Thursday, August 25, 2005

This Too Shall Pass

Today's Guardian carries a piece about ecologist Peter Turchin, author of War and Peace and War, who believes he has discovered the laws of history to explain the rise and fall of empires.

" . . . his experience in the mathematical modelling of animal populations such as lemmings, voles and forest insects has given him confidence that the complex processes of human interactions can be captured by such methods too. "History is not just a huge number of random factors interacting in very complex ways," he says. "There are some strong patterns that come out. And there are some reasonably simple explanations at work for these patterns."

Read the rest here.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

John, I think the link was truncated.

It should be: http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/feature/story/0,,1555330,00.html

John said...

Thanks Jim, I'll fix it.

griff said...

have you read asimov's foundation series?

John said...

No, Mart was always the sci-fi buff. Do you recommend it?