It was local climate change and poor resource management -- two problems which
fed on each other. Desertification isn't new to the 20th century...

Iran was originally wooded, but the forests were marginal -- not very fertile,
easy to lose, mostly valuable for keeping topsoil in place. These were cut at
rates faster than they could regenerate, and the country desertified. The
ancient Persians were superb engineers (their air-conditioning and water-
transport methods, in particular, get a lot of attention in sustainability
circles today), but poor foresters.

Of course, regenerative forestry was only invented in the 19th century. Persia
isn't the only part of the world where marginal forests were over-harvested
and lost; the forests that survived were those in very tree-friendly regions,
or in uninhabited regions, or both. In Persia, the temperate-rainforest zone
north of the Elburz Mountains (on the south shore of the Caspian Sea) was
forested much longer, although these days it's more urbanized than anything
else.

The problem in Iraq -- Mesopotania -- was a different one: the Babylonians put
in irrigation canals, but, over time, irrigation canals render the soil salty
and toxic to plants. This takes thousands of years; but by the time the
Mongols arrived, parts of Iraq were already a salt marsh, and after Hugalu
Khan destroyed the irrigation systems, no one could get much value from
rebuilding them. The climate is still mild and pleasant; the soil, much less
so.

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rossdavidh
For those interested in Peter Turchin's work, he just released a new book
called "Ages of Discord". It's got a lot of mathematical notation, but if
you're not put off by that it's a good read. [http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-
discord/](http://peterturchin.com/ages-of-discord/)

------
TheGRS
Everyone should listen to Dan Carlin's amazing Hardcore History series on
Genghis Khan: [http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-43-wrath-o...](http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-43-wrath-of-the-khans-i/)

He makes a case for not just Kahn and his descendants being a huge factor in
history, but for every ruler who has gone in and shaken up the foundations of
civilization through conquest. Khan, Alexander and Napoleon are prime examples
given (and I'm avoiding another key example but you'll know who it is if you
listen to the podcast). He speculates that at various times in history,
civilization stalled out, but these rulers came in and got things moving again
simply by clearing entire parts away and making room for new ideas and new
forms of government. Its a fascinating theory and I think this data
corroborates that.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
You can point to examples of predator migrations causing rises in the
populations of prey species for nearly the same reasons.

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GavinMcG
It seems to me that "reveal" must be the wrong word here, basically by
definition.

~~~
asolove
Indeed. The model is seeded with only two interesting bits of information:
agricultural capacity and military technology. They then compared that model
with one that only knew about agriculture. Because the first model was more
predictive, they concluded war was the primary cause of civilization. That
result seems suspect.

Looking at the little maps in the article, I might hesitate a guess that this
model has been over-fit to a certain idea of "civilization". It predicts Egypt
and Rome and Greece, things people know about. But it doesn't seem to predict
the Byzantines, Sogdian and other Central Asian empires, peaks and troughs of
Chinese dynasties, etc., which were just as long-lived and influential but are
less well-known.

I wonder what would happen if they modeled resource availability, language
overlap over time, political ideology (large empires tend to become inward-
looking), etc. War is certainly an important factor, but not the only one.

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squozzer
Turchin has made the point elsewhere that agriculture is important because
food production is a fundamental constraint on population growth. But it's
warfare that provided the impetus for scaling societies past the tribal level.

~~~
clock_tower
But tribes fight better than civilizations (less concern for social status,
less internal dissention; read _War Before Civilization_ for an interesting
discussion of this) -- so over-civilization is self-correcting in a way.
Turchin sees his ideas as an elaboration on ibn Khaldun...

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dpflan
For an analysis of warfare, progression of technology and its influence on
warfare, and war's influence on society, I recommend reading _A History of
Warfare_ by John Keegan. It does explore war as an extension of politics and
can lead to nice thought exercises about how war does influence the creation
and destruction of civilization.

1\. Wiki About:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Warfare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Warfare)

------
DanielBMarkham
Random internet comment: in my mind there are three cooperative/adversarial
games that drove all of human civilization: trading/commerce, clanning/war,
and prey/predator.

Each of these requires vastly different strategies in different circumstances.
Each scales out in a way that becomes more nuanced and complex the bigger the
system. Each one, and various ones in combinations drive out other complex,
emergent behavior like religion or language.

Intelligence, at least on this planet, seems to thrive in a state of stress
and moderate, creative chaos. There are a lot of idealists in the world who
want to build something totally peaceful where all needs are taken care of and
there's very little risk. If I'm correct, this would effectively kill the
species over the long run.

