Navigating polycrisis: long-run socio-cultural factors shape response to changing climate.

Climate variability and natural hazards like floods and earthquakes can act as environmental shocks or socioecological stressors leading to instability and suffering throughout human history. Yet, societies experience a wide range of outcomes when facing such challenges: some suffer from social unrest, civil violence or complete collapse; others prove more resilient and maintain key social functions. We currently lack a clear, generally agreed-upon conceptual framework and evidentiary base to explore what causes these divergent outcomes. Here, we discuss efforts to develop such a framework through the Crisis Database (CrisisDB) programme. We illustrate that the impact of environmental stressors is mediated through extant cultural, political and economic structures that evolve over extended timescales (decades to centuries). These structures can generate high resilience to major shocks, facilitate positive adaptation, or, alternatively, undermine collective action and lead to unrest, violence and even societal collapse. By exposing the ways that different societies have reacted to crises over their lifetime, this framework can help identify the factors and complex social-ecological interactions that either bolster or undermine resilience to contemporary climate shocks. This article is part of the theme issue 'Climate change adaptation needs a science of culture'.

Disentangling the evolutionary drivers of social complexity: A comprehensive test of hypotheses.

During the Holocene, the scale and complexity of human societies increased markedly. Generations of scholars have proposed different theories explaining this expansion, which range from broadly functionalist explanations, focusing on the provision of public goods, to conflict theories, emphasizing the role of class struggle or warfare. To quantitatively test these theories, we develop a general dynamical model based on the theoretical framework of cultural macroevolution. Using this model and Seshat: Global History Databank, we test 17 potential predictor variables proxying mechanisms suggested by major theories of sociopolitical complexity (and >100,000 combinations of these predictors). The best-supported model indicates a strong causal role played by a combination of increasing agricultural productivity and invention/adoption of military technologies (most notably, iron weapons and cavalry in the first millennium BCE).

The direct and indirect effects of a global pandemic on US fishers and seafood workers.

The United States' fishing and seafood industries experienced major shifts in consumer demand and social-distancing restrictions starting in March 2020, when the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic were unfolding. However, the specific effects on fishers and seafood processors are less well known. Fishermen and seafood workers are potentially at risk during a pandemic given existing tight working quarters, seasonal work, and long hours. To address these concerns, and given a lack of data on the sector, we reviewed news articles, scientific articles, and white papers to assess the various effects of COVID-19 on US seafood workers. Here, we show that most COVID-19 cases among seafood workers occurred during summer 2020 and during the beginning of 2021. These cases were documented across coastal areas, with Alaska experiencing the largest number of cases and outbreaks. Seafood workers were about twice as likely to contract COVID-19 as workers in other parts of the overall US food system. We also documented a number of indirect effects of the pandemic. New social-distancing restrictions and policies limited crew size, resulting in longer hours and more physical taxation. Because of changes in demand and the closure of some processing plants because of COVID-19 outbreaks, economic consequences of the pandemic were a primary concern for fishers and seafood workers, and safety measures allowed for seafood price variation and losses throughout the pandemic. We also highlight a number of inequities in COVID-19 responses within the seafood sector, both along racial and gender lines. All of these conditions point to the diverse direct and indirect effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on fishers and seafood workers. We hope this work sets the foundation for future work on the seafood sector in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic, improving the overall workplace, and collecting systematic social and economic data on workers.

Rise of the war machines: Charting the evolution of military technologies from the Neolithic to the Industrial Revolution.

What have been the causes and consequences of technological evolution in world history? In particular, what propels innovation and diffusion of military technologies, details of which are comparatively well preserved and which are often seen as drivers of broad socio-cultural processes? Here we analyze the evolution of key military technologies in a sample of pre-industrial societies world-wide covering almost 10,000 years of history using Seshat: Global History Databank. We empirically test previously speculative theories that proposed world population size, connectivity between geographical areas of innovation and adoption, and critical enabling technological advances, such as iron metallurgy and horse riding, as central drivers of military technological evolution. We find that all of these factors are strong predictors of change in military technology, whereas state-level factors such as polity population, territorial size, or governance sophistication play no major role. We discuss how our approach can be extended to explore technological change more generally, and how our results carry important ramifications for understanding major drivers of evolution of social complexity.

Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization.

Do human societies from around the world exhibit similarities in the way that they are structured, and show commonalities in the ways that they have evolved? These are long-standing questions that have proven difficult to answer. To test between competing hypotheses, we constructed a massive repository of historical and archaeological information known as "Seshat: Global History Databank." We systematically coded data on 414 societies from 30 regions around the world spanning the last 10,000 years. We were able to capture information on 51 variables reflecting nine characteristics of human societies, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems. Our analyses revealed that these different characteristics show strong relationships with each other and that a single principal component captures around three-quarters of the observed variation. Furthermore, we found that different characteristics of social complexity are highly predictable across different world regions. These results suggest that key aspects of social organization are functionally related and do indeed coevolve in predictable ways. Our findings highlight the power of the sciences and humanities working together to rigorously test hypotheses about general rules that may have shaped human history.

Deficient attentional modulation of the startle response in patients with schizotypal personality disorder.

OBJECTIVE: Attentional deficits have been identified as an abnormality that individuals with schizotypal personality disorder share with schizophrenia patients. The purpose of this study was to examine automatic sensorimotor gating and controlled attentional modulation of the startle eye blink response in unmedicated subjects with schizotypal personality disorder. METHOD: Eighteen unmedicated patients with schizotypal personality disorder and 16 healthy individuals were assessed in an acoustic attention-to-prepulse paradigm. The participants performed a selective attention task involving the presentation of attended, ignored, and novel tones that served as prepulse tones. Acoustic startle probes were presented at short and long lead intervals after the onset of tones and occasionally during the intertone interval. RESULTS: The comparison subjects showed greater prepulse inhibition and prepulse facilitation during the attended than the ignored prepulses, demonstrating early and later attentional modulation of startle eye blink response. In contrast, the subjects with schizotypal personality disorder failed to show this pattern. CONCLUSIONS: Subjects with schizotypal personality disorder have deficits in controlled attentional processing, as indexed by modification of the startle eye blink response, that are similar to those observed in patients with schizophrenia.