Sociomeeting: Brainstorming history: a journal club on Peter Turchin’s work

• Talk

• Canigó Callau i Boix, Ivan Sevostianov
• IFISC
• 17 febrer de 2026 a les 12:00
• seminar room
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This session will be a journal club dedicated to the computational history or cliodynamics as named by Peter Turchin. We will start by a short summary of a recent paper of his, followed by a discussion of physical models one could apply to the given data already today to bootstrap the research on this new and exciting topic.

The paper [1] itself talks about the primary steps that are taken to verify the interpretations of sociological and anthropological models. Each theory is reduced to a set of variables from the history data bank [2] to then determine its influence on the complexification of the society. Statistics like correlations and causal relations allowed the authors to highlight the best predictors out of a large pool of variables such as agricultural tradition length and warfare intensity. Besides the paper investigates the role of technological revolutions such as invention of cavalry in the occurrence advancement-stagnation cycles.

We encourage all attendants to read [1] or any other Turchin’s paper beforehand and prepare interesting questions and ideas.

 

[1] Peter Turchin et al., Disentangling the evolutionary drivers of social complexity: A comprehensive test of hypotheses. Sci. Adv.8, eabn3517(2022). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abn3517

[2] Turchin, P.; Brennan, R.; Currie, T.; Feeney, K.; Francois, P.; Hoyer, D., et al. (2015). Seshat: The Global History Databank. Cliodynamics, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.21237/C7clio6127917

Detalls de contacte:

Juan Fernández Gracia

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