Evolution of Collective Computational Abilities of (Pre)Historic Societies

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Meeting Description

It has recently been learned that as they evolve, all early human societies first grown in size without developing their information-processing sophistication very much, then they switch to a mode where they develop their information-processing sophistication without growing much, and then they switch back to a mode in which they grow in size. In this working group we will investigate many aspects of this phenomenon: What are the fine-grained details of how the many different kinds of information-processing and different kinds of size growth co-evolve? Do similar “mode-switches” involving information-processing sophistication happen at later stages in the evolution of human societies? How should we best combine the time-series’ of many different societies to glean such high-level characteristics of social development? What underlying theories about how groups of people collectively process information best explain these phenomena.

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Agenda

November 2 — 4, 2020

Speakers

Elizabeth Bradley - "A quick introduction to nonlinear time-series analysis"
David Carballo
Stefani Crabtree
Laura Ellyson
James Evans
Gary Feinman
Jessica Flack
Anna Frishman
Marcus Hamilton
Juergen Jost
Jin Hong Kuan
Tim Kohler
Ian Morris
Johannes Mueller
Cameron Petrie
Hajime Shimao
Michael Smith
Miriam Stark
Steven Wernke
David Wolpert