------
virgil_disgr4ce
Proud that my brother and I playing about 3,000 games of Civ I contributed, I
assume, to this study

~~~
pugworthy
Came for the Civ comment, was not disappointed.

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ComteDeLaFere
“It seems warfare created intense pressure that drove these societies.”

This seems backwards. Wouldn't the intense pressure of societies bumping up
against each other drive warfare, and not the other way around?

~~~
MarkPNeyer
The pressure analogy seems reasonable to me. It suggests that this goes both
ways:

Two societies pushing against each other lead to pressure. This pressure
results in military conflict. Whoever wins the military conflict can exert
increased pressure.

The necessity of winning wars put pressure on the society to develop better
ways of winning wars. These better ways put more pressure on external
societies, etc.

China was the most wealthy, educated civilization in the world in the 1400's.
They stagnated basically becuase there was little to no fighting.

Meanwhile Europe was busy finding newer more elaborate ways to slaughter each
other, and to avoid being slaughtered.

~~~
ComteDeLaFere
-> They stagnated basically because there was little to no fighting.

A fair assessment, but now I realize that another way to say this is -

They stagnated because there was little to drive innovation.

Stated this way, it at least makes us consider that there might be an
alternative to constant warfare as a driver of progress. Maybe recognition of
this is some kind of societal turning point as well?

~~~
pixl97
War may drive innovation, but it may also have other purposes. Like resetting
service and management economies that spend lots of effort keeping themselves
running but not producing products. People think that the more efficient
businesses always win are wrong. A bureaucratic sector can wedge itself into
the legal system and enforce inefficiency.

------
platz
Computer Simulations also suggest reality is simulated in a computer.

------
digi_owl
No shit Sherlock.

Just looking at recent history will show that outright war, or the imminent
threat of same, has driven perhaps the biggest technological push in known
history.

------
singularity2001
Next: Computer Simulations Reveal Computers Will Drive the Demise of
Civilisation

~~~
bbctol
Computer Simulations Reveal Best Option for Civilization is to Cede Control to
Computer Simulations, Trust Us You Guys

------
erikpukinskis
This seems almost tautological to me. Civilization is violence. Civilization
is cultural agreement, agreement generally requires control, control is
violence.

How else are you going to centralize a way of life besides killing everyone
who doesn't agree to it?

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negamax
Always knew this intuitively. When two tribes, cities, countries goto war;
they push each side to get better or perish. Winner never takes all as any
society created with war in center will have power struggle built in. Process
repeats.

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dschiptsov
Competition in general. War is just one form of it.

So-called Cold War and Arm-racing is the most recent examples.

Continuous competition for everything, not just survival and reproduction, is
what makes evolution (biological or social) possible.

------
teilo
Of which we had not the slightest inkling until a computer simulation told us
so.

------
ommunist
Sorry, computer, I am not going to war, even if it will rise another
civilization.

------
softwarelimits
what are the best open source tools for social simulations?

~~~
anonymouslee
I'm part of an NSF funded research coordination network focused on supporting
good practices for computational modeling (www.comses.net). We've been
curating a comprehensive list of computational modeling platforms at
[https://www.openabm.org/modeling-platforms](https://www.openabm.org/modeling-
platforms) but for the most part the popular modeling platforms are NetLogo
([https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/](https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/)),
Repast ([https://repast.github.io/](https://repast.github.io/)), and Mason
([https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/](https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/)).

Rob Allan wrote a survey of agent based modelling toolkits available at
[http://www.grids.ac.uk/Complex/ABMS/](http://www.grids.ac.uk/Complex/ABMS/)
(in 2011 though so some things are out-of-date).

It's important to strive towards models that are as simple as possible so you
don't end up "simulating the world" and so you can better understand and
analyze the processes that led to the interesting results. It's also important
that you document and open your source code to review because as we all know,
it's trivial to hardcode your assumptions into a program to tell you what you
want to see.

------
Tomrn
Was anyone else half expecting this to be a dwarf fortress story?

------
DrNuke
Sid Meier knows it better ehehe

------
mrow84
(2013)

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wwggggoi
maybe. but, imagine where we'd be now had science driven the rise of
civilization. imagine if all the money squandered on war were invested in
science.

------
myf01d
Things liberals won't like to hear.

~~~
clock_tower
Turchin's pretty embarrassing for everyone, except ibn Khaldun of course. Even
Hitler wouldn't want to hear it, since race is a rounding error in Turchin's
model... (Think of the War Nerd on Eritrea; as he tells it, that's a classic
Turchinian story.)

------
outworlder
I used to run a computer simulation that proved the same thing. It's called
Dwarf Fortress world generation.

