Articles to be published in 2024
Volume 23, Number 2 / September 2024
Julia Zinkina, Marina Butovskaya, Sergey Shulgin, and Andrey Korotayev. Global Evolutionary Perspectives on Gender Differences in Religiosity, Family, Politics and Pro-Social Values Based on the Data from the World Values Survey
ABSTRACT
Recent studies show that the globally rising gender equality does not bring down gender differences in values. These findings somewhat undermine the social role theory and rise the need for additional explanations. Also, these findings imply that gender differences in values might stem from some underlying universalities that persist even through changes associated with socioeconomic development. This gives us ground to explore evolutionary perspective on gender differences in values. We discuss evolutionary mechanisms that could underly certain universal gender differences in values and proceed to check if these differences are truly universal across the world (we use World Values Survey data to search for empirical support of our evolution-based hypotheses). We provide evidence supporting the global scale of gender differences in religiosity, family values, politics values, and pro-social values through our calculations.
Kayode Joseph Onipede. Theocratic System of Administration in Ekiti Society before Oduduwa: A discourse in Ekiti-Yoruba indigenous political culture
ABSTRACT
The concern of this paper is to discuss change and continuity in the traditional political system of the Ekiti Yoruba and explain how the indigenous political system of administration, which is continuing at the community level, can contribute to national cohesion and citizenship. It, thus, interrogated Ekiti indigenous political system before Oduduwa which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been given any scholarly attention despite its significance. The paper relied on historical methodologies consisting of primary and secondary sources to elicit and interpret its data. The primary source comprised participants’ observation and oral interviews with indigenous chief priests and prophets in Ekiti societies; secondary sources were extant studies and documents like texts and journal articles. The paper explains the impact of indigenous social institutions in building lasting social ties among group(s) within Ekiti community and which have continued to complement the administrative structure of government of Ekiti community, including the contemporary system of governance. The adoption of the system and structure which is organic and an inclusive system, because of its bottom-up approach system and structure, facilitated social commitment and citizens’ participation in the administration of their communities. The system has remained significant in the social and political administration of Ekiti society, which is complementary monarchism and can be helpful in the contemporary political system.
Sabeeha and Altaf Qadir. Chiefdom, Vassalage Tribes and Empire: The Political Structures of Arabia from First CE to the Advent of Islam
ABSTRACT
No political system could ever be evolved in isolation from the environment in which it emerged. Similarly, no particular system could be understood as stagnant. It is actually the culmination or an improved form of a long historical growth. Keeping in view this synopsis, the Islamic political institutions could be placed in the time and space where the salient political features and social trends of the Jahaliyah Arabia and the neighboring political cultures contributed to its foundations and evolution. Besides the compact political structures of the Aksum, Rome and Persia and then Byzantine and Sassanid on the borders, internally the Arab before Islam had a diverse mechanism to run their affairs. The Arabian South experienced organized governance as compare to the North and Central regions. This diversity can be attributed to the geo-strategic location and ecological environment of the Peninsula. The fertile South was more supportive to the growth of a political mechanism than the arid geo-politically more vulnerable North and Central regions. In a nutshell, a proper study of the less discussed Jahiliyah politics could minimize the assumptions about the complete lawlessness and political unawareness of the Arabs in politics and governance
Valery Solovyov. Using the Google Books Ngram Corpus to Study Social Evolution
ABSTRACT
This article shortly summarizes primary publications that use Google Books Ngram (GBN) to study societal change. GBN is the most extensive tagged diachronic corpus available. Examining trends in societal evolution is possible using word frequency statistics broken down by year. The development of individualism, the changes in emotions and happiness, social psychology, and some other topics are among those examined in this article as the areas of research that have attracted the most interest. This paper discusses the specific results and the research methodology, particularly its limitations. There are some examples of how GBN can be used to test existing scientific theories. New, unexpected, and scientifically significant findings are possible with GBN that would be impossible with other approaches.
Uwe Christian Plachetka. Zhèng Hé’s indirect impact on Europe: On revolutionary focal groups of Production Revolutions
ABSTRACT
Andrea Komlosy (2022) amplified Leonid and Anton Grinin’s foresight study (Grinin, Grinin, Korotayev 2022), based on the model of production principles, on the impact of Covid-19 by the spatial dimension to merge it with the standard World System model. The Chinese Song Dynasty (960-1279) presumably established cash-based market economy as the seedling nursery of capitalism (inter alia: Schottenhammer 2011, 2017). After the 14th century Black Death and the immediate post-pandemic period the armada of the famous Ming Admiral Zhèng Hé rebooted the Maritime Silk Road (Belich 2022: 232-233) initiating a hitherto unknown hegemonic shift from China to Europe. No vessel of his expedition reached Europe, however crucial information did, to furnish a cluster (Watts-Strogatz 1998) of revolutionary-minded Renaissance humanists in Italy to launch the industrial production revolution by means of their humanism. Since no one can see into the future, calibrating any model means running it backwards into history checking whether the model’s rationale are matching reasonably well with known data or evidences.
Shahzadi Raheela Anum, Sana Fatima, Amjad Ullah Khan, Sobia Ishrat, Bushra Iqbal, Amna, Shaista Naz, Muzammil Ahmad Khan and Muhammad Muzammal. Evolution of human brain and the Myth of its 10 Percent Use
ABSTRACT
The human brain is a complex organ that controls nearly every function of the human body. As science believes, humans evolved from apes but with the passage of time, humans achieved domain specification and maturation in the nervous system due to which they gained sensory, language, and other social cognition functions, called higher-level cognitive functions. Neurogenesis or brain development is an organized process that starts from the early weeks of pregnancy to early childhood. During development, brain parts connect to each other directly and indirectly to process information. As the brain is a mysterious organ so many theories and myths are linked to its development and its use. A widespread misconception, a claim, that most people use only about 10% of their potential brain power. But there is no room for the myth because up till now we have mapped almost all regions of the brain. Furthermore, PET scans and fMRI are clear proofs that all most all brain parts are connected to each other and all parts are functionally active. And if the brain parts are unnecessary and unused then it has to be removed or disappear, as per the rule of the theory of evolution. Now it is the time to rest the myth even though it has survived for a whole century.