搜尋結果
Joshua Goldstein: "Toynbee (1954 9:322) structures the past five centuries around the same timing that Wright and Dehio followed. He builds from Wright's "more severe" war concentrations (every other long wave)41a roughly 115-year cycle of war and peace (table 5.2). The three regular modern cycles are dated 1568-1672, 1672-1792, and 1792-1914 ...
* Article / Special Issue: The age of catastrophe. CAIRNS Dossier, Volume 4, Issue 9, October 2020 URL = https://www.cairn-int.info/dossiers-2020-9-page-1.htm ...
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- Chapter 9
- Chapter 10
"In 1982, I went on my first archaeological excavation in Greece. I was thrilled: I had dug a lot in Britain, but this was something else entirely. An ancient Land Rover took me from Birmingham as far as Thessaloniki, where I caught an even more ancient bus to Assiros, the farming village where we would be working (figure 1.1).¹ There I settled int...
I begin with foraging societies. “Foraging,” one standard reference work helpfully suggests, means the “hunting of wild animals, gathering of wild plants, and fishing, with no domestication of plants, and no domesticated animals except the dog”¹ (hence the common use of the term “hunter-gatherers” as a synonym for “foragers”). The consequence of th...
Farmers are people whose most important source of energy is domesticated plants and animals. At the start of chapter 2, I quoted Catherine Panter-Brick’s definition of foragers as people who “exercise no deliberate alteration of the gene pool of exploited resources” and consequently “live in small groups, and . . . move around a lot”;¹ farmers, by ...
Humanity has always depended on solar energy. Sunlight hits the earth, where plants photosynthesize it into chemical energy; animals eat the plants, converting their chemical energy to kinetic energy; and humans eat both plants and other animals. In the last two centuries, however, humans have vastly increased the amount of energy they capture by l...
In chapters 2 to 4, I attempted to tell the story of human values across the twenty thousand years since the coldest point of the last ice age. I suggested that modern human values initially emerged somewhere around 100,000 years ago (± 50,000 years) as a consequence of the biological evolution of our big, fast brains, and that once we had our big,...
I too, as Ian did, would in Kenya have paid a local family to fetch and boil the water. He drew the lesson that biological evolution has given us common sense, which tells us to adapt to our circumstances. But “common sense” is—paradoxically—usually ideological. Ian was in Kenya as a temporary individual observer. For the villagers, it would be bet...
In my response to the Tanner Lecture presentation made by Ian Morris, I emphasized the great distance that separated the our two scholarly approaches to history. Morris worked on a complex global scale, moving back and forth across vast spans of time and space, whereas I stayed with specific individuals in all their intricacies at the local level, ...
Ian Morris assures us that he does not think his view implies “that what is (let alone what has been) is what ought to be.”⁴ Nevertheless, Morris’s speculations raise questions about the relationship between the values that people actually do hold, or have held, and the values that we ought to hold, if indeed there are any such values. In order to ...
I would like to thank Professor Morris for his stimulating, bracing, synthesizing, and heart-stoppingly terrifying lecture, which I predict will soon become a video game, like Snakes and Ladders but with a lot more snakes. Let me briefly place myself. I’m a writer of fiction—I say this without shame, especially since the brain gurus have revealed t...
In academia, criticism is the sincerest form of flattery. I therefore owe major thanks to Phil Kleinheinz, Josh Ober, Kathy St. John, Walter Scheidel, Paul Seabright, Ken Wardle, the Princeton University Press’s two anonymous reviewers, and my tireless and patient editors Steve Macedo and Rob Tempio, all of whom read and commented on earlier versio...
* Essay: DAOs, Democracy and Governance. by Ralph C. Merkle. Version 1.9, May 31st 2016. Cryonics Magazine, July- August, Vol 37:4, pp 28-40; Alcor, www.alcor.org URL ...
Summary. By Dave Pollard, [1] : "Jeff Vail's short, free online book A Theory of Power begins with a series of provocative theses: The best representation of our world, of what 'is', is not matter, but the connections between matter. These connections define 'power-relationships' -- the ability of one entity to influence the action. of another.
Description. From the Wikipedia: "Records of the Grand Historian, also known by its Chinese name Shiji, is a monumental history of China that is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories. The Records was written in the late 2nd century BC to early 1st century BC by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian, whose father Sima Tan had begun it ...
Living systems have integrity. Their character depends on the whole. The same is true for organizations; to understand the most challenging managerial issues requires seeing the whole system that generates the issues." Second, a fundamental principle of system dynamics states that the structure of the system gives rise to its behavior.
