Tag Archives: history

Math + data + history lead to cliodynamics and history crisis detection

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This February 18, 2024 essay by Daniel Hoyer, senior researcher, historian, and complexity scientist at the University of Toronto for The Conversation, discuses history as scientific data, Note: Links have been removed,

American humorist and writer Mark Twain is believed to have once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

I’ve been working as a historian and complexity scientist for the better part of a decade, and I often think about this phrase as I follow different strands of the historical record and notice the same patterns over and over.

My background is in ancient history. As a young researcher, I tried to understand why the Roman Empire became so big and what ultimately led to its downfall. Then, during my doctoral studies, I met the evolutionary biologist turned historian Peter Turchin, and that meeting had a profound impact on my work.

I joined Turchin and a few others who were establishing a new field – a new way to investigate history. It was called cliodynamics after Clio, the ancient Greek muse of history, and dynamics, the study of how complex systems change over time. Cliodynamics marshals scientific and statistical tools to better understand the past.

The aim is to treat history as a “natural” science, using statistical methods, computational simulations and other tools adapted from evolutionary theory, physics and complexity science to understand why things happened the way that they did.

By turning historical knowledge into scientific “data”, we can run analyses and test hypotheses about historical processes, just like any other science.

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Hoyer’s essay is fascinating and I can’t really do it justice with a few excerpts but hopefully these will tempt you into reading more of his and his colleagues’ work, from the February 18, 2024 essay.

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Since 2011, my colleagues and I have been compiling an enormous amount of information about the past and storing it in a unique collection called the Seshat: Global History Databank. Seshat involves the contribution of over 100 researchers from around the world.

We create structured, analysable information by surveying the huge amount of scholarship available about the past. For instance, we can record a society’s population as a number, or answer questions about whether something was present or absent. Like, did a society have professional bureaucrats? Or, did it maintain public irrigation works.

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Our goal is to find out what drove these societies into crisis, and then what factors seem to have determined whether people could course-correct to stave off devastation.

But why? Right now, we are living in an age of polycrisis – a state where social, political, economic, environmental and other systems are not only deeply interrelated, but nearly all of them are under strain or experiencing some kind of disaster or extreme upheaval.

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Pouring through the historical record, we have started noticing some very important themes rhyming through history. Even major ecological disasters and unpredictable climates are nothing new.

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One of the most common patterns that has jumped out is how extreme inequality shows up in nearly every case of major crisis. When big gaps exist between the haves and have-nots, not just in material wealth but also access to positions of power, this breeds frustration, dissent and turmoil.

“Ages of discord”, as Turchin dubbed periods of great social unrest and violence, produce some of history’s most devastating events. This includes the US civil war of the 1860s, the early 20th-century Russian Revolution, and the Taiping rebellion against the Chinese Qing dynasty, often said to be the deadliest civil war in history.

All of these cases saw people become frustrated at extreme wealth inequality, along with lack of inclusion in the political process. Frustration bred anger, and eventually erupted into fighting that killed millions and affected many more.

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Perhaps one of the most surprising things is that inequality seems to be just as corrosive for the elites themselves. This is because the accumulation of so much wealth and power leads to intense infighting between them, which ripples throughout society.

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My colleague, political scientist Jack Goldstone, came up with a theory to explain this [“gap between the wealthy who can afford services and the growing number who cannot”] in the early 1990s, called structural demographic theory. He took an in-depth look at the French Revolution, often seen as the archetypal popular revolt. Goldstone was able to show that a lot of the fighting and grievances were driven by frustrated elites, not only by the “masses”, as is the common understanding.

These elites were finding it harder and harder to get a seat at the table with the French royal court. Goldstone noted that the reason these tensions became so inflamed and exploded is because the state had been losing its grip on the country for decades due to mismanagement of resources and from all of the entrenched privileges that the elites were fighting so hard to retain.

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If the past teaches us anything, it is that trying to hold on to systems and policies that refuse to appropriately adapt and respond to changing circumstances — like climate change or growing unrest among a population – usually end in disaster. Those with the means and opportunity to enact change must do so, or at least to not stand in the way when reform is needed.

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Our goal as cliodynamicists is to uncover patterns – not just to see how what we are doing today rhymes with the past – but to help find better ways forward.

If you have the time, please do read Hoyer’s February 18, 2024 essay in its entirety (h/t February 19, 2024 news item on phys.org). The Seshat Global History Databank can be found here.

