Big Data Research: Agriculture is not the cause of large countries

The data has changed everything in the human world.

In the past decade, data analytics has revolutionized biological research. With Hadoop and the open source code tools originally designed by Yahoo and Facebook, the Big Data software platform revolutionized the business world. This technique even changed the history study.

In early 2000 Peter Turchin founded a research area called Cliodynamics. The idea is to use data analysis as a way of predicting the future, but it can also be used to test some theories about what happened in the past. You can design a model that is meant to interpret history, after which you can test the model with real historical data.

The goal of a recent study is to analyze the origins of complex societies. In a recent article by the National Academy of Sciences in the US, Tehring led a team of researchers from different disciplines to try and topple a longstanding argument that the emergence of large nations was the result of agricultural development.

Agriculture is not the cause of large countries

Early humans to collect, hunting for a living. The social structure is relatively simple and may consist of dozens of individuals who are all acquainted with each other and will not carry out complicated cooperation tasks with each other. But in the end there was a complex society - government, military, agriculture, education, etc., and other large-scale, collaborative projects. In this essay, Teqin and his collaborators analyze the distribution of social norm distributions, which makes it possible to expand the reach of social networks to millions of people.

"Large state organizations can not be without bureaucracy, but the cost of bureaucracy is so high that people have to pay for it," he said. "The bigger question then becomes, and the more complex the society will be in the face of high costs." Evolutionary development?

The standard theory for answering this question, which is called the theory of "bottom up," was that man invented agriculture about 10,000 years ago, brought about an excess supply of resources and liberated mankind from work activities Out, engaged in other economic activities. But the research team found that the bottom-up theory was wrong, at least not entirely right. "The competition among societies, that is, events that took place historically in the form of war led to the transformation of a complex society."

To compare the two theories, researchers designed two mathematical models to predict the expansion of a complex society. One is based on agricultural, ecological and geographical conditions; the other is an additional addition to the three elements of war. Next, they use historical map data to determine whether these two models fit the trajectory of the actual development of different countries and empires.

Models containing war factors have achieved a success rate of about 65% in predicting historical changes, while the other model has only reached about 16%. This shows that the war factor is even more important in the spread of social norms and leads to the emergence of complex societies.

Researchers are honest that the model is far from perfect - for example, it does not include population data - but for the most part, the model predicts the emergence of large-scale nations between 1500 and 1500 BC Diffusion. In addition, they also pointed out that there are still many controversies about whether simpler society is belligerent. However, the war has become quite commonplace from the historical moment when the model began to be calculated. "There are many reasons for being warlike: scramble for resources (mainly territory), revenge and strategic considerations (hands on before your enemies are ready to attack you)."

Food production, economy and ideology

The team said it is preparing for the next research project, this time adding food production data. In addition, economic and ideological competition is also a factor in shaping a society. For example, the United States and the Soviet Union is the competition. "The United States was naked capitalism in the 1920s and the workers were expected to pay the maximum amount of wages to be exploited, but then the Soviet Union became a rival, meaning workers should be paid higher wages." In the 1920s " Red Scare "period - that is, during the period when fears of a massive rise of communism in the United States - that U.S. companies voluntarily pay higher salaries and implement more social security programs such as pensions .

But decades later, economic competition forced Russia to be forced into more free trade and democracy. What is the biggest factor behind this? War.