Seminar Abstract

Monday, August 23, 2004 • 12:15 AM • Medium Conference Room

Doug White University of California-Irvine

Civilizations as Complex Networks

General scientific strategies for complex evolutionary processes emergent out of network interaction might require capturing long term dynamics first, in this case the interaction between relatively slow processes of population growth pressing on resources building pressures for sociopolitical violence, and how these affect stacks of processes that operate at faster time scales. Turchin's work shows oscillatory dynamics in multiple civilizational contexts at a secular (2-3 century) scale in which organizational innovation leaves lasting organizational changes that generate millennial trends. Micro dynamics resulting from demographic-violence crises in the period and region examined (1175-1500 CE Europe and peri-European region beginning with a largely demonetized economy) drive monetization at the macro-level and differential growth of commercial production regions that is mediated by network variables (placement in the geographic and trade network). Entailment relationships among commodities and urban or trade-node variables change over generational time scales - the current research problem involving how these coevolve with demographic-violence phases and regional network positional effects. Strong statistical tests are used for identifying empirical dynamics, changing entailment relationships, new graph theoretic measures and statistical techniques (ring cohesion) are used for measuring cohesion and its effects, and new network measures of flow centralities contribute to time-lagged predictions of changes in the relative prominence of cities and states within the evolving world economy.