Patent Politics: a June 23, 2017 book launch at the Wilson Center (Washington, DC)

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I received a June 12, 2017 notice (via email) from the Wilson Center (also know as the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars) about a book examining patents and policies in the United States and in Europe and its upcoming launch,

Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe

Over the past thirty years, the world’s patent systems have experienced pressure from civil society like never before. From farmers to patient advocates, new voices are arguing that patents impact public health, economic inequality, morality—and democracy. These challenges, to domains that we usually consider technical and legal, may seem surprising. But in Patent Politics, Shobita Parthasarathy argues that patent systems have always been deeply political and social.

To demonstrate this, Parthasarathy takes readers through a particularly fierce and prolonged set of controversies over patents on life forms linked to important advances in biology and agriculture and potentially life-saving medicines. Comparing battles over patents on animals, human embryonic stem cells, human genes, and plants in the United States and Europe, she shows how political culture, ideology, and history shape patent system politics. Clashes over whose voices and which values matter in the patent system, as well as what counts as knowledge and whose expertise is important, look quite different in these two places. And through these debates, the United States and Europe are developing very different approaches to patent and innovation governance. Not just the first comprehensive look at the controversies swirling around biotechnology patents, Patent Politics is also the first in-depth analysis of the political underpinnings and implications of modern patent systems, and provides a timely analysis of how we can reform these systems around the world to maximize the public interest.

Join us on June 23 [2017] from 4-6 pm [elsewhere the time is listed at 4-7 pm] for a discussion on the role of the patent system in governing emerging technologies, on the launch of Shobita Parthasarathy’s Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

You can find more information such as this on the Patent Politics event page,

Speakers

Keynote


  • Shobita Parthasarathy

    Fellow
    Associate Professor of Public Policy and Women’s Studies, and Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, at University of Michigan

Moderator


  • Eleonore Pauwels

    Senior Program Associate and Director of Biology Collectives, Science and Technology Innovation Program
    Formerly European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Technological Development, Directorate on Science, Economy and Society

Panelists


  • Daniel Sarewitz

    Co-Director, Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes Professor of Science and Society, School for the Future of Innovation in Society

  • Richard Harris

    Award-Winning Journalist National Public Radio Author of “Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions”

For those who cannot attend in person, there will be a live webcast. If you can be there in person, you can RSVP here (Note: The time frame for the event is listed in some places as 4-7 pm.) I cannot find any reason for the time frame disparity. My best guess is that the discussion is scheduled for two hours with a one hour reception afterwards for those who can attend in person.

What’s a science historian doing in the field of synthetic biology?

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Dominic Berry’s essay on why he, a science historian, is involved in a synthetic biology project takes some interesting twists and turns, from a Sept. 2, 2016 news item on phys.org,

What are synthetic biologists doing to plants, and what are plants doing to synthetic biology? This question frames a series of laboratory observations that I am pursuing across the UK as part of the Engineering Life project, which is dedicated to exploring what it might mean to engineer biology. I contribute to the project through a focus on plant scientists and my training in the history and philosophy of science. For plant scientists the engineering of biology can take many forms not all of which are captured by the category ‘synthetic biology’. Scientists that aim to create modified organisms are more inclined to refer to themselves as the latter, while other plant scientists will emphasise an integration of biological work with methods or techniques from engineering without adopting the identity of synthetic biologist. Accordingly, different legacies in the biosciences (from molecular biology to biomimetics) can be drawn upon depending on the features of the project at hand. These category and naming problems are all part of a larger set of questions that social and natural scientists continue to explore together. For the purposes of this post the distinctions between synthetic biology and the broader engineering of biology do not matter greatly, so I will simply refer to synthetic biology throughout.

Berry’s piece was originally posted Sept. 1, 2016 by Stephen Burgess on the PLOS (Public Library of Science) Synbio (Synthetic Biology blog). In this next bit Berry notes briefly why science historians and scientists might find interaction and collaboration fruitful (Note: Links have been removed),

It might seem strange that a historian is focused so closely on the present. However, I am not alone, and one recent author has picked out projects that suggest it is becoming a trend. This is only of interest for readers of the PLOS Synbio blog because it flags up that there are historians of science available for collaboration (hello!), and plenty of historical scholarship to draw upon to see your work in a new light, or rediscover forgotten research programs, or reconsider current practices, precisely as a recent Nature editorial emphasised for all sciences.

The May 17, 2016 Nature editorial ‘Second Thoughts’, mentioned in Berry’s piece, opens provocatively and continues in that vein (Note: A link has been removed),

The thought experiment has a noble place in research, but some thoughts are deemed more noble than others. Darwin and Einstein could let their minds wander and imagine the consequences of certain actions or natural laws. But scientists and historians who try to estimate what might have happened if, say, Darwin had fallen off the Beagle and drowned, are often accused of playing parlour games.

