Peter Turchin
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Peter Valentinovich Turchin (; born 22 May 1957) is a Russian-American complexity scientist, specializing in an area of study he and his colleagues developed called cliodynamics
mathematical modeling A mathematical model is an abstract and concrete, abstract description of a concrete system using mathematics, mathematical concepts and language of mathematics, language. The process of developing a mathematical model is termed ''mathematical m ...
and
statistical analysis Statistical inference is the process of using data analysis to infer properties of an underlying probability distribution.Upton, G., Cook, I. (2008) ''Oxford Dictionary of Statistics'', OUP. . Inferential statistical analysis infers properties of ...
of the dynamics of historical societies. Turchin is an emeritus professor at the University of Connecticut in the departments of ecology and evolutionary biology, anthropology, and mathematics. He is a project leader at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and a research associate at the School of Anthropology of the
University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...
. He was editor-in-chief and remains a member of the editorial board at ''Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution''. Turchin is a founding director of the Seshat: Global History Databank. He was a director of the Evolution Institute. In 2021, he was elected a fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a United States–based international nonprofit with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsib ...
.


Early life and education

Peter Turchin was born in 1957 in Obninsk, Russia, and in 1964 he moved with his family to
Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...
. In 1975 he enrolled at
Moscow State University Moscow State University (MSU), officially M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University,. is a public university, public research university in Moscow, Russia. The university includes 15 research institutes, 43 faculties, more than 300 departments, a ...
's Faculty of Biology and studied there until 1977, when his father, Soviet dissident Valentin Turchin, was exiled from the
Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
. In 1980 Turchin received a B.A. (''cum laude'') in
biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...
from
New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...
, and in 1985 a Ph.D. in
zoology Zoology ( , ) is the scientific study of animals. Its studies include the anatomy, structure, embryology, Biological classification, classification, Ethology, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinction, extinct, and ...
from
Duke University Duke University is a Private university, private research university in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity, North Carolina, Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1 ...
. While Turchin's training is as a theoretical biologist, he holds no degrees in history.


Career

Throughout his career Turchin has made contributions to various fields, such as
economic history Economic history is the study of history using methodological tools from economics or with a special attention to economic phenomena. Research is conducted using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and the Applied economics ...
and historical dynamics. He is one of the founders of cliodynamics, the scientific discipline at the intersection of historical macrosociology, cliometrics, and mathematical modeling of social processes. Turchin developed an original theory explaining how large historical empires evolve by the mechanism of multilevel selection. His research on secular cyclesTurchin P. and Korotayev A. 2006
Population Dynamics and Internal Warfare: A Reconsideration
'' Social Evolution & History'' 5(2): 112–147; Turchin P. and Nefedov S. 2009
Secular Cycles
Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial ...
.
has contributed to our understanding of the collapse of complex societies as has his re-interpretation of
Ibn Khaldun Ibn Khaldun (27 May 1332 – 17 March 1406, 732–808 Hijri year, AH) was an Arabs, Arab Islamic scholar, historian, philosopher and sociologist. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages, and cons ...
's notion of '' asabiyya'' as "collective solidarity"..Korotayev A.V., Khaltourina D.A
''Introduction to Social Macrodynamics: Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends in Africa''.
Moscow: URSS, 2006. .
One of Turchin's most prominent fields of research is his study of the
hypothesis A hypothesis (: hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. A scientific hypothesis must be based on observations and make a testable and reproducible prediction about reality, in a process beginning with an educated guess o ...
that
population Population is a set of humans or other organisms in a given region or area. Governments conduct a census to quantify the resident population size within a given jurisdiction. The term is also applied to non-human animals, microorganisms, and pl ...
pressure causes increased
warfare War is an armed conflict between the armed forces of State (polity), states, or between governmental forces and armed groups that are organized under a certain command structure and have the capacity to sustain military operations, or betwe ...
. Turchin, in collaboration with Korotayev, has shown that negative results do not falsify the population-warfare hypothesis. Population and warfare are dynamical variables. If their interaction causes sustained oscillations, then we do not in general expect to find strong correlation between the two variables measured at the same time (that is, unlagged). Turchin and Korotayev have explored mathematically what the dynamical patterns of interaction between population and warfare (focusing on internal warfare) might be in stateless and state societies. Next, they tested the model predictions in several empirical case studies: early modern England, Han and Tang China, and the
Roman Empire The Roman Empire ruled the Mediterranean and much of Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. The Roman people, Romans conquered most of this during the Roman Republic, Republic, and it was ruled by emperors following Octavian's assumption of ...
. Their empirical results have lent support to the population-warfare theory: Turchin and Korotayev have found that there is a tendency for population numbers and internal warfare intensity to oscillate with the same period but shifted in phase, with warfare peaks following population peaks. They demonstrated that the rates of change of the two variables behave precisely as predicted by the theory: population rate of change is negatively affected by warfare intensity, while warfare rate of change is positively affected by population density. In 2010, Turchin published research using 40 combined social indicators to predict that there would be worldwide social unrest in the 2020s. He subsequently cited the success of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign as evidence that "negative trends seem to be accelerating" and that there has been an "unprecedented collapse of social norms governing civilized discourse". In 2020, Turchin and Jack Goldstone predicted that political and civic unrest in the United States would continue regardless of the party in power, until a leader took action to reduce inequality and improve the social indicators that are tracked in their research.


