Simulations and History

In the science-fiction novel "Hard to be a God" by Arkadii Sturgatskii (1975) Earth is interfering in the affairs of the planet Arankar in order to save its inhabitants from themselves - with certain unfortunate consequences. The Earth "progressors" work for "The Institute of Experimental History"; which, in turn, implies the existence of a science of Theoretical History.

I believe Life has caught up with Art here. I believe we are now at the start of a science of Theoretical History. This is essentially the science of using computer simulations of dynamical models of historical processes in order to gain understanding of those processes.

There are two books that cover this material but from different perspectives:

- "Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall" by Peter Turchin (2003) which is a formal state of the art modeling and computer simulation of long-term historical changes in territorial states.

And

- "Genes, Mind, And Culture: The Coevolutionary Process" by Charles J. Lumsden & Edward O. Wilson (1981) which does not have any of the computer modeling of the previous work but is ground-breaking in its conceptions and its application of evolutionary dynamics. The idea here is that there is a positive feedback mechanism between biological and cultural evolution that explains why human society "took off" after millennia of paleolithic stasis. (Caution: Australian Aborigines remained in stasis for 60,000 years!) The central idea is that genetic constraints shape culture, which in turn becomes the cultural environment in which an individual's Darwinian fitness is determined, forming a positive feedback between cultural and evolutionary change.
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