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What if Darwin had toppled overboard before he joined the evolutionary dots? That discussion seems useful, because it raises interesting questions about the state of knowledge, then and now, and how it is communicated and portrayed. In his 2013 book Darwin Deleted — in which the young Charles is, indeed, lost in a storm — the historian Peter Bowler argued that the theory of evolution would have emerged just so, but with the pieces perhaps placed in a different order, and therefore less antagonistic to religious society.

In this week’s World View, another historian offers an alternative pathway for science: what if the ideas of Gregor Mendel on the inheritance of traits had been challenged more robustly and more successfully by a rival interpretation by the scientist W. F. R. Weldon? Gregory Radick argues that a twentieth-century genetics driven more by Weldon’s emphasis on environmental context would have weakened the dominance of the current misleading impression that nature always trumps nurture.

Here is Berry on the importance of questions,

The historian can ask: What traditions and legacies are these practitioners either building on or reacting against? How do these ideas cohere (or remain incoherent) for individuals and laboratories? Is a new way of understanding and investigating biology being created, and if so, where can we find evidence of it? Have biologists become increasingly concerned with controlling biological phenomena rather than understanding them? How does the desire to integrate engineering with biology sit within the long history of the establishment of biological science over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries?

Berry is an academic and his piece reflects an academic writing style with its complicated sentence structures and muted conclusions. If you have the patience, it is a good read on a topic that isn’t discussed all that often.

NNI’s clumsy attempt to manipulate media; copyright roots

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Is it ever a good idea to hand a bunch of experts at your public workshop on nanotechnology risks and ethical issues a list of the facts and comments that you’d like them to give in response to ‘difficult’ questions from the media after you’ve taken a recent shellacking from one reporter who is likely present? While the answer should be obvious, I’m sad to say that the folks at the US National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) publicly and demonstrably failed to answer correctly.

The reporter in question is Andrew Schneider who wrote a series on nanotechnology for AOL News. I’ve mentioned his series in passing a few times here and I’m truly disheartened to find myself discussing Schneider and it, one more time. For the record, I think it’s well written and there’s some good information about important problems unfortunately, there’s also a fair chunk of misleading and wrong information. So, in addition to the solid, well founded material, the series also provides examples of ill-informed and irresponsible science journalism. (Here’s an example of one of his misleading statements. If you want to find it, you have to read down a few paragraphs as that post was about misleading statements being bruited about by individuals with differing perspectives on nanotechnology.) The Schneider’s series, if you’re madly curious is here.

Yesterday, Clayton Teague, director for the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, provided a riposte on AOL News where Schneider, a few hours, later, offered a devastating nonresponse. Instead, Schneider focused on the NNI’s recent report to the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisors (PCAST) getting in a few solid hits before revealing the clumsy attempt to manipulate the media message at the public workshop that the NNI recently held and which Schneider likely attended.

If you want the inside story from the perspective of one of the experts who was at the panel, check out Dr. Andrew Maynard’s latest posting on his 2020 Science blog.

Two more points before I move on (for today anyway), Schneider’s ‘nonresponse’ refers to both Andrew and another expert as ‘civilians’.

  • Maynard [director of the Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan School of Public Health] and Jennifer Sass [chief scientist and nano expert for the Natural Resources Defense Council], both leading civilian public health scientists who participated in the review … [emphasis mine]
  • “Surely it is inappropriate for the federal government to advise independent experts what to say on its behalf when it comes to critical news reports,” added Maynard, who was one of the civilian advisers on the panel. [emphasis mine]

As far as I’m aware, only the police and the military refer to the rest of us (who are not them) as civilians. Is Schneider trying to suggest (purposely or not) a police or military state?

As for my second point. Somebody passed the list of NNI preferred/approved facts and comments on to Schneider. The first thought would be someone from the expert panel but it could have come from anyone within the NNI who had access and is sympathetic to Schneider’s concerns about nanotechnology.

Copyright roots

If you’ve ever been curious as to how copyright came about in the first place, head over to Greg Fenton’s item on Techdirt. From the posting where Fenton is commenting on a recent Economist article about copyright,

The Economist goes on to highlight:

Copyright was originally the grant of a temporary government-supported monopoly on copying a work, not a property right.

Surely there will be copyright supporters who will cringe at such a statement. They believe that copyright is “intellectual property”, and therefore their arguments often confuse the requirements for laws that support copyright with those that support physical properties.

The article Fenton refers to  is currently open access (but I’m not sure for how long or what the policy is at The Economist). The last lines (with which I heartily concur) from the Economist’s article,

The value society places on creativity means that fair use needs to be expanded and inadvertent infringement should be minimally penalised. None of this should get in the way of the enforcement of copyright, which remains a vital tool in the encouragement of learning. But tools are not ends in themselves. [emphasis mine]

Today’s posting is a short one. About time I did that, eh?