Major Transitions in Political Order

TL;DR

This paper explores three major transitions in the development of social complexity, linking animal behavior, historical societies, and online communities through the evolution of social facts, norms, and information processing.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework for understanding societal evolution based on coarse-grained information and top-down causation, connecting biological and cultural transitions.

Findings

Identification of three key social transitions

Linking social facts to norm emergence and self-assembly

Highlighting the role of lossy information compression

Abstract

We present three major transitions that occur on the way to the elaborate and diverse societies of the modern era. Our account links the worlds of social animals such as pigtail macaques and monk parakeets to examples from human history, including 18th Century London and the contemporary online phenomenon of Wikipedia. From the first awareness and use of group-level social facts to the emergence of norms and their self-assembly into normative bundles, each transition represents a new relationship between the individual and the group. At the center of this relationship is the use of coarse-grained information gained via lossy compression. The role of top-down causation in the origin of society parallels that conjectured to occur in the origin and evolution of life itself.