Works

Turchin has published over 200 scientific articles, including more than a dozen in ''
Nature Nature is an inherent character or constitution, particularly of the Ecosphere (planetary), ecosphere or the universe as a whole. In this general sense nature refers to the Scientific law, laws, elements and phenomenon, phenomena of the physic ...
'', ''
Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
'', or ''
PNAS ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America'' (often abbreviated ''PNAS'' or ''PNAS USA'') is a peer-reviewed multidisciplinary scientific journal. It is the official journal of the National Academy of S ...
'', and at least eight books. He is the founder of the journal, '' Cliodynamics'', "...dedicated to 'the search for general principles explaining the functioning and dynamics of historical societies'", and manages a blog, Cliodynamica.


Books

* * * * * *. * * *


Selected journal articles

* * * *Turchin P. (2006)
Population Dynamics and Internal Warfare: A Reconsideration
''Social Evolution & History'' 5(2): 112–147 (with
Andrey Korotayev Andrey Vitalievich Korotayev (; born 17 February 1961) is a Russian anthropology, anthropologist, economic history, economic historian, comparative politics, comparative political scientist, demography, demographer and sociology, sociologist ...
). * * * *
Article retracted on July 7, 2021

Explaining the rise of moralizing religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank. ''Religion, Brain & Behavior'', 2023, 13(2), 167-194.


See also

* Elite overproduction * Structural-demographic theory * Seshat (project)


References


Further reading

* Article on work by Goldstone and Turchin. * * Turchin adopted and expanded Goldstone's model to apply to modern industrial states. They later became collaborators. * Osnos, Evan, "Ruling-Class Rules: How to thrive in the power elite – while declaring it your enemy", ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'', 29 January 2024, pp. 18–23. "In the nineteen-twenties... American elites, some of whom feared a Bolshevik revolution, consented to reform... Under
Franklin D. Roosevelt Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882April 12, 1945), also known as FDR, was the 32nd president of the United States, serving from 1933 until his death in 1945. He is the longest-serving U.S. president, and the only one to have served ...
... the U.S. raised taxes, took steps to protect unions, and established a
minimum wage A minimum wage is the lowest remuneration that employers can legally pay their employees—the price floor below which employees may not sell their labor. List of countries by minimum wage, Most countries had introduced minimum wage legislation b ...
. The costs, Turchin writes, 'were borne by the American
ruling class In sociology, the ruling class of a society is the social class who set and decide the political and economic agenda of society. In Marxist philosophy, the ruling class are the class who own the means of production in a given society and apply ...
.'... Between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, a period that scholars call the Great Compression, economic equality narrowed, except among Black Americans... But by the nineteen-eighties the Great Compression was over. As the rich grew richer than ever, they sought to turn their money into
political power In political science, power is the ability to influence or direct the actions, beliefs, or conduct of actors. Power does not exclusively refer to the threat or use of force (coercion) by one actor against another, but may also be exerted thro ...
; spending on politics soared." (p. 22.) " democracy can function well if people are unwilling to lose power – if a generation of leaders... becomes so entrenched that it ages into gerontocracy; if one of two major parties denies the arithmetic of elections; if a cohort of the ruling class loses status that it once enjoyed and sets out to salvage it." (p. 23.)


External links

*
Cliodynamica
' A Blog about the Evolution of Civilizations @PeterTurchin.com * *Maini, Alessandro. "On Historical Dynamics by P. Turchin". ''Biophysical Economics and Sustainability'' 5, No. 1 (4 February 2020): 3
DOI: 10.1007/s41247-019-0063-x
{{DEFAULTSORT:Turchin, Peter 1957 births American evolutionary biologists World system scholars Complex systems scientists Living people New York University alumni Duke University alumni Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science University of Connecticut faculty Writers from Moscow Soviet emigrants to the United States Russian scientists