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Sociology

Political evolution

Nature volume 467, pages 798–799 (2010)Cite this article

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Phylogenetic methods of evolutionary biology can be used to study socio-political variation mapped onto linguistic trees. The range of political complexities in Austronesian societies offers a good test case. See Article p.801

Today, the whole world is divided into states whose political organization consists of multi-level bureaucracies frustratingly familiar to all of us whenever we try to deal with government agencies. But as Europeans expanded around the globe in recent centuries, they encountered non-European peoples living under simpler political organizations, variously termed chiefdoms, tribes or bands, of which the simplest was egalitarian and leaderless1. The archaeological record suggests that all societies were politically simple until around 10,000 years ago, and that the first states didn't arise until about 3400 BC. Through what stages has political complexity changed with time? On page 801 of this issue, Currie et al.2 describe a big advance in understanding this central problem of political science. They have achieved it by applying the quantitative methods of phylogenetic-tree analysis now routine in evolutionary biology.

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Figure 1: Extremes of Austronesian political organization.

P. BOURSEILLER/GETTY M. PUDDY/PHOTOLIBRARY

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  1. Jared Diamond is in the Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095-1524, USA. jdiamond@geog.ucla.edu,

    Jared Diamond

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  1. Jared Diamond
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Diamond, J. Political evolution. Nature 467, 798–799 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/467798a

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