Quote:The Brexit vote caught most elite observers by surprise and has spurred a flurry of talk of further possible defections from the EU. But one person who was not so surprised was Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, author most recently of “Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth.”

Although Turchin, like most other observers, had expected Brexit to fail narrowly, his attention was focused primarily on a strikingly different confluence of background trends at work, leading him to expect an ongoing increase in dis-integrative processes across Europe. So Turchin’s surprise was qualitatively different than that of others. “I didn’t expect that my prediction of the EU’s demise would be endorsed so quickly,” he tweeted after the vote, linking a blog post, “Will the European Union Survive its 60th Anniversary?” Turchin sees EU disintegration as almost a certainty in the near term, but believes there’s a chance to start over, on a sounder footing, if the right lessons are learned. And he believes it’s a vital enterprise, not just for Europe, but for all of us...



http://www.salon.com/2016/06/29/a_cultural_evolutionary_explanation_for_the_not_so_surprising_brexit_outcome/

(06-30-2016, 05:42 PM)Dan Wrote: http://www.salon.com/2016/06/29/a_cultural_evolutionary_explanation_for_the_not_so_surprising_brexit_outcome/

Quote:The Brexit vote caught most elite observers by surprise and has spurred a flurry of talk of further possible defections from the EU. But one person who was not so surprised was Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, author most recently of “Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth.”

Although Turchin, like most other observers, had expected Brexit to fail narrowly, his attention was focused primarily on a strikingly different confluence of background trends at work, leading him to expect an ongoing increase in dis-integrative processes across Europe. So Turchin’s surprise was qualitatively different than that of others. “I didn’t expect that my prediction of the EU’s demise would be endorsed so quickly,” he tweeted after the vote, linking a blog post, “Will the European Union Survive its 60th Anniversary?” Turchin sees EU disintegration as almost a certainty in the near term, but believes there’s a chance to start over, on a sounder footing, if the right lessons are learned. And he believes it’s a vital enterprise, not just for Europe, but for all of us...



http://www.salon.com/2016/06/29/a_cultural_evolutionary_explanation_for_the_not_so_surprising_brexit_outcome/