| Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific. | |
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MedLine Citation:
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PMID: 20944739 Owner: NLM Status: MEDLINE |
Abstract/OtherAbstract:
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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. |
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Authors:
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Thomas E Currie; Simon J Greenhill; Russell D Gray; Toshikazu Hasegawa; Ruth Mace |
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Publication Detail:
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Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't |
Journal Detail:
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Title: Nature Volume: 467 ISSN: 1476-4687 ISO Abbreviation: Nature Publication Date: 2010 Oct |
Date Detail:
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Created Date: 2010-10-14 Completed Date: 2010-12-01 Revised Date: - |
Medline Journal Info:
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Nlm Unique ID: 0410462 Medline TA: Nature Country: England |
Other Details:
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Languages: eng Pagination: 801-4 Citation Subset: IM |
Affiliation:
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Evolutionary Cognitive Science Research Center, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo 153-8902, Japan. t.currie@ucl.ac.uk |
Export Citation:
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| MeSH Terms | |
Descriptor/Qualifier:
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Asia, Southeastern Geography* Group Processes Language Linguistics / methods Models, Theoretical New Zealand Pacific Islands Pacific Ocean Phylogeny* Political Systems* Politics Taiwan |
| Comments/Corrections | |
Comment In:
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Nature. 2010 Oct 14;467(7317):798-9
[PMID:
20944737
]
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From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine
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