Evolution trumps revolution

How do political systems evolve? New research suggests they develop much as animals do, with incremental growth, writes DICK AHLSTROM, Science Editor

POLITICAL structures evolve in much the same way as biological species, according to new research. And just as species can decline and vanish without warning, unstable political groupings can also degrade and disappear.

Where this leaves Ireland and its precarious political and financial situation is unclear, but the researchers also found that unstable political systems can regress in jumps rather than the slow step-by-step changes seen when a political structure becomes more complex.

The similarities between animal evolution and political evolution are revealed in research published this morning in the journal Nature. The international research team from Japan, the UK and New Zealand showed how it could build “family trees” for emerging political structures to map out their evolutionary development.

It doesn’t attempt to explain how leaders such as a Lemass or a Churchill might emerge but it does show how political structures grow and evolve, and how they become more centralised and complex as they do so.

The thing that most startled the researchers was the fact that “cultural evolution” could be mapped on to a family tree.

“This study highlights the benefits of applying the same kinds of techniques used to study complex systems in nature to investigate long-term human social and cultural evolution,” the authors write.

“Interestingly, these results indicate that political evolution, like biological evolution, tends to proceed through small steps rather than through major jumps in ‘design space’,” they say.

They also found, however, that retrograde steps do not have to progress on this “sequential” basis and can come apart more quickly than they are assembled over time.

“This could occur if small, peripheral groups break away from the control of a centralised state or complex chiefdom, or found new societies with fewer levels of political organisation, or it could occur as part of a rapid, more widespread societal collapse and the breakdown of political institutions leaving smaller, less politically complex groups in some regions,” the authors, led by Thomas Currie of the University of Tokyo and colleagues, write.

There are clear precedents for this, for example the large states and empires established at Srivijaya, Sumatra and Majapahit, Java, which were known to have “waxed and waned over the last 1,500 years”, the authors say.

All human societies were originally politically simple until the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago. As populations increased, societal complexity increased, evolving from small bands of family groups on to larger kinship-based groups or tribes. Typically these had only informal leadership, but this changed as tribes evolved into chiefdoms, with political leadership centralised in a hereditary office. Then chiefdoms coalesced to form states, with increasing complexity as seen in our modern societies, the authors write.

The researchers were able to track these changes by looking at the people who originated in Taiwan about 5,200 years ago and later spread out eastwards across the Pacific to populate its many island chains and also westward to southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean to reach Madagascar.

More particularly the research team looked at the words these “Austronesians” used, tracking the evolution of their languages as time passed, societies formed and populations spread.

They analysed 84 Austronesian-speaking societies, using the biological techniques that allowed them to track language evolution. It looked at lists of 210 vocabulary terms for more than 500 languages.

This enabled them to see how a political structure in one location gradually grew in complexity, or conversely degraded and became less complex.

Its main finding was that while complexity increased on a step-wise basis, loss of complexity could happen much more quickly in “jumps” rather than steps.

Could conditions arise where the complexity of our own society could collapse? The authors do not comment on whether European societies could see breakdown and a return to chiefdoms or some other simpler political structure.

Certainly, however, tribalism and the notion of a “chief” readily describes our political parties, so perhaps we are already on the way to a new, simpler political dawn.