Author: Recent imbs_socdyn_sdeas items

To develop a theory of Robust Intelligence (RI), we continue to advance our theory of interdependence on the efficient and effective control of systems of autonomous hybrid teams composed of robots, machines and humans working interchangeably. As is th…

This thesis outlines and presents an alternative hypothetical process to the emergence of ethnic conflict. Ethnic conflicts, rather than being dependent upon pre-existing ‘ancient hatreds’, are instead the result of a congruence between ethnic and poli…

The analysis of dollar inflation performed by the authors through the approximation of empirical data for 1913–2012 with a power-law function with an accelerating log-periodic oscillation superimposed over it has made it possible to detect a quasi-sing…

Changes in R necessitate updated R scripts for Eff, E. Anthon, & Dow, Malcolm M. (2009). How to Deal with Missing Data and Galton’s Problem in Cross-Cultural Survey Research: A Primer for R. Structure and Dynamics, 3(3). Retrieved from: http://www…

Explanations of the causes of war fall roughly into two schools: those arguing for the primacy of environment and technology, and those arguing for the primacy of sociopolitical factors. We re-examine two hypotheses from the former school, viz, societi…

Discoveries of modern biology are forcing a re-evaluation of even the central pillars of neo-Darwinian evolution. Anthropologists study the processes and results of biological and biocultural evolution, so they must be aware of the scope and nature of …

This article continues our analysis of the gold price dynamics that was published in December 2010 and forecasted the possibility of the “burst of the gold bubble” in April –June 2011. Our recent analysis suggests the possibility of one more substantia…

Kinship is an essential factor in human social life. Many years of research devoted to develop a better understanding of kinship bear witness to this fact. Important advances were made on conceptual, modeling and empirical grounds. Computational social…

This paper presents a simulation of world-systems theory’s iteration model of early human societies. The polities modeled are composed of sedentary foragers and/or simple horticulturalists that rely upon basic subsistence technologies and display low l…

Explanations of the causes of war fall roughly into two schools: those arguing for the primacy of environment and technology, and those arguing for the primacy of sociopolitical factors. We re-examine two hypotheses from the former school, vi…

Multilevel selection is a powerful theoretical framework for understanding how complex hierarchical systems evolve by iteratively adding control levels. Here I apply this framework to a major transition in human social evolution, from small-scale egali…

The analysis of the gold price series for 2003–2010 employing both the methodology developed by Didier Sornette and the one of the authors allows forecasting the collapse in gold prices in April – June 2011. The article discusses both the scenarios tha…

Anthropologists often recorded the typical amount of kinship altruism – that is, the altruism between individuals who identify one another as kin — they observed in what they referred to as tribal or traditional societies (e.g., Murdock 1949; Keesing …

This paper presents an object-oriented approach that tightly integrates multiple modeling techniques and GIS in order to investigate route selections made by pedestrians in an ancient urban environment. Our applied method allows the integration of agen…

A broad appeal for a new theory of interdependence, ‘iota’, has been requested for the science of complexity in a special issue of Science, for social network analysis by the National Academy of Sciences, for effects-based operations by the US military…

Discriminators who have limited tolerance for helping dissimilar others are necessary for the evolution of costly cooperation in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma. Existing research reports that trust in societies decreases when agents copy markers and tol…

Using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, Roes and Raymond (2003) find that large societies are more likely to be located in resource-rich environments, engage in warfare, and hold beliefs in gods actively supporting human morality (“moralizing gods”)….

The article presents results of spectral analysis that has detected the presence of Kondratieff waves (their period equals approximately 52–53 years) in the world GDP dynamics for the 1870–2007 period. To estimate the statistical significance of the de…

Agent-based models (ABMs), perhaps used along with other methods, are increasingly being applied to address problems involving social-ecological systems (SES). However, systematic and standardized techniques for organizing data requirements and collect…

Multiple imputation (MI) has become the preferred method for dealing with missing data in survey research. MI involves three steps: creating m multiply imputed complete datasets; estimating models on each of the m datasets using any standard statistica…

Two kinds of formal models need to be distinguished: data models derived from patterned observations and theory models derived from theories about processes that produce the patterned observations. These correspond to the difference between the phenom…

Formalization is typically associated by both supporters and detractors of formal methods with an emphasis on form over content or meaning. However well founded, this association fails to capture why we employ (or not) formal descriptions of what we ar…

Marriage payments: a fundamental reconsiderationAbstract This paper is a constructive critique of the well-known book by Jack Goody and Stanley Tambiah (1973), Bridewealth and Dowry. Given the general acceptance of Goody’s framework in contemporary stu…

Introduction to the Special Issue on “Formalization as a tool for empirical research: what it buys us and what it doesn’t.”

In this article, I present an analysis of the results of a memory task (free listing) about social relationships administered to Tongans of Polynesia. Contrary to claims by Weller and Romney (1988) and Ross (2004), the free listing activity did not yie…